The nature of the proactive society

This chapter discusses the transition from what might be called the currently prevailing “managerial society” to the gradually emerging proactive society, placing special attention on distinguishing between entrepreneurship and proactivity, the former being a functionally narrow concept and the latter being its much broader and formally looser extension. Subsequently, it elaborates on several representative manifestations of proactivity, including the performance of non-automatable labor, proxy-entrepreneurship, and protean career building. Finally, it analyzes several categories of characteristics of the proactive society, including those of a structural, organizational, political, ethical, and cognitive nature, thereby highlighting the multidimensional nature of the concept under consideration.