The Third Wave

Ten years ago, Playboy readers caught a first, exclusive look at an extraordinary book that subsequently went on to sell 6,000,000 copies around the world and add a new phrase to the language: "Future Shock." Now Playboy once again presents a revealing first excerpt from a major book by Alvin Toffler: "The Third Wave."

To be published by William Morrow in March, "The Third Wave" may do for us in the Eighties what its predecessor did for us in the Seventies--change our perception of ourselves.

It is a sweeping look at the emerging future that deals with everything from new family forms and the exciting politics of tomorrow to the future of work, personality and business. It is a passionate book that starts out with the ringing charge that "a new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it."

It differs from "Future Shock" in one key way. While that book dealt with the processes of adaptation and change, it had relatively little to say about where we actually were heading. "The Third Wave," by contrast, presents a coherent, colorful full-length portrait of the emerging society.

Toffler calls this new civilization the Third Wave. The agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago started what he describes as the First Wave of historic change. The industrial revolution of 300 years ago launched today's dying Second Wave civilization. Today we find ourselves caught up in the explosive Third Wave of change.

In fact, Toffler argues, many of the hard-to-understand features of life today, in our fast-changing, complex society, make sense only when we analyze the collision of this Third Wave with our existing Second Wave institutions, politics and personal habits.

In Millions of middle-class homes, a ritual drama is enacted: The recently graduated son or daughter arrives late for dinner, snarls, flings down the want ads and proclaims the nine-to-five job a degrading sham and a shuck. No human being with even a shredlet of self-respect would submit to the nine-to-five regimen.

Enter parents:

The father, just returned from his own nine-to-five job, and the mother, exhausted and depressed from paying the latest batch of bills, are outraged. They have been through this before. Having seen good times and bad, they suggest a secure job with a big corporation. The young person sneers. Small companies are better. No company is best of all. An advanced degree? What for? It's all a terrible waste!

Aghast, the parents see their suggestions dismissed, one after another. Their frustration mounts until, at last, they utter the ultimate parental cry: "When are you going to face the real world?"

Such scenes are not limited to affluent homes in the U.S. or even Europe. Japanese corporate moguls mutter in their sake about the swift decline of the work ethic and corporate loyalty, of industrial punctuality and discipline among the young. Even in the Soviet Union, middle-class parents face similar challenges from their children.

Is this just another case of épater les parents--the traditional generational conflict? Or is there something new here? Can it be that young people and their parents are simply not talking about the same "real world"?

The fact is that what we are seeing is not merely the classical confrontation of romantic youth and realistic elders. Indeed, what was once realistic may no longer be. For the basic code of behavior, containing the ground rules of social life, is changing rapidly as the onrushing Third Wave arrives.

Second Wave civilization--what we call industrial society--brought with it a "code book" of principles or rules that governed everyday behavior. Such principles as standardization, maximization and synchronization were applied in business, government and a daily life obsessed with punctuality and schedules.

Today, a counter-code book is emerging--new ground rules for the life we are building on the basis of a "demassified" economy, demassified media, and on new family and corporate structures. Many of the seemingly senseless battles between young (continued on page 152)The Third Wave(continued from page 146) and old, as well as other conflicts in our classrooms, board rooms and political back rooms, are, in fact, nothing more than clashes over which code book to apply.

The new code book directly attacks much of what the Second Wave person has been taught to believe in--from the importance of punctuality and synchronization to the need for conformity and standardization. It challenges the presumed efficiency of centralization and professionalization. It compels us to reconsider our conviction that bigger is better and our notions of concentration. To understand this new code, and how it contrasts with the old one, is to understand instantly many of the otherwise confusing conflicts that swirl around us, exhausting our energies and threatening our personal power, prestige or pay check.

The end of nine to Five

Take the case of the frustrated parents. Second Wave civilization synchronized daily life, tying the rhythms of sleep and wakefulness, of work and play, to the underlying throb of machines. Raised in this civilization, the parents take for granted that work must be synchronized, that everyone must arrive and work at the same time, that rush-hour traffic is unavoidable, that mealtimes must be fixed and that children must, at an early age, be indoctrinated with time consciousness and punctuality. They cannot understand why their offspring seem so annoyingly casual about keeping appointments and why, if the nine-to-five job (or other fixed-schedule job) was good enough for them, it should suddenly be regarded as intolerable by their children.

