PETER DRUCKER, POST-CAPITALIST SOCIETY

Peter Drucker. Post-Capitalist Society. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
BIOGRAPHIC AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC
Drucker is the grand old man of management analysis.

There is no bibliography.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The Transformation

PART ONE: SOCIETY

1. From Capitalism to Knowledge Society 19

2. The Society of Organizations 48

3. Labor, Capital, and Their Future 68

4. The Productivity of the New Work Forces 83

5. The Responsibility-Based Organization 97

PART TWO: POLITY

6. From Nation-State to Megastate 113

7. Transnationalism, Regionalism, and Tribalism 141

8. The Needed Government Turnaround 157

9. Citizenship Through the Social Sector 168

PART THREE: KNOWLEDGE

10. Knowledge: Its Economics and Its Productivity 181

11. The Accountable School 194

12. The Educated Person 210

SELECTED SUMMARY NOTES ON THE TEXT
D. says we are living through one of the sharp transformations seen every few hundred years in Western history. He looks back at the following such changes in the past: the rise of the 13th-century city and its guilds, new urban universities, etc....the Renaissance, 1455-1517....modern capitalism and industrial revolution, 1776-1815. Each such transformation produced a "new European civilization." (p. 2) Our transformation is on a world stage not a Western or European stage, but the whole world in transition has been Westernized. We know we are leaving the modernist stage of capitalism and the nation-state and can review and revise our understanding of it. (p. 4) But it is still hard to foresee the traits of the post-capitalist world. At least, however, we know that it will be "both a non-socialist and a post-capitalist society." (p. 4) And we know that "its primary source will be knowledge" and therefore "a society of organizations." (p. 4)

SIGNIFICANCE, EVALUATION, AND RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORK

KNOWLEDGE/INFORMATION IN PLACE OF GOODS: D. skims the surface of the capitalist transformation more incisively analyzed by David Harvey and Fredric Jameson. We learn little from him not better learned from them. However, we find that his description of knowledge "as an economic resource" (p. 183) sheds interesting light from a different angle on the "simulacra" described by Baudrillard and others. See his chapter 10. D. calls for an Adam Smith to come forward with the theoretical explanation of knowledge at the center of the "wealth -producing process. (p. 183) See D.'s chapter 10. He says that we do not yet have a theoretical understanding of what, in practice, we already are engaged in. [NOTE: This conforms with THE PROGRAMME notion that theory and praxis are not sequential but zig and zag down the highway, in turn reinforcing and abetting one another.]

19 January 1996
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