Employees: capital or commodity?

Abstract

Companies increasingly like to describe themselves as “knowledge companies”, that store and share experience and knowledge and facilitate open exchange of both. However, trends in career development encourage the “new deal” of employment, whereby employability is dependent on the mutual contract of employment for added value. This “new deal” environment will encourage individual gatekeepers of knowledge to hoard their specialist knowledge to retain their employability value, rather than share that knowledge with others in the company. This paper considers whether the “new deal” is in fact a contradiction to the “knowledge company”, and whether companies much choose to be one or the other. It concludes that companies which wish to become true knowledge sharing environments must understand the motivational aspects of career development, and adopt a culture that motivates employees to share, while recognising the employees’ lack of loyalty and need for independence. Only when companies can balance the treatment of employees as both capital and commodity, can the “new deal” company and “knowledge company” co‐exist.

Citation

Byrne, R. (2001), "Employees: capital or commodity?", The Learning Organization, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 44-50. https://doi.org/10.1108/09696470110366534