knowledge worker

Examples of knowledge worker in the following topics:

• Work and Technology

  • It has created a situation in which workers who perform easily automated tasks are being forced to find work that is less automated.
  • This poses problems for workers in industrial societies.
  • The service sector consists of the "soft" parts of the economy—activities where people offer their knowledge and time to improve productivity, performance, potential, and sustainability.
  • Typical examples of knowledge workers may include software engineers, architects, engineers, scientists and lawyers, because they "think for a living."
  • Discuss the shift in the economy from mechanization to automation due to the Information Age and its impact on the modern industrial worker

• Workplace

  • This is the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and behaviors to become effective organizational members.
  • This type of personality predisposes some workers to engage in behaviors like information seeking that accelerate the socialization process.
  • Specifically, new employees who are extraverted or particularly open to experience are more likely to seek out information, feedback, acceptance and relationships with co-workers.
  • It is defined as the "desire to acquire knowledge" that energizes individual exploration of an organization's culture and norms.
  • Also called networking, relationship building involves an employee's efforts to develop camaraderie with co-workers and supervisors.

• The Conflict Perspective on Deviance

  • In a capitalist society, the worker's alienation from his and her humanity occurs because the worker can only express labor, a fundamental social aspect of personal individuality, through a privately owned system of industrial production in which each worker is an instrument, a thing, not a person.
  • Institutions of knowledge, norms, and values, are in place to categorize and control humans.
  • The nineteeth-century German intellectual Karl Marx identified and described the alienation that afflict the worker under capitalism.

• Marx and the "Opiate of the Masses"

  • Marx's view of capitalism saw rich capitalists getting richer and their workers getting poorer.
  • Not only were workers being exploited, but in the process they were being further detached from the products they helped create.
  • The common worker is led to believe that he or she is a replaceable tool, and is alienated to the point of extreme discontent.
  • Marx's approach to sociology was critical in the sense that, in contrast to the knowledge for knowledge's sake approach, it advocated change.

• Secondary Groups

  • Secondary relationships involve weak emotional ties and little personal knowledge of one another.
  • A university class, an athletic team, and workers in an office all likely form secondary groups.

• Introduction

  • In addition to making available services and cultural opportunities for the largely immigrant population of the neighborhood, Hull House afforded an opportunity for young social workers to acquire training.
  • Sociological Practice thus refers to the ways people do sociology in the course of their lives as well as the ways they approach sociological research, theory, methods, and knowledge.

• Informal Structure

  • The informal organization is characterized by constant evolution; grass roots; being dynamic and responsive; requiring insider knowledge to be seen; treating people as individuals; being flat and fluid; being cohered by trust and reciprocity; and being difficult to pin down.
  • In a large organization, a worker may feel like an anonymous number rather than a unique individual.
  • Kent Bowen concluded in Harvard Business Review that the legendary flexibility of Toyota's operations is due to the way the scientific method is ingrained in its workers—not through formal training or manuals but through unwritten principles that govern how workers work, interact, construct, and learn.

• Work and Alienation

  • An example of the alienation of the worker from the work he produces is the worker who attaches tires onto a car in an auto manufacturing plant.
  • An example of the alienation of the worker from working is the same worker in the auto manufacturing plant who derives very little satisfaction from the monotonous act of attaching tires on to a car.
  • An example of the alienation of the worker from the other workers is that the auto manufacturing company for which he works only cares about selling the cars he helps to produce, rather than fostering social relationships on the floor.
  • The second is the alienation of the worker from working, or from the act of producing itself.
  • The fourth is the alienation of the worker from other workers, in which the capitalist system reduces the act of work to a simple economic practice, rather than recognizing the social elements of the act of production.

• The "McDonaldization" of Society

  • Workers in these organizations are judged by how fast they accomplish tasks instead of the quality of work they do.
  • This also applies to the workers in those organizations.
  • This can be considered an example of how Western culture, focused on efficiency of transfer of knowledge, has spread around the rest of the world.

• Elder Abuse

  • Deprivation may be active or passive, occurring intentionally or from a lack of knowledge.
  • Domestic elder abuses are committed by family and friends of an older person; institutional elder abuse is committed by workers at residential facilities for elders, such as nursing homes.
  • Imagine if the people elders depended on the most, such as these community transport service workers, were to breach that trust and abuse them.