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Knowledge Workers

The term knowledge workers has become ubiquitous in sociological and government discourse. The existence and importance of knowledge workers has become emblematic of social and economic change. However, that existence and importance are not uncontested. This article examines the rise of the knowledge worker and the typical understanding of the knowledge worker, locating that understanding in historical and more recent debates about these workers, then finally focuses on new debates and arguments about the empirical claims made about knowledge workers, their privileging, and whether or not all workers should be regarded as knowledge workers.

Danish architect and urban design consultant Jan Gehl speaks at the Eurogel 2006 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 1, 2006. His career focus has been improving urban living through more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly city designs. In advanced and developing economies over the last 50 years, knowledge workers like Gehl have ushered in a new economic model of management, organization, and employment. Their intellectual work is complex and varied, generating ideas that lead to creativity and innovation.

Defining Knowledge Workers

There is a family of related terms—knowledge work, knowledge workers, knowledge-intensive firms, and knowledge economy—that have become common parlance in recent years. Along with a similar if not overlapping family around creativity, knowledge workers are regarded as an essential feature of the putative “new economy.” Because of this assumed essentiality, knowledge workers have a privileged status within the new economy because economic development is now said to be now dependent on the brains, not brawn, of workers. However, the economic, occupational, and organizational developments that underpin understanding of knowledge workers are not uncontested.

Knowledge workers are usually defined as being highly educated and having work of an intellectual nature that is complex and varied, drawing on abstract or theoretical knowledge to generate ideas that lead to creativity and innovation. It is assumed that their number has grown in the advanced, and more recently the developing, economies over the past half-century, and that they form a new occupational, even social, elite. Their work and its outputs have become central to economic development as well as vital to growth and productivity. Moreover, because their model of work has become the new standard—reformulating management, organization, and employment—knowledge workers constitute the economic vanguard. Although lists of knowledge workers can vary slightly and are sometimes updated, they typically include, for example, information technology (IT) and software designers, consultants, advertising and marketing executives, scientists, academics, and architects.

The Rise of the Knowledge Worker

The existence of knowledge workers and debates about them are long-standing, with distinctions being made between manual and mental labor in early 20th-century socialist visions of the future. Debate between radical and conservative scholars began to heat up in the 1950s, however, as a larger percentage of the workforce acquired university—or, in the United States, college—education, and the numbers of managerial, professional, and technical workers expanded. At this point, sociological debate focused on the class position and orientation of these workers: essentially, whether this educated labor would challenge, work alongside, or work for the old property-owning ruling class. Acquiring higher education therefore might not just provide a financial return on investment through better pay but potentially open a route to social domination as well.

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