Customer Reviews

Knowledge Capitalism: Business, Work, and Learning in the New Economy

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Burton-Jones' account of the knowledge based economy is the best I have found. I've nearly finished my PhD and have read many books! Most books by academics while good for my thesis yield few useful insights for practice. Unfortunately books written by practitioners are mostly useless. They are too light weight to add any value at all (not just for me, my consulting friends tell me the same thing!). This book strikes a great middle-road. Burton-Jones is a practitioner but he seems to have read everything academics have read! It's original, well researched, well written, and carefully argued enough to be very useful for my research and teaching while still practical enough be a great reference for managers. I particularly liked Burton-Jones' Knowledge Supply Model, his Knowledge Growth Model of the firm, and his clear 'Implications' sections concluding his chapters. It's a great book. If you want an introduction to the knowledge economy it is perfect. If you are serious about the knowledge economy or knowledge management, it should be on your bookshelf (or your desk). If you teach knowledge management or economics (particularly in grad school/MBA), get it.

This book falls squarely into the apocalyptic tradition of business literature. It preaches the end of the world, and exhorts readers to repent and prepare for a new world unlike anything they have known. Burton-Jones has absorbed, organized and presented a mass of data to support his message. The data themselves are worth the price of the book, because they provide ample raw material from which to draw one's own conclusions about the validity of the author's thesis. He has trademarked certain key phrases in the book, and the frequent appearance of the superscript "TM" is a helpful reminder to the reader to remember that this book is at least in part a sales pitch for a consultancy practice. But it is nonetheless important to read this book because while Burton-Jones may be wrong about some things, he is clearly right that a big global economic change is underway, and he sets forth in clear, if colorless, prose a reasonably plausible explanation of what it is and why it is happening. We [...] recommend the book to owners, managers, individuals, students, teachers, and policy-makers.