The reason is that the Third Wave, as it sweeps in, carries with it a completely different sense of time. If the Second Wave tied life to the tempo of the machine, the Third Wave challenges this mechanical synchronization, alters our most basic social rhythms and, in so doing, frees us from the machine.

Once we understand this, it comes as no surprise that one of the fastest spreading innovations in industry during the Seventies was "flexitime"--an arrangement that permits workers, within predetermined limits, to choose their own working hours. Instead of requiring everyone to arrive at the factory gate or the office at the same time, or even at prefixed staggered times, the company operating on flexitime typically sets certain core hours when everyone is expected to show up, and specifies other hours as flexible. Each employee may choose which of the flexible hours he or she wishes to spend working.

This means that a day person--one whose biological rhythms routinely awaken him or her early in the morning--can choose to arrive at work at, say, eight A.M., while a night person, whose metabolism is different, can choose to start working at ten or 10:30 A.M. It means that an employee can take time off for household chores, or to shop, or to take a child to the dentist. Groups of workers who wish to go bowling together early in the morning or late in the afternoon can jointly set their schedules to make it possible. In short, time itself is being demassified.

The flexitime movement began in 1965, when a woman economist in Germany, Christel Kämmerer, recommended it as a way to bring more mothers into the job market. In 1967, Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm, the "Deutsche Boeing," discovered that many of its employees were arriving at work worn out from fighting rush-hour traffic. Management gingerly experimented by allowing 2000 workers to go off the rigid eight-to-five schedule and to choose their own hours. Within two years, all 12,000 of its employees were on flexitime, and some departments had even given up the requirement for everyone to be there during core time.

In 1972, Europa magazine reported that "in some 2000 West German firms, the national concept of rigid punctuality has vanished beyond recall.... The reason is the introduction of Gleitzeit"; i.e., sliding, or flexible, hours. By 1977, fully a fourth of the West German work force, more than 5,000,000 employees in all, were on one or another form of flexitime and the system was being used by 22,000 companies with an estimated 4,000,000 workers in France, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Italy and England. In Switzerland, 15--20 percent of all industrial firms had switched to the new system for all or part of their work force.

Multinational firms (a major force for cultural diffusion in today's world) soon began exporting the system from Europe. Nestlé and Lufthansa, for example, introduced it to their operations in the U. S. By 1977, according to a report prepared by Professor Stanley Nollen and consultant Virginia Martin for the American Management Associations, 13 percent of all U. S. companies were using flexible hours. Within a few years, they forecast, the number will reach 17 percent, representing more than 8,000,000 workers. Among the American firms trying out flexitime systems are such giants as Scott Paper, Bank of California, General Motors, Bristol-Myers and Equitable Life.

Some of the more moss-backed trade unions--preservers of the Second Wave status quo--have hesitated. But individual workers, by and large, see flexitime as a liberating influence. Says the manager of one London-based insurance firm: "The young married women were absolutely rapturous about the change-over." A Swiss survey found that fully 95 percent of affected workers approve. Thirty-five percent--men more than women--say they spend more time with the family.

One black mother working for a Boston bank was about to be fired because--though a good worker in other respects--she was continually turning up late. Her poor attendance record reinforced racist stereotypes about the "unreliability" and "laziness" of black workers. But when her office went on flexitime, she was no longer considered late. It turned out, reported sociologist Allan R. Cohen, "that she'd been late because she had to drop her son in a day-care center and could just never quite get to the office by starting time."

Employers, for their part, report higher productivity, reduced absenteeism and other benefits. There are, of course, problems, as with any innovation, but, according to the A.M.A. survey, only two percent of the companies trying it have gone back to the old rigid time structure. One Lufthansa manager summed it up succinctly: "There's no such thing now as a punctuality problem."

The Sleepless Gorgon

But flexitime, while widely publicized, is only a small part of the general restructuring of time that the Third Wave carries with it. We are also seeing a powerful shift toward increased night work. This is occurring not so much in the traditional manufacturing centers like Akron or Baltimore, which have always had a lot of workers on night shifts, but in the rapidly expanding services and in the advanced, computer-based industries.

"The modern city," declares the French newspaper Le Monde, "is a Gorgon that never sleeps and in which... a growing proportion of the citizens work outside the [normal] diurnal rhythms." Across the board in the technological nations, the number of night workers now runs between 15 and 25 percent of all (continued on page 180)The Third Wave(continued on page 152) employees. In France, for example, the percentage has soared from only 12 in 1957 to 21 by 1974. In the U. S., the number of full-time night workers jumped 13 percent between 1974 and 1977; the total, including part-timers, reached 13,500,000.

