The term 'knowledge work' appeared in The Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959) by Peter Drucker.[12] Drucker later coined the term 'knowledge worker' in The Effective Executive[13] in 1966. Later, in 1999, he suggested that "the most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity."

The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers.”

the definingcharacteristic of knowledge workers is that they arethemselves changed by the information theyprocess.’ So, the workers interviewed saw theirvalue to an organisation being to understand a bodyof knowledge and generate new information fromthis understanding which changed either theorganisation or its customer in a direct way.

Peter Drucker, the distinguished commentator onorganisation and management, has popularised theterm “knowledge worker” to describe the role of agrowing percentage of employees in businessorganisations: “The manual worker is yesterday..,..The basic capital resource, the fundamentalinvestment, but also the cost centre for a developedeconomy is the knowledge worker who puts to work