by Daniel Bell
Praise for
The Coming of Post-Industrial Society
“It is rare in social science to find a study that fundamentally changes our perception of the way the world works. Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society accomplished such a feat. First published in 1973, it was an instant classic. Bell’s highly informative and engaging new introduction makes this powerful work even more compelling.”
—William Fulius Wilson
Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor,
Harvard University (1999)
“A quarter century ago, Dan Bell was prescient when he published his classic on post-industrial society. With this brilliant new foreword he remains ahead in linking his past insights to the new information age.”
—Foseph S. Nye, Fr.
Dean of the Kennedy School of Government,
Harvard University (1999)
“Daniel Bell introduced the concept of post-industrial technology in the first edition of this work, and it has now become universal. His additional essay brings together in a short compass both a sharp characterization of the special features of the new technology which has developed so much in the interim, yet along lines he already foresaw, and deeply insightful comments on the social effects that it permits but does not determine.”
—Kenneth F. Arrow
Joan Kennedy Professor of Economics Emeritus,
Stanford University; Nobe] Laureate in Economics (1999)
“One of the great seminal works of the last half century and also portending the changes in the next half century.”
—Manuel Castells (1999)
“A book that could affect thinking for years to come. ... It is a book to be read by all Americans who want to know what the year 2000 has in store for us.”
—Arnold Bekhmtm
Christian Science Monitor (1973)
“Bell elaborates ... with learning and ingenuity. Even more admirably, he is free of slushy romanticism about the future.”
—Maron F. Levy, Fr.
Fortune (1973)
THE COMING
OF
POST-INDUSTRIAL
SOCIETY
THE COMING
OF
POST-INDUSTRIAL
SOCIETY
A Venture in Social
Forecasting
* * *
DANIEL BELL
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Copyright © 1973 by Daniel Bell
Foreword © 1976 by Daniel Bell
Foreword 1999 © 1999 by Daniel Bell
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022-5299.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-89178
ISBN 0-465-01281-7 cloth
0-465-09713-8 pbk.
DESIGNED BY VINCENT TORRE
00 01 02 20 19 18 17 16
FOR
Jordy Bell Jacoby
AND
Stephen Jacoby
CONTENTS
The Axial Age of Technology Foreword: 1999
Foreword: 1976
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER
1
From Industrial to Post-Industrial Society:
Theories of Social Development
CHAPTER
2
From Goods to Services: The Changing
Shape of the Economy
CHAPTER
3
The Dimensions of Knowledge and
Technology: The New Class Structure of
Post-Industrial Society
CHAPTER
4
The Subordination of the Corporation: The
Tension between the Economizing and
Sociologizing Modes
CHAPTER
5
Social Choice and Social Planning: The
dequacy of Our Concepts and Tools
CHAPTER
6
“Who Will Rule?” Politicians and
Technocrats in the Post-Industrial Society
CODA
An Agenda for the Future
1. How Social Systems Change
2. The Future of Science
3. Meritocracy and Equality
4. The End of Scarcity?
5. Culture and Consciousness
Name Index
Subject Index
THE AXIAL AGE OF
TECHNOLOGY
FOREWORD: 1999
The Coming of Post-Industrial Society was first published in 1973 and re-issued with an expanded foreword in 1976. Since then, the term, the phrase, the idea, the concept of post-industrial society has passed into common currency and the academic lexicon. A search in the Nexis database from August 6, 1997 to August 8, 1998, reveals 104 citations in articles and speeches by many different persons. In the two-year period beginning in 1996, there were 191 instances.
The range is revealing, sometimes amusing, and sometimes astounding. Sir Leon Brittan, Vice-President of the European Commission, speaking in Tokyo in September 1997, remarked, “We are managing a difficult transition to becoming post-industrial societies with aging populations.” William Julius Wilson, the Harvard sociologist, writing in January 1998 on the reasons behind inner-city dislocations, pointed to the “post-industrial society” occupational positions that require higher levels of education. The Unabomber, the man responsible for the death or maiming of more than a dozen persons over a dozen-year period, in January 1998 offered to end his war “if a national newspaper published his 35,000-word manifesto criticizing the corrupt and dehumanizing influences of post-industrial [i.e., technological] society.” When the New York Times and Washington Post jointly published the manuscript, David Kaczynski, the brother of the Unabomber, recognized the style and words and informed the authorities of his identity.
What is striking is the high-level and often-minatory use of the phrase by world leaders. Celebrating the 650th anniversary of Prague University in April 1998, President Václav Havel remarked: “University research must not be driven solely ... by die demands of the market economy; post-industrial society demands that universities recall their original concept of ‘general learning.’” In June 1998, speaking of the flaws in Asian societies, Margaret Thatcher laid part of the blame on “the failure to develop the political framework and skills needed in advanced industrial and post-industrial societies.”