Even more dramatic has been the spread of part-time work--and the preference for it expressed by large numbers of people. In the Detroit area, an estimated 65 percent of the total work force at the J. L. Hudson department stores consists of part-timers. Prudential Insurance employs 1600 part-timers in its U. S. and Canadian offices. In all, there is now one voluntary part-time worker for every five and a half full-timers in the U. S. A decade ago, it was about half that many. Even more noteworthy is the fact that the percentage of unemployed workers who want only part-time work has also doubled in the past 20 years.

This opening up of part-time jobs is particularly welcomed by women, by the elderly and semiretired and by many young people who are willing to settle for a smaller pay check in return for time to pursue their own hobbies, sports, religious, artistic or political interests.

What we see, therefore, is a fundamental break with Second Wave synchronization. The combination of flexitime, part-time and night work means that more and more people are working outside the nine-to-five (or any fixed-schedule) system, and that the entire society is shifting to round-the-clock operations.

New consumer patterns, meanwhile, parallel changes in the time structure of production. Note, for instance, the proliferation of all-night supermarkets. "Will the four-A.M. shopper, long considered a hallmark of California kookiness, become a regular feature of life in the less flamboyant East?" asks The New York Times. The answer is a resounding yes.

Mealtimes are also affected by these changes and are similarly "desynchronized." People do not all eat at the same time, as most of them once did. The rigid three-meal-a-day pattern is broken as more and more fast-food shops spring up serving billions of meals at all hours. Television watching changes, too, as programers devise shows specifically aimed at "urban adults, night workers and just plain insomniacs." Banks, meanwhile, give up their celebrated bankers' hours.

Manhattan's giant Citibank runs television commercials for its new automated banking system: "You are about to witness the dawn of a revolution in banking. This is Citibank's new 24-hour service... where you can do most of your everyday banking any time you want. So if Don Slater wants to check his balance at the crack of dawn, he can do it. And Brian Holland can transfer money from savings into checking any time he wants to.... You know and I know that life doesn't stop at three P.M. Monday to Friday.... The Citi never sleeps."

Schedule-a-Friend

These changes in our social rhythms have deep, only partly noticed effects on the environment and economy. For example, while the increasing individualization of time patterns certainly makes work less onerous, it also can intensify loneliness and social isolation. If friends, lovers and family all work at different hours, and new services are not laid in place to help them coordinate their personal schedules, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to arrange face-to-face social contact. The old social centers--the neighborhood pub, the church clambake, the school prom--are losing their traditional significance. In their place, new Third Wave institutions must be invented to facilitate social life.

One can, for example, easily imagine a new computerized service--call it Pers-Sched or Friend-Sched--that not only reminds you of your own appointments but stores the schedules of various friends and family members, so that each person in the social network can, by pushing a button, find out where his or her friends and acquaintances will be when, and can make arrangements accordingly.

The shift toward more flexible and personalized schedules also reduces energy costs and pollution by leveling out peak loads. Thus, electric utilities in a dozen states are now using "time-of-day" pricing for industrial and residential customers to discourage energy use during traditional peak hours, while Connecticut's Department of Environmental Protection has urged companies to institute flexitime as a means of complying with Federal environmental requirements.

Even these, however, are among the most obvious implications of the time shift. As the process continues to unfold in the years and decades ahead, we will see far more powerful and as-yet-unimagined changes and consequences. The new time patterns will affect our daily rhythms in the home. They will affect our art, our politics and our play. They will affect our biology. For when we touch on time, we touch on all of human experience.

The Computer

These Third Wave rhythms spring from deep psychological, economic and technological forces. At one level, they arise from the changed nature of the population. People today--more affluent and educated than their parents, and faced with more life choices--simply refuse to be massified. The more people differ in terms of the work they do or the products they consume, the more they demand to be treated as individuals--and the more they resist socially imposed schedules.

But, at another level, the new, more personalized Third Wave rhythms can be traced to a wide range of new technologies moving into our lives. Video cassettes and home video recording, for example, make it possible for televiewers to tape programs off the air and view them at times of their own choosing. Writes columnist Steven Brill, "Within the next two or three years, television will probably stop dictating the schedules of even the worst tube addicts."

