Toffler Model

Toffler Model

  • Submitted By: tinagaran
  • Date Submitted: 01/23/2010 4:24 AM
  • Category: Business
  • Words: 318
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 467

1.0 TOFFLER MODEL: WAVE THEORY
The Toffler’s model is developed by Alvin Toffler, an American writer and a futurist. One of his well known works is the book titled “The Third Wave”, which was published in the 1980. In “The Third Wave” book, Toffler presents the wave theory where he identifies three types of societies, and based on the ‘waves’ concept, each new wave(society/culture) pushes the older society/culture. Alvin Toffler describes a new world order that cannot be avoided and also describes how to survive and even profit on its arrival (Wikipedia.com – Alvin Toffler).
The Third Wave society is still emerging. In the Third Wave society, the most important resource is not land, capital or labour, but knowledge. Knowledge includes everything from data, assumptions, values, inferences, intuition and imagination. Third Wave nations can profit on this knowledge by marketing innovation, management, information, culture, education, medical care, software and financial services. Therefore de-massification also characterizes the Third Wave. Customized products would be realized through computer driven manufacturing technologies which allows cheap customization and product diversity. In the Third Wave society, there would be rise in knowledge based workers and decline in manual job workers. This would result to workers in the Third Wave society become less interchangeable. Though the Third Wave might be resisted by the Second Wave elites and the poor American due to their fear that they would be displaced by the new order, Third Wave proponents view that the most urgent current problems such as energy, war and poverty cannot be solved using the framework of an industrial civilization (Toffler.A & Toffler.H 1996). Hence transforming into the Third Wave is vital and not really a choice. Other key characteristics of the Third Wave are the way government takes shape. Toffler says that minorities will play a more important role and gone of the days where majority...

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