THE THIRD WAVE
The second pressure springs from a little-noticed change in the social environment in which the corporation finds itself. That environment is now far more organized than before. At one time each firm operated in what might be termed an un-derorganized society. Today the socio- sphere, especially in the United States, has leaped to a new level of organization. It is packed with a writhing, interacting mass of well-organized, often well-funded, associations, agencies, trade unions, and other groupings.
In the United States today, some 1,370,000 companies interact with well over 90,000 schools and universities, 330,000 churches, and hundreds of thousands of branches of 13,000 national organizations, plus countless purely local environmental, social, religious, athletic, political, ethnic, and civic groups, each with its own agenda and priorities. It takes 144,000 law firms to mediate all these relationships!
In this densely crowded socio-sphere, every corporate action has repercussive impacts not merely on lonely or helpless individuals but on organized groups, many of them with professional staffs, a press of their own, access to the political system, and resources with which to hire experts, lawyers, and other assistance.
In this finely strung socio-sphere, corporate decisions are closely scrutinized. “Social pollution” produced by the corporation in the form of unemployment, community disruption, forced mobility, and the like is instantly spotted, and pressures are placed on the corporation to assume far greater responsibility than ever before for its social, as well as economic, “products.”
A third set of pressures reflects the changed info-sphere. Thus, the de- massification of society means that far more information must be exchanged between social institutions—including the corporation—to maintain equilibrial relationships among them. Third Wave production methods further intensify the corporation’s hunger for information as raw material. The firm thus sucks up data like a gigantic vacuum cleaner, processes it, and disseminates it to others in increasingly complex ways. As information becomes central to production, as “information managers” proliferate hi industry, the corporation, by necessity, impacts on the informational environment exactly asit impacts on the physical and social environment.
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