The computer, too, is beginning to recast our schedules and even our conceptions of time. Indeed, it is the computer that has made flexitime possible in large organizations. At its simplest, it makes possible the complex interweaving of thousands of personalized, flexible schedules. But it also alters our communications patterns in time, permitting us to access data and exchange it both synchronously (i.e., simultaneously) and asynchronously.

What that means is illustrated by the growing number of computer users who are today engaged in what is called computer conferencing. This permits a group to communicate with one another through terminals in their homes or offices. Some 660 scientists, futurists, planners and educators conduct lengthy discussions of energy, economics, decentralization or space satellites with one another through what is known as the Electronic Information Exchange System. Teleprinters and video screens in their homes and offices provide a choice of either instant or delayed communication. Many time zones apart, each user can choose to send or retrieve data whenever it is most convenient. A person can work at three A.M., if he or she feels like it. Alternatively, several can go on line at the same time, if they so choose.

But the computer's effect on time goes much deeper, influencing even the way we think about it. The computer introduces a new vocabulary (with terms such as real time, for example) that clarifies, (continued on page 268)The Third Wave(continued from page 180) labels and reconceptualizes temporal phenomena. It begins to replace the clock as the most important timekeeping or pacesetting device in society.

Computer operations occur so rapidly that we routinely process data in what might be termed subliminal time--intervals far too short for the human senses to detect or for human neural response times to match. We now have computer-operated microprinters capable of turning out 10,000--20,000 lines per minute--more than 200 times faster than anyone can read them, and this is still the slowest part of computer systems. In 20 years, computer scientists have gone from speaking in terms of milliseconds (thousandths of a second) to nanoseconds (billionths of a second)--a compression of time almost beyond our powers to imagine. It is as though a person's entire working life of, say, 80,000 paid hours--2000 hours per year for 40 years--could be crunched into 4.8 minutes.

Beyond the computer, we find other technologies or products that also move in the direction of demassifying time. Mood-influencing drugs (not to speak of marijuana) alter the perception of time within us. As far more sophisticated mood drugs appear, it is likely that, for good or for ill, even our interior sense of time, our experience of duration, will become further individualized and less universally shared.

During Second Wave civilization, machines were clumsily synchronized with one another, and people on the assembly line were then synchronized with the machines, with all the many social consequences that flowed from this fact. Today, machine synchronization has reached such exquisitely high levels, and the pace of even the fastest human workers is so ridiculously slow in comparison, that full advantage of the technology can be derived not by coupling workers to the machine but only by decoupling them from it.

Put differently, during Second Wave civilization, machine synchronization shackled the human to the machine's capabilities and imprisoned all of social life in a common frame. It did so in capitalist and socialist industrial societies alike. Now, as machine synchronization grows more precise, humans, instead of being imprisoned, are being freed.

One of the psychological consequences of this is a change in the very meaning of punctuality in our lives. We are moving now from an across-the-board punctuality to selective or situational punctuality. Being on time--as our children perhaps dimly sense--no longer means what it used to mean.

Punctuality was not terribly important during First Wave civilization--basically because agricultural work was not highly interdependent. With the coming of the Second Wave, one worker's lateness or absence could immediately and dramatically disrupt the work of many others in factory or office. Hence the enormous cultural pressure to assure punctuality.

Today, because the Third Wave brings with it personalized, instead of universal or massified, schedules, the consequences of being late are less clear. To be late may inconvenience a friend or a co-worker, but its disruptive effects on production, while still potentially severe in certain jobs, are less and less obvious. It is harder--especially for young people--to tell when punctuality is really important and when it is demanded out of mere force of habit, courtesy or ritual. Punctuality remains vital in some situations, but, as the computer spreads and people are permitted to plug into and out of round-the-clock cycles at will, the number of workers whose effectiveness depends on it decreases.

The result is less pressure to be "on time" and the spread of more casual attitudes toward time among the young. Punctuality, like morality, becomes situational.

In short, as the Third Wave moves in, challenging the old industrial way of doing things, it changes the relationship of the entire civilization to time. The old mechanical synchronization that destroyed so much of the spontaneity and joy of life and virtually symbolized the Second Wave is on its way out. The young people who reject the nine-to-five regimen, who are indifferent to classical punctuality, may not understand why they behave as they do. But time itself has changed in the "real world" and, along with it, we have changed the ground rules that once governed us.

