The New Knowledge Workers Free

As modern technologies are relentlessly affecting our human life, various terminologies and concepts inter alia “post‐capitalist society”, “post‐industrial society”, “post‐modern society”, “Third Wave”, “digital revolution”, “information markets”, “information society”, and “knowledge society” are being increasingly used for describing different transformations influenced by ICT revolution. The application of the term “high‐tech industry” which involves many domains like computers, internet, digital spaces, hardware, software, high‐tech manufacturing, communication services, robotics, electronics, etc. is another evidence for such a claim. To add value to knowledge and build capability among employees working in the high‐tech industry, or, to be exact, knowledge‐intensive companies, the book “The new knowledge workers” has been published. As a case study of Poland and the USA, it concentrates on the knowledge worker in high‐tech companies. Since the high‐tech industry is mainly defined (p. 2) based on the analysis of social potential, financial indicators, and an assessment of the degree of technological advancements, the ten chapters in the book cover these approaches with an emphasis on the social issues. After providing readers with some information regarding high‐tech industry based on both the literature, and Polish and American contexts in Chapter 1; chapters 2, 3, and 4, as an informative theoretical foundation, deal with the triangle of the concepts “work”, “knowledge‐intensive organizations” that basically revolve around R&D enterprises by the intellectual, intangible, and weightless commodities of knowledge and information, and “knowledge workers” categorized as white‐collar workers (p. 28). As its name suggests, Chapter 5 “Research methods and the organizations studied” is concerned with how the research was carried out. The contents included in this chapter are methodologically and paradigmatically instructive. Because the book is an extraction of a research project, chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 report its findings. “Bureaucracy for knowledge workers” (yes or no? If yes, to what extent should it be exerted?), “work time in high‐tech companies and time management for knowledge workers”, “trust and distrust in knowledge work”, and “pleasure, motivation, and identity of knowledge workers” are among the most notable issues discussed in chapters 6 to 9. The closing chapter, highlighting that the relations between knowledge workers and their managers, and, more broadly, employees' approaches to formal regulations and hierarchies, to the social construction of work time, and to trust and distrust in IT projects and knowledge‐intensive companies, as well as the knowledge worker's professional identity, are all significantly saturated today by organizational ideology (p. 136), offers a model of the knowledge‐intensive workplace for managing knowledge workers. Altogether, the work as an example of mixed research with many references cited in the text is abundant in theories. It is hoped that such a research that opens the way for further investigations will be updated and repeated through larger scale studies considering other knowledge workers and contexts including modern librarians and information professionals as well. As a book, it is a good addition to the literature but to cover more audiences its publication via scholarly papers is also recommended. This inspiring book is of value for managers, practitioners, students, professors, and researchers in Computer Science, Library and Information Science, Communication, Sociology, and Management.