Even the President of the United States uses the term post-industrial. In a round-table discussion in Shanghai (June 30, 1998), “Shaping China for the 21st Century,” President Clinton remarked: “In your economic growth you will almost leap over a generation of economic experiences that older European countries and the United States experienced [so] you will essentially be creating an industrialized and a post-industrial society at the same time. And therefore, more quickly you will have to educate more people at higher levels than we did.”
When I asked the National Security Council who had written Mr. Clinton’s talk, I was told that that particular response to the issues was extempore. Yet it is also evident that President Clinton’s remarks grew out of the context of previous White House briefings during which the problem had been raised several times. In May 1998, the transcript of a White House briefing by Mike McCurry, the Press Officer, and Strobe Talbott, the Deputy Secretary of State, stated that the discussion dealt with the “substant
ive challenges ... of the post Cold War era in a post-industrial society.” And in a discussion between President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the Prime Minister’s retreat at Chequers in May, the same theme was addressed. Michael Curry restated this theme in a press briefing in Birmingham, England, about the meeting of the two leaders and their aides.
What is clear from all this is that the leaders of the Western nations consider their societies to be “post-industrial” and that the problem facing the rest of the world is how to make the transition to the post-industrial state.
Though the phrase “post-industrial society” is now used widely, there is often little specificity as to what it connotes. For example, the London Economist (August 22, 1998) in its story “Post-Industrial Glasgow” writes:
The unprepared visitor to Glasgow looks in vain for teeming tenements blackened still by grime and soot, and searches an empty skyline for the thicket of cranes that rimmed die cacophonous shipyards. ... That Glasgow has gone—along with most of the ship-building and steel making that once made the city rich. ... But from the city centre Glasgow looks and feels like a successful post-industrial centre for tourism, services and shopping.
Such a description understandably concentrates on the decline of industry and manufacturing and the supplanting by services. But it misses the extraordinary range of changes that run through the social structure of the emerging post-industrial world, one that does not wholly displace the agrarian and industrial worlds (though it transforms them in essential ways) but represents new principles of innovation, new modes of social organization, and new classes in society.
The post-industrial society, as a concept and as a reality, arises within the frame of socio-economic history, the contexts of the pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial worlds.1 In the first fifty-five of the past fifty-seven centuries, as Paul Krugman has pointed out, most of the world’s population lived largely as subsistence economies based on extractive industries—farming, mining, fishing, timber. For that large period T. R. Malthus was right; population increase was subject to the checks of disease, exhaustion of soils, and diminishing natural resources. Migrations and marauding wars were the common lot of peoples.
But Malthus wrote in 1800, and the world has changed radically since then. The creation of a source of energy unknown to previous centuries and its methodical use within an enclosed container transformed the landscape. Steam pumps could now draw water out of the coal mines and allow miners to dig deeper and bring up more coal. England, as an island bedded on coal in the Midlands, began the development of steam-powered looms for the manufacture of textiles. Factories arose as the industry expanded. Steam-powered shafts, from fire boxes of coal, drove railroads and steamships, and radical new modes of transportation were created. People for the first time could travel on land faster than any animal, and on water faster than wind. With the increase in the understanding of sanitation, with clean water and medical advances—at least in the Western world—diseases no longer had devastating effects. Population increases meant new factors of production and new sources of demand. With the development of modern chemistry, by the manipulation of the properties of macromolecules, humans for the first rime could make goods, such as plastics, not found in nature.
A new understanding of economics had also appeared, the division of labor and the principle of productivity, the ability to gain a greater output of goods with a similar or lesser input of labor. In short, and for the first time, economic surpluses could arise without exploitation—unless the division of labor was carried to too great an extreme. In previous times, wealth was gained by war, plunder, slavery, tax-farming, and the like, a brutal zero-sum game. Now for the first rime, productivity could be increased, generating increases in incomes and wealth that in turn could create economic surpluses without impoverishing the working class. This, at least, was the promise of economic liberalism.
If one reflects on this achievement, it is clear that the so-called industrial revolution (a term coined a hundred years after die fact, in 1886, when Arnold Toynbee Sr., the uncle of the famous historian, gave his Oxford lectures) was due to a new understanding of technology and the organization of production. Technology was more than making things in a reproducible manner. It was a rational ordering of means-ends relations, a rationalization of work and even of sectors of life. Technology is, in its procedures, instrumental, and in its design, aesthetic, a conception fostered by the famous Bauhaus of the Weimar Republic. This aesthetic is demonstrated in the work of the architects Walter Gropius and Erich Mendelssohn, the artist Lázló Moholy-Nagy, and the painters Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger.