The Post-Standardized Mind

The Third Wave does more than alter Second Wave patterns of synchronization. It also attacks another basic feature of industrial life: standardization.

The hidden code of Second Wave society encouraged a steam-roller standardization of many things--from values, weights, distances, sizes, time and currencies to products and prices. Second Wave businessmen worked hard to make every widget identical, and some still do.

But today's savviest businessmen, by contrast, know how to customize (as opposed to standardize) at least cost, and find ingenious ways of applying the latest technology to the individualization of products and services. Paradoxically, they frequently use carefully standardized components but fit them together in highly customized configurations. More and more, we find ourselves, therefore, moving to post-standardized production, and farming out to the hitherto pre--industrial countries the manufacture of standardized goods.

As we do so, we simultaneously begin to shift away from social and economic standardization. In employment, the number of workers doing identical work grows smaller and smaller as the diversity of occupations increases. Wages and fringe benefits begin to vary more from worker to worker. Workers themselves become more different from one another and, since they (and we) are also consumers, the differences immediately translate into the market place.

For that reason, the shift away from traditional mass production is accompanied by a demassification of marketing, of merchandising and of consumption. The dazzling variety of goods and services--increasingly customized, partially customized or, at least, customizable--means that marketers and distributors must aim for individuals or small groups of consumers, rather than for undifferentiated masses. This accounts for the rise of "boutique" marketing.

It also means that consumers begin to make their choices not merely because a product fulfills a specific material or psychological function but also because of the way it fits into the larger configuration of products and services they require. Those configurations are highly transient, as are the lifestyles they help define. Consumption, like production, becomes configurational. Post-standardized production brings with it post-standardized consumption.

Even prices, which were standardized along with goods during the early Second Wave period, begin to be less standardized, since custom products require custom pricing. The price tag for an automobile depends on the package of options selected; the price of a hi-fi set similarly depends on the units that are plugged together and on how much work the buyer wishes to do; the prices of aircraft, offshore oil rigs, ships, computers and other high-technology items vary from one unit to the next.

In domestic politics, we see similar trends. Our views are increasingly diversified. Consensus breaks down in nation after nation, and thousands of new "issue groups" spring up, each fighting for its own narrow, often temporary, set of goals. Regional and local differences, characteristic of First Wave societies, were obliterated by the Second Wave steam roller. New ones now spring to the fore, sparking a drive for autonomy and cultural diversity--all part of the Third Wave push to a post-standardized society.

At yet another level, we also see the breakup of the mass mind as the new communications media come into play. The demassification of the mass media--the rise of minimagazines, newsletters and small-scale, often Xeroxed communications, along with the coming of cable, cassette and computer--shatters the standardized image of the world propagated by Second Wave communications technologies and pumps a diversity of images, ideas, symbols and values into society. Not only are we using customized products; we are using diverse symbols to customize our own view of the world.

Thus, Art News summarizes the views of Dieter Honisch, director of West Berlin's National Gallery: "What is admired in Cologne may not be accepted in Munich and a Stuttgart success may not impress the Hamburg public. Ruled by sectional interests, the country is losing its sense of national culture."

Nothing underlines this process of cultural destandardization more crisply than a recent article in Christianity Today, a leading voice of conservative Protestantism in America. The editor writes, "Many Christians seem confused by the availability of so many different translations of the Bible. Older Christians did not face so many choices." Then comes the punch line. "Christianity Today recommends that no version should be the 'standard.'" Even within the narrow bounds of Biblical translation, as in religion generally, the notion of a single standard is passing. Our religious views, like our tastes, are becoming less uniform and less standardized.

The net effect is to carry us away from the Huxleian or Orwellian society of faceless, deindividualized humanoids that a simple extension of Second Wave tendencies would suggest and, instead, toward a profusion of lifestyles and more highly individualized personalities. We are watching the rise of a post-standardized mind and a post-standardized public.

This will bring its own social, psychological and philosophical problems, some of which we are already feeling in the loneliness and social isolation around us, but these are dramatically different from the problems of conformity that exercised us during the industrial age. We are moving away from the mass society, from mass marketing, mass merchandising, mass consumption and mass communications, and anyone who still thinks of massification as the wave of the future is peering through a rearview mirror.

