The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society

Overview

Peter Drucker frames the late 20th century as an age of discontinuities rather than smooth, linear progress. The book argues that the most consequential shifts are structural breaks, new technologies, new forms of organization, new patterns of world economy, and new social expectations, that invalidate inherited assumptions. Instead of a unified grand theory, Drucker offers guidelines for action: how to recognize emerging realities, build institutions around them, and measure results in a world where yesterday’s rules no longer apply.

From Continuity to Discontinuity

Drucker contends that industrial-era habits, faith in incremental improvement, centralized control, and stable careers, have outlived their conditions. He emphasizes Schumpeterian dynamics: innovation organizes knowledge to create the new and destroy the old. The core break is the shift from brute-force mechanization to knowledge-based technologies, where information, design, and management are decisive. Because innovation is purposeful and systematic, institutions must learn to manage it as a process: define objectives, focus on opportunities, and be willing to abandon practices that no longer produce results.

The Knowledge Society

Knowledge becomes the central economic resource and the knowledge worker the pivotal social group. Productivity in knowledge work, not only in manual labor, becomes the decisive measure of national and organizational performance. This shift challenges schools and universities designed for selective elites and credentialing. Drucker calls for lifelong learning, second-chance pathways, and rigorous attention to outcomes rather than time served or degrees acquired. He warns that knowledge creates new inequalities; inclusion depends on accessible education, mobility into meaningful work, and organizations that develop people. Authority rooted in position gives way to responsibility rooted in contribution, making management both a social function and a moral practice.

The World Economy and the Multinational

Economic life is increasingly transnational, outgrowing nation-bound policies and assumptions. The multinational enterprise is not a financial novelty but a productive system that allocates knowledge, capital, and work across borders. Drucker argues that development succeeds when countries integrate into world markets, compete on performance, and build managerial and technical capacity; it falters when they rely on protection, autarky, or subsidies to shield uncompetitive industries. He anticipates new strains on monetary and trade regimes as capital and information move faster than political authority, urging rules that favor transparency, competition, and adaptability.

Government, Institutions, and Pluralism

The modern “megastate” promises more than it can deliver. Complex services, schools, hospitals, research centers, corporations, perform best as accountable autonomous institutions with clear missions and measured results. Drucker advocates pluralism: a society of strong, self-governing institutions that discipline power by distributing it and that make performance visible. Government’s role is to set the framework, define objectives, and stop doing what does not work. Social policy, like corporate policy, must be judged by outcomes: Are the poor becoming productive? Are communities capable of self-management? Are new problems being met with new tools rather than old dogmas?

Guidelines for Action

Across domains, Drucker recommends a bias for organized abandonment and systematic innovation. Build on strengths, concentrate resources where results are possible, and treat people as responsible contributors rather than as costs. Measure what matters, results rather than effort, learning rather than schooling, value creation rather than activity. Accept that turbulence is normal; the task of leadership is to convert discontinuity from threat into opportunity by designing institutions that learn.

Enduring Significance

Published at the close of the 1960s, the book anticipates the rise of the service and knowledge economy, the spread of multinationals, the limits of macroeconomic fine-tuning, and the need for accountable, mission-driven institutions beyond the state. Its enduring contribution is a method: face the breaks, look for what is genuinely new, and organize for results under new conditions.