Thanks a lot, Harold -- I've been behind schedule all week, and wandering over here to a thought-provoking reflection, and comments batting three for three, isn't getting me caught up at all.

That underlined passage made me think of a huge but oddly entertaining tome on the development of markets that a friend gave me. In early economies (I don't want to say "primitive"), barter is extremely common, money is suspect, and there's a sometimes unacknowledge shared belief that things have intrinsic value.

(That's the notion that your clay pot is worth two liters of barley, say.)

In more robust economics that extend farther, in a sense the individual elements are the knowledge (the facts), but the function of the economy depends on channels of exchange (the meaning).

That's where money comes into its own -- in a sense, it means what people decide it means. And objects no longer have an objective value (the way the price of gold was for years defined as $45 U.S. an ounce) -- there's a meaning applied to them, and that's what gives them value.

Quite the tangent, but I'm not up to the knowledge-worker label yet. I tend to agree with Michele (and said as much on Work Literacy) -- I think most workers define themselves in terms of the major processes they engage in (Damn it, Jim, I'm a physician, not a knowledge worker!).

"Knowledge worker" other than as a catchall term doesn't have much more meaning than "user of English."