Because the Third Wave is not dominant yet even in the most technically advanced nations, we still feel the tug of powerful Second Wave currents. We are still completing some of the unfinished business of the Second Wave. For example, hardcover book publishing in the U. S., long a backward industry, is only now reaching the stage of mass merchandising that paperback publishing and most other consumer industries attained more than a generation ago. Other Second Wave movements seem almost quixotic, such as the one that urges us at this late stage to adopt the metric system in the U. S., to bring American measurements into conformity with those used in Europe. Still others derive from bureaucratic empire building, such as the effort of Common Market technocrats in Brussels to "harmonize" everything from auto mirrors to college diplomas--"harmonization" being the current gobbledygook for industrial-style standardization.

Nevertheless, all these attempts to achieve uniformity are, essentially, the rear-guard actions of a spent civilization. The thrust of Third Wave change is toward increased diversity, not toward the further standardization of life. And that is just as true of ideas, political convictions, sexual proclivities, educational methods, eating habits, religious views, ethnic attitudes, musical taste, fashions and family forms as it is of automated production.

A historic turning point has been reached and standardization, another of the ground rules of Second Wave civilization, is being replaced.

The New Matrix

The Third Wave subverts the old rules in yet another way, as the intensifying battle against centralization suggests.

While all societies need some measure of both centralization and decentralization, Second Wave civilization was heavily biased toward the former and against the latter. The great standardizers who helped build industrialism marched hand in hand with the great centralizers, from Hamilton and Lenin to Roosevelt.

Today a sharp swing has begun to carry us in the opposite direction. New political parties, new management techniques and new philosophies are springing up that explicitly attack the centralist premises of the Second Wave. Decentralization has become a hot political issue from California to Kiev.

In Sweden, a coalition of largely decentralist small parties drove the centralist Social Democrats from power after 44 years in office. Violent struggles over decentralization and regionalism have shaken France in recent years, while across the Channel and to the north, the Scottish Nationalists now include a wing committed to "radical economic decentralization." Similar political movements can be identified elsewhere in Western Europe.

In the U. S., too, decentralism has gained wide support. It is decentralism that supplies at least some of the fuel for the tax revolt that is, for good or for ill, flaming across the country. At the local level, decentralism has a growing constituency, with local politicos calling for "neighborhood power."

In schools of architecture and planning, meanwhile, from Berkeley and Yale in the U. S. to the Architectural Association in London, students are immersing themselves in decentralist philosophies. They are, among other things, exploring new technologies for environmental control, solar heating or urban agriculture that, taken together, might help make communities partially self-sufficient--and, hence, decentralize the economy, the social system and the political structure. The impact of these young planners and architects will be increasingly felt in the years to come as they move into responsible positions.

It is apparent that something is happening to our Second Wave assumptions--and not just in politics. The term decentralization has also become a buzz word in management, and large companies are racing to break their departments down into smaller, more autonomous "profit centers." A typical case in the U. S. was the reorganization of Esmark, Inc., a huge company with operations in the food, chemical, oil and insurance industries.

"In the past," declared Esmark's chairman, Robert Reneker, "we had an unwieldy business.... The only way we could develop a coordinated effort was to divide it into bite-size bits." The result: an Esmark cut into 1000 profit centers, each one largely responsible for its own operation.

"The net effect," said Business Week, "is to lift the routine decision making from Reneker's shoulders. Decentralization is evident everywhere but in Esmark's financial controls."

What is important is not Esmark--which has probably reorganized itself more than once since then--but the general tendency it illustrates. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies are also in the process of continual reorganization, decentralizing, sometimes overshooting and swinging back, but gradually, over time, reducing centralized control over their day-to-day operations.

At an even deeper level, large organizations are changing the authority patterns that underpinned centralism. The typical Second Wave firm or government agency was organized around the principle of "one man, one boss." While an employee or an executive might have many subordinates, he or she would never report to more than a single superior. This principle meant that the channels of command all went to the center.

Today it is fascinating to watch that system crack under its own weight in the advanced industries, in the services, the professions and many government agencies. The fact is, growing multitudes of us have more than a single boss.

In Future Shock, I pointed out that big organizations were increasingly honeycombed by temporary units such as task forces, interdepartmental committees and project teams. I termed that phenomenon ad-hocracy. Since then, many large companies have moved to incorporate these transient units into a radically new formal structure called matrix organization. Instead of centralized control, matrix organization employs a "multiple-command system."

