Drucker’s subsequent description of the insensate labor of unskilled men in factories draws almost entirely from Taylor’s portrait of them—and accordingly condescends to their abilities to plan and organize work. In actual fact, it wasn’t so. Before Taylor, work was already organized by teams of factory workers, who in large part had control over how they worked. The knowledge they applied to work was largely “tacit” in nature, agreed upon among workers themselves rather than “explicit” (to borrow a famous definition from the sociologist Michael Polanyi). What Taylor sought in particular—indeed, what constituted his signal obsession—was to extract this tacit knowledge and install it in another set of people, the “industrial engineers.” Drucker called them “the prototype of all modern ‘knowledge workers’”—a plausible assumption but one that excised the tremendous amount of knowledge that already existed in the work process.
it’s even better to acknowledge that there never were any knowledge workers.
There have only ever been workers
— @aworkinglibrary
https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/knowledge-workers
(as someone who began his work life on the factory floor, cleaning CNC machines, and have slowly moved along the spectrum of work to now doing devops, I’ve experienced every single inch of the journey above. )
Original: https://toots.dgplug.org/@jason/112794289198355889