首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
The Next Society The new economy may or may not materialize, but there is no doubt that the next society will be with us sho
The Next Society The new economy may or may not materialize, but there is no doubt that the next society will be with us sho
admin
2013-02-05
27
问题
The Next Society
The new economy may or may not materialize, but there is no doubt that the next society will be with us shortly. In the developed world, and probably in the emerging countries as well, this new society will be a good deal more important than the new economy (if any). It will be quite different from the society of the late 20th century, and also different from what most people expect. Much of it will be unprecedented. And most of it is already here, or is rapidly emerging.
In the developed countries, the dominant factor in the next society will be something to which most people are only just beginning to pay attention: the rapid growth in the older population and the rapid shrinking of the younger generation. Politicians everywhere still promise to save the existing pension system, but they--and their constituents--know perfectly well that in another 25 years people will have to keep working until their mid-70s, health permitting.
What has not yet sunk in is that a growing number of older people--say those over 50--will not keep on working as traditional full time nine-to-five employees, but will participate in the labor force in many new and different ways: as temporaries, as part-timers, as consultants on special assignments, and so on. What used to be personnel and are now known as human resources departments still assume that those who work for an organization are full-time employees. Employment laws and regulations are based on the same assumption. Within 20 or 25 years, however, perhaps as many as half the people who work for an organization will not be employed by it, certainly not on a full-time basis. This will be especially true for older people. New ways of working with people at arm’s length will increasingly become the central managerial issue of employing organizations, and not just of businesses.
The shrinking of the younger population will cause an even greater upheaval, if only because nothing like this has happened since the dying centuries of the Roman Empire. In every single developed country, but also in China and Brazil, the birth rate is now well below the replacement rate of 2.2 live births per woman of reproductive age. Politically, this means that immigration will become an important and highly divisive issue in all rich countries. It will cut across all traditional political alignments. Economically, the decline in the young population will change markets in fundamental ways. Growth in family formation has been the driving force of all domestic markets in the developed world, but the rate of family formation is certain to fall steadily unless bolstered by large-scale immigration of younger people. The homogeneous mass market that emerged in all rich countries after the Second World War has been youth-determined from the start. It will now become middle-age-determined, or perhaps more likely it will split into two: a middle-age-determined mass market and a much smaller youth-determined one. And because the supply of young people will shrink, creating new employment patterns to attract and hold the growing number of older people (especially older educated people) will become increasingly important.
Knowledge is all
The next society will be a knowledge society. Knowledge will be its key resource, and knowledge workers will be the dominant group in its workforce. Its three main characteristics will be:
-- Borderlessness, because knowledge travels even more effortlessly than money.
-- Upward mobility, available to everyone through easily acquired formal education.
-- The potential for failure as well as success. Anyone can acquire the "means of production",
i. e, the knowledge required for the job, but not everyone can win.
Together, those three characteristics will make the knowledge society a highly competitive one, for organizations and individuals alike. Information technology, although only one of many new features of the next society, is already having one hugely important effect: it is allowing knowledge to spread near-instantly, and making it accessible to everyone. Given the ease and speed at which information travels, every institution in the knowledge society--not only businesses, but also schools, universities, hospitals and increasingly government agencies too-- has to be globally competitive, even though most organizations will continue to be local in their activities and in their markets. This is because the Internet will keep customers everywhere informed on what is available anywhere in the world, and at what price.
This new knowledge economy will rely heavily on knowledge workers. At present, this term is widely used to describe people with considerable theoretical knowledge and learning: doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, chemical engineers. But the most striking growth will be in "knowledge technologists" ~ computer technicians, software designers, analysts in clinical labs, manufacturing technologists, paralegals. These people are as much manual workers as they are knowledge workers; in fact, they usually spend far more time working with their hands than with their brains. But their manual work is based on a substantial amount of theoretical knowledge which can be acquired only through formal education, not through an apprenticeship. They are not, as a rule, much better paid than traditional skilled workers, but they see themselves as "professionals" . Just as unskilled manual workers in manufacturing were the dominant social and political force in the 20th century, knowledge technologists are likely to become the dominant social--and perhaps also political--force over the next decades.
The new protectionism
Structurally, too, the next society is already diverging from the society almost all of us still live in. The 20th century saw the rapid decline ’of the sector that had dominated society for 10,000 years: agriculture. In volume terms, farm production now is at least four or five times what it was before the First World War. But in 1913 farm products accounted for 70% of world trade, whereas now their share is at most 17%. In the early years of the 20th century, agriculture in most developed countries was the largest single contributor to GDP; now in rich countries its contribution has dwindled to the point of becoming marginal. And the farm population is down to a tiny proportion of the total.
Manufacturing has traveled a long way down the same road. Since the Second World War, manufacturing output in the developed world has probably tripled in volume, but inflation adjusted manufacturing prices have fallen steadily, whereas the cost of prime knowledge products-health care and education-has tripled, again adjusted for inflation. The relative purchasing power of manufactured goods against knowledge products is now only one-fifth or one-sixth of what it was 50 years ago. Manufacturing employment in America has fallen from 35% of the workforce in the 1950s to less than half that now, without causing much social disruption. But it may be too much to hope for an equally easy transition in countries such as Japan or Germany, where blue-collar manufacturing workers still make up 25--30% of the labor force.
