THE THIRD WAVE
This gives us a clue to the institutional structure of Third Wave civilization. Some scholars have suggested that, with I he increasing importance of information, the university will replace the factory as the central institution of tomorrow. This notion, however, which comes almost exclusively from academics, is based on the provincial assumption that only the university can, or does, house theoretical knowledge. It is little more than a professorial wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Multinational executives, for their part, see the executive suite as the pivot of tomorrow. The new profession of “information managers” pictures their computer rooms as the center of the new civilization. Scientists look to the industrial research laboratory. A few remaining hippies dream of restoring the agricultural commune to the center of a neo-medieval future. Others may nominate the “gratification chambers” of a leisure-drenched society.
My own nomination, for reasons outlined earlier, is none of these. It is, in fact, the home.
I believe the home will assume a startling new importance in Third Wave civilization. The rise of the prosumer, the spread of the electronic cottage, the invention of new organizational structures in business, the automation and de-massifi-cation of production, all point to the home’s re-emergence as a central unit in the society of tomorrow—a unit with enhanced rather than diminished economic, medical, educational, and social functions.
Yet it is unlikely that any institution—not even the home—will play as central a role as the cathedral or the factory did in the past. For the society is likely to be built around a network rather than a hierarchy of new institutions.
This suggests also that the corporations (and the socialist production organizations) of tomorrow will no longer tower over other social institutions. In Third Wave societies, corporations will be recognized as the complex organizations they are, and will pursue multiple goals simultaneously—not just profit or production quotas. Instead of focusing on a single bottom line, as many of today’s managers have been trained to do, the shrewd Third Wave manager will watch over (and will be held personally responsible for) multiple “bottom lines.”
Executive paychecks and bonuses will gradually come to reflect this new multi-functionality, as the corporation, either through voluntary means or because it is compelled to, becomes more responsive to what today are regarded as non-economic and hence largely irrelevant factors—ecological, political, social, cultural, and moral.
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