post-capitalist society emerging?

[Chris Burford]

At 15:38 26/11/99 -0500, you wrote:
>[Anyone know anything about Adler?]
>
>"Market, Hierarchy, and Trust: The Knowledge Economy and the
>  Future of Capitalism"
>
>       BY:  PAUL S. ADLER
>               Marshall School of Business, University of Southern
>               California
>
>Document:  Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:
>            http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=186930
>
>  Contact:  PAUL S. ADLER
>    Email:  Mailto:padler at usc.edu
>   Postal:  Marshall School of Business, University of Southern
>            California
>            Los Angeles, CA 90089-1421  USA
>    Phone:  (213)740-0728
>      Fax:  (213)740-3582
>
>ABSTRACT:
>  Recent conceptualizations of trends in the structure of U.S.
>  industry have focused on the relative importance of markets,
>  hierarchies, and hybrid intermediate forms. This paper seeks to
>  advance the discussion by distinguishing three ideal-typical
>  forms of organization and their corresponding key coordination
>  mechanism: market/price, hierarchy/authority, and
>  community/trust. Different institutions combine the three
>  forms/mechanisms in different proportions. Economic and
>  organizational theory have shown that compared to trust, price
>  and authority are relatively ineffective mechanisms for dealing
>  with assets that are based on knowledge. As knowledge becomes
>  increasingly important in our economy, we should therefore
>  expect high-trust institutional forms to proliferate.
>
>  A review of trends in employment relations, interdivisional
>  relations, and inter-firm relations finds evidence suggesting
>  that the effect of growing knowledge-intensity may indeed be
>  such a trend towards greater reliance on trust. There is also
>  reason to believe that the form of trust most effective in this
>  context is of a distinctively modern kind - "reflective trust" -
>  as opposed to a traditionalistic, blind trust. Such a trend to
>  reflective trust appears to threaten the privileges of currently
>  dominant social actors, and these actors' resistance, in
>  combination with the complex interdependencies between price,
>  authority, and trust mechanisms, imparts a halting character to
>  the trend. But the momentum of this trend nevertheless appears
>  to be self-reinforcing, which suggests that it may ultimately
>  come to challenge the foundations of our capitalist form of
>  society while simultaneously creating the foundations of a new,
>  post-capitalist form.

This seems consciously complementary to the arguments put forward in
"Knowledge Capitalism"

I attach my post to PEN-L last month. 

They are not only talking about life style changes but some change to the
nature of private ownership of the means of production, owing to the
greater importance of knowledge capital (highly educated living capital, in
the managerial and technocratic departments).

It appears to be suggested that relative ownership of the means of
production is becoming more productive of surplus value than absolute
ownership, because the ability to network and cooperate with other holders
of crucial information, may be more important than the absolute ownership
of your patent. Besides your top employees might get head-hunted next week
in a more mobile labour market. 


>Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 07:45:37 +0100
>To: pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu
>From: Chris Burford <cburford at gn.apc.org>
>Subject: [PEN-L:12866] Knowledge Capitalism


>Has anyone seen a copy or a credible review of "Knowledge Capitalism" by
>Alan Burton-Jones, that has just been published?
>
>According to Amazon: Hardcover - 250 pages (September 1999) 
>Oxford University Press; ISBN: 0198296223
>
>He gave a credible interview on CNN using terms like the ownership of the
>means of production, without immediate obvious error and without flash. 
>
>He said that the management of this type of capitalism is rather different.
>For example the senior manager needs to distinguish between knowledge that
>is a necessity for the business and knowledge from which its profits come,
>and where to go for each type.
>
>He gave the example of the change of share valuation of General Motors and
>Microsoft as evidence that knowledge capitalism is coming in. Two years
>ago, if I caught his figures correctly, he said GM was worth 20 times
>Microsoft. Now Microsoft is worth 3 times GM.
>
>He did not restrict himself to saying that this is the effect on capitalism
>of increasing skill of the labour force relative to the fixed capital. He
>spoke as if the knowledge capital was in individual workers, other teams,
>or outside agencies or companies. 
>
>However the argument appeared to be consistent with the competition within
>capitalism  for relative surplus value from technical and organisational
>innovation, with technology that permits a more mobile workforce.
>
>I suppose some will immediately see this as trendy and post modernist, but
>he did not look at all trendy. 
>
>My intuition is that this addresses developments in material reality. But I
>would be interested in other comments.
>
>
>Chris Burford
>
>London
>
>