Rifkin, Jeremy. The Age of Access: Everything is a Service. London. Penguin Books, 2001

Summary: Rifkin presents social and economic evidence that the industrialized world is already in what he terms the age of access, in which the concept of capital ownership is replaced by concepts of access to resources. Part one of the book, The Capitalist Frontier, provides evidence of this shift and outlines the larger reasons for the change. In part two, Enclosing the Cultual Commons, he discusses what effects such a shift may have on different aspects of culture, which he says will be massive, requiring shifts in our relationships not just with corporations, but with one another as well.

Use: It was partially our own institute's focus on service design and partly the inclusion of chapter five (Everything is a Service) in one of our first-year readers that gave me the idea to approach learning as a service.