CLIPPINGS

Abstract

As the world jumps from the Industrial Age to the Information Age in what is, from a historical sense, a cultural nanosecond, the very concept of work is morphing at Warp 13 speed, the Information Revolution is coursing through the veins of corpus corporatus, having as significant an effect on the American workplace as did Ford's assembly line. The principal currency of the new workplace—what one knows and what one does with that knowledge—is effectively splitting the nation's workforce into two social classes. A professional class (“information brokers”) holds the skeleton key to the executive bathroom, while a service class is increasingly relegated to the broom closet. As the ability to manipulate data emerges as the new definition of skilled labor, blue‐collar workers, who represented the heart of the postwar middle class, are fast becoming an endangered species. With polarization of the workplace accelerating into the next millennium, the parachutes most likely to open will be those somehow connected to managing information.