Mona Jebril University of Palestine 1 College II Reading, Study Skills, & Vocabulary

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Mona Jebril University of Palestine 17 PART 4: Reading in the Real World

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Mona Jebril University of Palestine 19 Textbook P.79-80

Mona Jebril University of Palestine 20 According to American economist Peter Drucker (1993), every few hundred years in Western history a sharp transformation takes place in which society rearranges itself. One such period happened between 1455 and 1517, beginning with the invention of the printing press, and included the Renaissance, the European discovery of America, a reawakening of science, and the protestant Reformation. All these events had significant effects on the development of Western society. The next period lasted from the American Revolution and the perfection of the steam engine in 1776 until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in During this time, the industrial Revolution took place, public school systems were established on large scale, the first modern university was founded in Berlin in 1809, and both capitalism and communism emerged as economic and political ideologies. Again, society had been altered. Drucker suggests that another such transformation is taking place today. He claims it began around 1960s with the introduction of computers and the emergence of the first non-Western country- Japan-to be a global economic power. The period is predicted to end sometime around 2010 or 2020., when what Drucker calls the “post-capitalist” era will have produced the knowledge society. The major characteristic of this new society will be the use of knowledge as an economic resource. That is, knowledge, not labor, will be the basis of wealth. The leading social group will be “knowledge workers’ who know how to make specialized knowledge productive and innovative in a free-market system. Drucker warns that this situation may create class conflict, as knowledge workers accrue much higher status and income than service workers. Recognizing that these two groups of workers are not social classes in the traditional sense, he nonetheless feels that people who provide various types of services- food, finance, leisure, and the like-must not be socially and economically disadvantaged. Otherwise, the old conflict outlined by Marx between capitalists and workers will be transformed into one between the two new dominant groups: those who create and work with knowledge and those who provide various services to them. {Source: “The knowledge Society” from William C Cockerham, The Global Society: An Introduction to Society, p.300. by McGraw-Hill, Inc.}

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