To that extent, one can say that the previous two hundred years had been the “axial age” of technology. The “axial age” was a term used by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers to characterize the period around 500 B.C., or more broadly from the sixth century before Christ to the second century before Christ, which saw the breakthrough of religion and transcendence. This was the extraordinary period of Zarathushtra in Persia, the Gautama Buddha in India, Confucius in China, the prophets in Israel (Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel), the Eleatic philosophers in Greece (Thales, Anaxi-mander, Pythagoras). There is a mystery to this simultaneity, and die various explanations cannot be discussed here. But what is evident is that one has here a world axis on which history turned. Is it too much to say that the past two hundred years have seen a new axial period, a “breakthrough” in human powers that is the basis for the transformation of nature and of the material world?2
The foundations of industrial society were laid by the harnessing of energy (steam, electricity, oil and gas) to drive machines and turbines; the vertical integration of the corporation, as in the shaping by Walter Teagle of the Standard Oil Company, which controlled everything from the oil in the tar sands to the refining to the sale of the gasoline; and the introduction of mass production by Henry Ford. But how does one explain the coming of post-industrial society? The first explanation was given by the Australian economist Colin Clark in his pathbreaking Conditions of Economic Progress (1940), where he divided the economy into sectors: primary (extractive), secondary (manufacturing), and tertiary (services). The progress of an economy was measured by the degree of productivity (output per capita) in each sector. As productivity rose in each sector (i.e., fewer persons were needed to achieve particular levels of output), labor could be transferred from one sector to another. Economic progress, thus, was defined as a function of the differential productivity among the sectors. Services was a residual category, the kind of additional benefits, so to speak, that a society could now afford. Many persons, in writing about a post-industrial society, still define it primarily with respect to services. But that definition is inadequate.
Clark’s view of services was narrowly “economistic.” More than that, it derived from the thinking of the classical economists, and Marx, that services were “unproductive.” In that view, only manufacturing produced value, by labor. But momentary reflection would show that this view is wrong. The major expansion of services in contemporary society is “human services,” primarily health and education. And both are the chief means today of increasing productivity in a society: education by advancing the acquisition of skills, particularly literacy and numeracy; health by reducing illness and making individuals more fit for work. This is why, in writing about services, I have broken this area into a further distinction (after the pre-industrial “primary” and the industrial “secondary”) of tertiary (transportation and utilities), quaternary (trade and finance), and quinary (health, education, etc.).
But for me, the novel and central feature of post-industrial society is the codification of theoretical knowledge and the new relation of science to technology. Every society has existed on the basis of knowledge and the role of language in the transmission of knowledge. But only in the twentieth century have we seen the codification of theoretical knowledge and the development of self-conscious research programs in
die unfolding of new knowledge. One sees this change in the new relation of science to technology. Almost all the industries of the nineteenth century—steel, electricity, telephone, automobile, aviation, the wireless—were created by talented tinkerers (a Bessemer, a Thomas Alva Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright brothers, Marconi) who were indifferent to or worked independently of the developments in science. But die major developments of the twentieth century—in telecommunication, computers, semi-conductors and transistors, materials science, optics, biotechnology—derive from the revolutions in twentieth-century physics and biology: from Einstein’s work in quantum theory and optics, which explained die photoelectric effect and led to the development of lasers, to the discovery of die double-helix structure of DNA and the genome project on decoding the chromosome structure of the body’s cells. Research and development are the handmaidens of invention and innovation, and these are integral to the developments in science.
No society, of course, ever emerges full-blown, like Minerva out of the head of Jove, but different facets emerge at different times, often out of interaction with older modes. It might be useful, therefore, to indicate here, even if schematically, some of the range and extent of post-industrial developments in the past twenty-five years, and to do so by contrast to features of industrial society.3
1. From manufacturing to services: Today only 18.8 million Americans, in a work force of 126 million, work in manufacturing as against 20.2 million in a work force of 77 million twenty-five years ago. Thus, nearly 15 percent of the labor force is now in manufacturing as against 26 percent twenty-five years ago. One needs to point out, too, the change in the character of manufacturing, namely the decline of smoke-stack industries and the rise of the antiseptic, sterile-room production of computer chips and drugs. In many ways, the two modes complement each other. Thus the Ford Motor Company is developing the use of an advanced neural network program using chips designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to monitor its engines for any troubles.