The knowledge society will be a highly competitive one, for organizations and individuals alike.  Information technology, although only one of many new features of the next society, is already having one hugely important effect: it is allowing knowledge to spread near-instantly , and making it accessible to everyone. Given the ease and speed at which information travels, every institution in the knowledge society--not only businesses, but also schools, universities, hospitals and increasingly government agencies too--has to be globally competitive, even though most organizations will continue to be local in their activities and in their markets. This is because the Internet will keep customers everywhere informed on what is available anywhere in the world, and at what price.    This new knowledge economy will rely heavily on knowledge workers. At present, this term is  widely used to describe people with considerable theoretical knowledge and learning :doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants chemical engineers. But the most striking growth will be in "knowledge technologists": computer technicians, software designers, analysts in clinical labs, manufacturing technologists, paralegals. These people are as much manual  workers and they are knowledge workers; in fact, they usually spend far more time working with their hands than with their brains, but their manual work is based on a substantial amount of theoretical knowledge which can be acquired only through formal education ,not through an apprenticeship . They are not, as a rule, much better paid than traditional skilled workers, but they see themselves as "professionals", just as unskilled manual workers in manufacturing were the  _ social and political force in the 21thcentury, knowledge technologists are likely to become the dominant social--and perhaps also political--force over the next decades. All of the following are characteristic of "knowledge technologist" except that   _  .
they spend more time on manual work than on mental work they are equipped with a large amount of theoretical knowledge they see themselves professionals rather than traditional skilled workers. They acquire skills through traditional apprenticeship