Dear Don,
While I normally avoid "me-too" posts to acknowledge an issue where I'd like to have said the same thing, this is a case where I can add a "me-too" with enough nuance to make posting worth while. On top of that, I cannot resist the opportunity to be the fourth Australian in a row to add a thought. (Well, I guess it's really one Australian in a row with Keith, plus a Brit -- Terry, a Kiwi -- Gavin, and a Yank via Norway -- me. But as a long-forgotten American president once said of Lord Keynes, "We are all Australians now.")
The line between products and services is increasingly ambiguous. This parallels the increasingly shaded flow of world economies. The Australian economist Colin Clark stated back in the 1940s that the economy had three sectors -- a primary sector of commodities, a secondary sector of manufacturing, and a tertiary sector of services. Back then, many economists dismissed the idea of a tertiary sector of services as problematic.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the proportion of services involved in every productive sector of the economy has increased dramatically. Somewhere on my office bookshelf, I have a useful little model that shows how most goods today actually shade off into services. The model proposes a number of factors that make something either a good or a service, but the relations between the two poles of the model suggest that nearly nothing occupies one end of the spectrum exclusively.
When I get back to my office, I'll see if I can hunt it down and post the reference.
In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Daniel Bell restructured Clark's model of the economy into five sectors. I built on that to develop a Seven Global Economies model. What is most significant about these seven economies is that services are embodied in all of them. As I see it, there is (or was) a service component in most economic sectors for nearly as long as human beings have walked the earth. The differences in the increasingly service-oriented knowledge economies that have developed over the past ten thousand years involve the proportion of humanity that works in the service sectors as contrasted with the primary sector -- agriculture, fishing, forestry, or the later secondary sector of manufacturing.
I liked Keith's philosophical-dramaturgical approach: "Every product is a moment in a process - the shift in interest is dramatic (obvious) and part of a drama (integral to some action)." While this may not be entirely true of certain products from the primary sector, it is likely to be the case for most human-made products, with the web of activities and services that flow around them and in which they are embedded. If we consider the web and network of embedding, it may even be true of commodities to the degree that we transact them through markets and transform them through human action. A commodity that cannot be transformed for some use through human action has no purpose, and therefore no commodity value.
Just thinking about all this on Easter Sunday. But I wish I had written your post anyhow!
Warm wishes,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean
Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
Telephone +61 3 9214 6755
www.swinburne.edu.au/design
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