The Future Of Public Administration:

21 Pages 5186 Words

ios. The first is that knowledge will be increasingly centralized and controlled and marketed through traditional economic and political processes. A second and more hopeful possibility is that knowledge will be widely distributed throughout society, so that increasing rather than decreasing numbers of people will have knowledge and in turn have power. Harlan Cleveland has suggested that such a possibility will lead to "the twilight of hierarchy," something which he holds to be inevitable. But the choice still remains.

In any case, when we combine this issue with the first, we can safely predict that the knowledge or information that we will be able to access will be tremendous, to the point that the quantity of information will no longer be the most important issue. Rather the key question will be how to organize this information for human purposes. In the case of public service, this means that we will have to learn to organize information in a fashion that will facilitate the pursuit of important public purposes. Again, one would expect t...