Introduction

The emergence of ‘information’ as the dominant commodity of the late twentieth century has brought with it an accompanying preoccupation with ‘knowledge work’ as the defining form of labour. At least implicitly, knowledge work stands always in contrast with certain other, persistent forms of work that are taken not to involve the active production and use of information. These latter may be either the residue of so-called ‘manual’ labour, or mediating processes in the operation of information technologies that remain to be automated, still requiring human interventions but otherwise defined as routine (data input being the prototypical case).

A starting concern of this chapter is how, in reproducing oppositions of mental versus manual, the discourse of knowledge versus routine work sustains old assumptions as a basis for conceptualising new relations of work and technology. Developing an alternative to these traditional conceptualisations requires that we re-examine the basic premises about knowledge on which they rest. One by now common-sense premise is that professionalised forms of labour have grown up around particular bodies of specialist knowledge, held, maintained and developed by profession members.