The future of work in the digital diaspora: economic restructuring and education

The microprocessor and digital technologies have spawned an economic revolution enabling the global customization of mass production and services in close synchronization with the automation of consumer processes. An important outcome of this revolution is the embedding of educational processes within commercial transactions before the sale and following delivery, before which the transaction is not complete. These new processes demand that business and education work collaboratively in a new digital environment potentiating a global diaspora of highly interactive entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial commerce. The new methods of telecommunications will be so powerful and ubiquitous as to become the ESL of the new millennium. People will need to learn the methods and processes of digital work to participate in the new economy. Explores the belief that these trends have serious implications for the processes by which education prepares students for the world of work, how education and business work together, and how society prepares citizens for roles in the new economy.