Under this arrangement, each employee is attached to a department and reports to a superior in customary fashion. But he or she is also assigned to one or more teams for jobs that can't be done by a single department. A typical project team may have people from manufacturing, research, sales, engineering, finance and other departments. The members of this team all report to the project leader as well as to their "regular" boss.

The result is that vast numbers of people today report to one boss for purely administrative purposes and to another (or a succession of others) for practical, get-the-work-done purposes. This system lets employees give attention to more than one task at a time. It speeds up the flow of information and avoids their looking at problems through the narrow slit of a single department. It helps the organization respond to quickly changing circumstances.

Spreading from such early users as General Electric in the U. S. and Skandia Insurance in Sweden, the matrix-style organization is now found in everything from hospitals to accounting firms. Matrix, in the words of Professors Stanley M. Davis of Boston University and Paul R. Lawrence of Harvard, "is... not just another minor management technique or a passing fad.... It represents a sharp break... matrix represents a new species of business organization."

And this new species is inherently less centralized than the old one-boss system that characterized the Second Wave era.

We are also decentralizing the economy as a whole. Although the fact is only dimly appreciated as yet, national economies are swiftly breaking down into regional and sectoral parts--subnational economies with distinctive and differing problems of their own. Regions, whether the Sun Belt in the U. S., the Mezzogiorno in Italy or Kansai in Japan, instead of growing more alike, as they did during the industrial era, are beginning to diverge from one another in terms of energy requirements, resources, occupational mix, educational levels, culture and other key factors. Moreover, many of the subnational economies have reached the same scale many national economies had only a generation ago.

The result has been the utter bankruptcy of Second Wave economic policies based on centralized controls or programs. Every attempt to offset inflation or unemployment through nationwide tax rebates or hikes, or through monetary or credit manipulation, or through other uniform, undifferentiated Second Wave policies, merely aggravates the disease.

Those who attempt to manage Third Wave economies with such centralized, Second Wave tools are like a doctor who arrives at a hospital one morning and blindly prescribes the same shot of Adrenalin for all patients--regardless of whether they have a broken leg, a ruptured spleen, a brain tumor or an ingrown toenail. Only disaggregated, decentralized economic management can work in the new economy, for it, too, is becoming progressively decentralized at the very moment it seems most global and uniform.

All these anticentralist tendencies--in politics, in corporate or government organization and in the economy itself (along with parallel developments in the media, in the distribution of computer power, in energy systems and in many other fields)--are breaking the old Second Wave patterns, substituting new ground rules for a Third Wave society.

Small Within big is Beautiful

Many other sections of the Second Wave social code are also being rewritten as the Third Wave arrives. Even a fleeting look shows us that Second Wave civilization's obsessive emphasis on maximization is also under sharp attack. Never before have advocates of "Bigger is better" been so assailed by advocates of "Small is beautiful." It was only in the Seventies that a book with that title could have become an influential, worldwide best seller.

Everywhere, the shift toward decentralization has been accompanied by a dawning recognition that there are limits to the much-vaunted economies of scale and that many organizations have exceeded those limits. Corporations are now actively searching for ways to reduce the size of their work units. New technologies and the shift to services both sharply reduce the scale of operation. The traditional Second Wave factory or office, with thousands of people under a single roof, will be a rarity in the high-technology nations.

In Australia, when I asked the president of an auto company to describe the auto plant of the future, he spoke with utter conviction, saying, "I would never, ever again build a plant like this one with 7000 workers under the same roof. I would break it into small units--300 or 400 in each. The new technologies now make this possible." I have since heard similar sentiments from the presidents or chairmen of companies producing food and other products.

Today, we are beginning to realize that neither big nor small is beautiful but that appropriate scale, and the intelligent meshing of both big and small, is most beautiful of all. (This was something that E. F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful, knew better than some of his more fanatic followers. He once told friends that, had he lived in a world of small organizations, he would have written a book called Big Is Beautiful.)

That is why we see experiments with new forms of organization that attempt to combine the advantages of both. The rapid spread of franchising, for example, in the U. S., Britain, Holland and other countries is often a response to capital shortage or tax quirks. But it also represents a method for rapidly creating small units and linking them together in larger systems, with varying degrees of centralization or decentralization.

Second Wave maximization is on its way out. Appropriate scale is in.

