ds. A marginal group of people became nomad-traders. This group exploded in size with the advent of the industrial revolution. True, the bulk of the workforce was still immobile and affixed to the production floor. But raw materials and the finished products traveled long distances to faraway markets. Professional services were needed and the professional manager, the lawyer, the accountant, the consultant, the trader, the broker – all emerged as both the parasites of the production processes and the indispensable components to any enterprise. Then came the services industry. Its protagonists were no longer geographically dependent. They rendered their services to a host of “employers” in a variety of ways and geographically spread. This trend accelerated today, at the beginning of the information and knowledge revolution. Knowledge is not locale-bound. It is easily transferable across boundaries. Its short-lived quality gives it a-temporal and non-spatial qualities. The location of the participants in the economic interactions of this new age are geographically transparent. These trends converged with an increase of mobility of people, goods and data (voice, visual, textual and other). The twin revolutions of transportation and of telecommunications really reduced the world to a “global village”(Idea stolen from Mrs. Clinton). Phenomena like commuting to work and multinationals were first made possible. Facsimile messages, electronic mail, other modem data transfers, the Internet broke not only physical barriers, but also temporal ones. Today, virtual offices are not only spatially virtual, but also temporally so. This means that workers can collaborate not only across continents but also across time zones. They can leave their work for someone else to continue in an electronic mailbox, for instance. These last technological advances precipitated the fragmentation of the very concepts of ...