The decline of farming as a producer of wealth and of livelihoods has allowed farm protectionism to spread to a degree that would have been unthinkable before the Second World War. In the same way, the decline of manufacturing will trigger an explosion of manufacturing protectionism-even as lip service continues to be paid to free trade. This protectionism may not necessarily take the form of traditional tariffs, but of subsidies, quotas and regulations of all kinds. Even more likely, regional blocks will emerge that trade freely internally but are highly protectionist externally. The European Union, NAFFA and Mercosur already point in that direction.
The future of the corporation
Statistically, multinational companies play much the same part in the world economy as they did in 1913. But they have become very different animals. Multinationals in 1913 were domestic firms with subsidiaries abroad, each of them self-contained, in charge of a politically defined territory, and highly autonomous. Multinationals now tend to be organized globally along product or service lines. But like the multinationals of 1913, they are held together and controlled by ownership. By contrast, the multinationals of 2025 are likely to be held together and controlled by strategy. There will still be ownership, of course. But alliances, joint ventures, minority stakes, know-how agreements contracts will increasingly be the building blocks of a confederation. This kind of organization will need a new kind of top management.
In most countries, and even in a good many large and complex companies, top management is still seen as an extension of operating management. Tomorrow’s top management, however, is likely to be a distinct and separate organ: it will stand for the company. One of the most important jobs ahead for the top management of {he big company of tomorrow, and especially of the multinational, will be to balance the conflicting demands on business being made by the need for both short-term and long-term results, and by the corporation’s various constituencies: customers, shareholders, knowledge employees and communities.
Multinationals in 1913 were composed of a domestic firms and its self-contained and autonomous
选项
答案
subsidiaries abroad
解析
文章第十一段中提到1913年的跨国公司是由国内公司及其国外的附属公司构成的。附属公司是独立的,具有自治权。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/b3I7777K
0
大学英语六级
相关试题推荐
Althoughclichés(陈词滥调)aboutthe"vulnerability"ofwomenintheeconomyhavebeendisprovedbyhardBureauofLaborStatistics
Althoughclichés(陈词滥调)aboutthe"vulnerability"ofwomenintheeconomyhavebeendisprovedbyhardBureauofLaborStatistics
Althoughclichés(陈词滥调)aboutthe"vulnerability"ofwomenintheeconomyhavebeendisprovedbyhardBureauofLaborStatistics
Althoughclichés(陈词滥调)aboutthe"vulnerability"ofwomenintheeconomyhavebeendisprovedbyhardBureauofLaborStatistics
Althoughclichés(陈词滥调)aboutthe"vulnerability"ofwomenintheeconomyhavebeendisprovedbyhardBureauofLaborStatistics
Advertisementsappeareverywhereinmodernsociety.Therearemanywaystoadvertiseandadscomeindifferentforms.Newspapers
Advertisementsappeareverywhereinmodernsociety.Therearemanywaystoadvertiseandadscomeindifferentforms.Newspapers
Advertisementsappeareverywhereinmodernsociety.Therearemanywaystoadvertiseandadscomeindifferentforms.Newspapers
Advertisementsappeareverywhereinmodernsociety.Therearemanywaystoadvertiseandadscomeindifferentforms.Newspapers
随机试题
中国共产党的组织体系包括:_________、_________、_________。
A.附桂八味丸加减 B.十全大补汤加减 C.四妙勇安汤加减 D.桃红四物汤加减 E.阳和汤加减血栓闭塞性脉管炎血瘀证宜用
A.引药上行,增强活血通络B.引药入肝,增强活血止痛C.制其寒性,增强和胃止呕D.引药下行,增强滋阴降火E.缓和药性,增强润肺止咳盐炙法炮制中药目的()。
患儿6个月,急性心力衰竭,现用强心苷药物治疗。当出现下列哪种情况时,应及时停止用强心苷药物()
根据《建设工程安全生产管理条例》规定,()应当审查施工组织设计中的安全技术措施或者专项施工方案是否符合工程建设强制性标准。
在弹性阶段,侧面角焊缝应力沿长度方向的分布为( )。
某大型海上工程孤立墩混凝土承台施工,其混凝土的配合比为1:1.5:2.50,水灰比为0.40,水泥用量为444kg/m3。承台的平面尺寸为10m×10m,承台底标高为-0.5m,顶标高为+3.5m。9根直径1.2m的钢管桩伸入承台混凝土中2m(桩芯混凝土已
开放式基金非交易过户是指不采用申购、赎回等基金交易方式,将一定数量基金份额按照一定规则从某一投资者基金账户转移到另一投资者基金账户的行为,主要包括继承、司法强制执行等方式。()
商业银行应当遵守的职业规范和准则,包括诚实守信、保护客户利益、拒绝参与违法行为等职业操守也是合规准则之一。()
设A为3阶矩阵,A2-A-2E=0且|A|=2,将A的第1列的2倍加到第3列,再将A的第3行的-2倍加到第1行得B,则|B+3E|=().
最新回复
(
0
)