Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century

A study of power in the 1990s and beyond traces the shifting global power structures and describes how the very definition of power has changed in modern times.

One of the world’s best-known social thinkers, Alvin Toffler is the author of Future Shock, The Third Wave, Previews and Premises, The Adaptive Corporation, and other works that are read in more than fifty countries.

His ideas have drawn comment from world leaders from Richard Nixon to Mikhail Gorbachev, and have significantly influenced contemporary thought.

At various times a Visiting Professor at Cornell University, a Washington correspondent, and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, Toffler earlier spent five years as a factory worker in an auto plant, a steel foundry, and other shops in heavy industry.

His books have won the McKinsey Foundation Book Award for their distinguished contribution to management literature in the United States; the Golden Key Award in China; and the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France.

Toffler works in close intellectual partnership with his spouse, Heidi Toffler, who holds an honorary doctorate in law and has been awarded the Medal of the President of the Italian Republic for her own contributions to social thought. He has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France.