Society is also taking a hard look at specialization and professionalism. The Second Wave code book put the expert on a towering pedestal. One of its basic rules was "Specialize to succeed." Today, in every field, including politics, we see a basic shift in attitude toward the specialist. Once regarded as the trustworthy source of neutral intelligence, specialists have been dethroned from public approval. They are increasingly criticized for pursuing their own self-interest and for being incapable of anything but "tunnel vision." We see more and more efforts to restrain the power of the expert by adding laypeople to decision-making bodies--in hospitals, for example, and many other institutions.

Parents demand the right to influence school decisions, no longer content to leave them to professional educators. After studying citizen political participation, a task force in the state of Washington a few years ago concluded, in a statement that summed up the new attitude, "You don't have to be an expert to know what you want!"

Second Wave civilization encouraged yet another principle: concentration. It concentrated money, energy, resources and people. It poured vast populations into urban concentrations. Today, this process, too, has begun to turn around. We see increasing geographical dispersal, instead. At the level of energy, we are moving from a reliance on concentrated deposits of fossil fuels to a variety of more widely dispersed forms of energy.

In short, one could move systematically through the entire code book of Second Wave civilization--from standardization to synchronization, right on down to centralization, maximization, specialization and concentration--and show, item by item, how the old ground rules that governed our daily life and our social decision making are in the process of being revolutionized as Third Wave civilization sweeps in.

The Organization of the Future

When all those old Second Wave principles were put to work in a single organization, the result was a classical industrial bureaucracy: a giant, hierarchical, permanent, top-down, mechanistic organization, well designed for making repetitive products or repetitive decisions in a comparatively stable industrial environment.

Now, however, as we shift to the new ground rules and begin to apply them together, we are led necessarily to wholly new kinds of organizations for the future. These Third Wave organizations have flatter hierarchies. They are less top-heavy. They consist of small components linked in temporary configurations. Each of these components has its own relationships with the outside world, its own foreign policy, so to speak, which it maintains without having to go through the center. These organizations operate more and more around the clock.

But they are different from bureaucracies in another fundamental respect. They are what might be called dual or poly organizations, in the sense that they are capable of assuming two or more distinct structural shapes, as conditions warrant--rather like some plastic of the future that will change shape when heat or cold is applied but spring back into a basic form when the temperature is in its normal range.

One might imagine an army that is democratic and participatory in peacetime but highly centralized and authoritarian during war, having been organized, in the first place, to be capable of both. We might use the analogy of a football team whose members are not merely capable of rearranging themselves in T formation, or a multiplicity of arrangements for different plays, but who, at the sound of a whistle, are equally capable of reassembling themselves as a soccer team, a baseball or basketball squad, depending upon the game being played. Such organizational players need to be trained for instant adaptation, and they must feel comfortable in a wider repertoire of available organizational structures.

We need managers who can operate as well in an open-door, free-flow style as in a hierarchical mode, who can work in an organization structured like an Egyptian Pyramid, as well as in one that looks like a Calder mobile, with a few thin managerial strands holding a complex set of nearly autonomous modules that move in response to the gentlest breeze.

We don't as yet have a vocabulary for describing these Third Wave organizations of the future. Terms like matrix and ad hoc are inadequate. Various theorists have suggested different terms. Advertising man Lester Wunderman has said, "Ensemble groups, acting as intellectual commandos, will... begin to replace the hierarchical structure."

Tony Judge, one of our most brilliant organization theorists, has written extensively about the "network" character of these emerging organizations of the future, pointing out, among other things, that "the network is not 'coordinated' by anybody; the participating bodies coordinate themselves, so that one may speak of 'autocoordination.'" He has also described them in terms of Buckminster Fuller's "tensegrity" principles.

But whatever terms we use, something revolutionary is happening. We are participating not merely in the birth of new organizational forms but in the birth of a new civilization. A new code book is taking form--a set of Third Wave principles, new ground rules for social survival.

It is hardly any wonder that parents--still mainly tied to the Second Wave code book--increasingly find themselves in conflict with children who, if anything, are aware of the growing irrelevance of the old rules but uncertain, if not blindly ignorant, of the new ones. They and we alike are caught between a dying industrial society and the Third Wave civilization of tomorrow.

"The Third Wave, as it sweeps in, carries with it a completely different sense of time."

"Third Wave rhythms spring from deep psychological, economic and technological forces."

"Being on time--as our children perhaps sense--no longer means what it used to mean."