The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  In the gross-domestic-product accounts, in a seven-trillion-dollar economy, manufacturing accounts for about 17 percent and services 50 percent of the national product.

  2. Occupational changes: The most striking change in the character of work is the extraordinary rise of professional and technical employment and the relative decline of skilled and semi-skilled workers. Of the work force of 126 million in 1996, 36.5 million persons were professionals and managers; almost half were classified as managers; and 37.6 million persons were in the technicians, sales, and administrative-support category. In all these were more than 74 million persons, or nearly 60 percent of the labor force. As against that, T3.5 million persons were classed as skilled workers (precision production and craft) and 18.1 million as operators and laborers, a total of 31.6 million, or 25 percent of the labor force.4

  3. Property and education: The traditional mode of gaining place and privilege in the society was through inheritance—of a family farm, a family business, or a family occupation, and, in a lesser way, through starting a business or entrepreneurship. Today education has become the basis of social mobility, especially with the expansion of professional and technical jobs, and even entrepreneurship requires a higher-education background. In 1960, only 41 percent of all persons had completed four years of high school (and only 20 percent of blacks). In 1996, 81 percent of the population had completed high school (and 74 percent of blacks). The change in college education is even more striking. In 1960 only 7.7 percent of the population had completed college (and 3.1 percent of blacks). In 1996, almost 24 percent of the population had completed college, and 13.6 percent of blacks (table 243, the Statistical Abstract of the United States).

  4. Financial capital and human capital: A different way of highlighting the change is to understand the nature of capital as a resource. In economic theory, until only the past thirty or so years, capital was regarded principally as financial capital amassed as money or land. Due to the pioneering work of Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker at the University of Chicago, human capital is now-regarded as an essential feature in understanding the strength of a society, and in the recent growth theory of Paul Romer, both human capital and technology are integrated into an endogamous feature of growth. More recently, the concept of social capital was advanced by the late James Coleman of the University of Chicago and Robert Putnam of Harvard. One gains social capital to the extent that one has access to opportunities and social networks; social capital represents the reduction, so to speak, of the “six degrees of separation” between persons. As Coleman and Putnam pointed out, minority groups often lack social capital and thus are more easily excluded from opportunities or knowledge about them.

  5. Technology and intellectual technology: For most persons, technology means machines; this understanding is reasonable given the foundation of mechanical technology for industrial society. But with the spread of computer-aided design in manufacture, as well as the merging of communications systems, what comes to the fore is “intellectual technology” (based on mathematics and linguistics), which uses algorithms (decision rules), programming (software), models and simulations, in the running of the new “high technology.”

  6. Infrastructure: The infrastructure of industrial society was transportation—ports, railroads, highways, trucks, airports—which made the exchange of goods and materials possible. The infrastructure of post-industrial society is communication: cable, broadband, digital TV, optical fiber networks, fax, e-mail, ISDN (integrated system digital networks, combining data, text, voice, sound, and image through a single channel). And now we have the Internet and the World Wide Web, which in less than five years have grown at a rate unprecedented in the history of communication. All these technologies form a complex adaptive system that is the foundation of the electronically mediated global economy.

  7. A knowledge theory of value: An industrial society, from Ricardo to Marx, is based on a labor theory of value, and the development of industry proceeds by labor-saving devices, substituting capital for labor. A post-industrial society rests on a knowledge theory of value. Knowledge is the source of invention and innovation. It creates value-added and increasing returns to scale and is often capital-saving in that the next substitution (e.g., fiber optics for copper in communications cables) uses less capital and produces a more than proportional gain in output. Knowledge is a collective good (in particular basic research), and one can raise the question of whether a “social rent” is due to the class of scientists who create the knowledge.

  So what is new about the post-industrial economy? Writes Bradford De Long,

  What is new is that for the first time since the invention of printing, information processing and distribution has become one of the leading sectors. Previous leading sectors changed the conditions of the lives of weavers, spinners, transporters, farmers, blacksmiths, and so on. Our leading sectors are changing the conditions of life of those who use information to direct enterprises—managers—and they are also changing the conditions of life of those who use information to decide what to buy—consumers. Perhaps most of interest, however, society’s information processors and distributors include its intellectuals. So we intellectuals are, quite naturally, excited. And we are very, very articulate.5

  The question arises: If information is so central to the new forms of socio-economic organization, why did I not call my work The Information Society? In 1975, I wrote a long monograph, “The Social Framework of the Information Society” (a major portion of which was printed in the book The Computer Age, edited by Michael Dertouzos and Joel Moses [MIT Press, 1979]), which laid out some of the central features of an information economy and raised some policy questions—i.e., centralization and privacy, skepticism about educational advances—that are still relevant today. But as I indicated in this book, my central focus has been in the role of technology and the ways that technology has become the strategic resource and lever of social change in society. I am not a technological determinist, for all technology operates in a context not always of its making (such as politics and culture); yet technology is the major instrument of change (and instruments can be used well or badly).

  My interest arose out of two methodological concerns. One was the de-coupling of the two dimensions of Marx’s concept of the mode of production—social relations (property and power) and techne—and observing what the historical picture would be like if we treated these dimensions as independent variables. In the one instance, these variables would be, sequentially, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism; in the other, pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial frameworks.6

  My second interest derives from my argument that one best understands society, particularly modern society, as a set of disjunctive realms. Most social theory sees society as a totality or as integrated through a single ramrod. Marxists see society as organized by the mode of production, which unites the sub-structure and superstructure—the economic as the foundation and politics and culture as epiphenomena. Durkheim and Parsons see society as organized by the value system, which legitimates derivative norms and behavior.

  Against such holistic theories I think of society as comprising three realms—the techno-economic, the political, and the cultural, each organized and obedient to different principles. These cohere at different times and in different ways. And they sometimes change in radically different ways.

  Historical change is not unified; nor do distinct periods make sense, though we often use those concepts loosely. The stone of stumbling for Marxism is the persistence of the great historic religions that arose in the first axial period. Political systems of empires have crumbled, and economic systems have disappeared; but the great religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam—are, in their core, still recognizable today.

  Pre-modern time was one of estate society organized vertically with the military estate, the landed estate, the ecclesiastical estate, and the bourgeois estate all ruled by the monarch. In modern capitalist society, th
e bourgeois estate swelled up, so to speak, to dominate the society. Economics—in production and commerce—became the organizing principle of society; the internal divisions, of capitalist and workers, became the class divisions of society. The social structure of post-industrial society, as I explore in the coda, section one, is made up of estates (the professional groups—scientific, technological, administrative, and cultural) and situses, which are the institutional locations (corporate, government, the military, the universities, and research complexes) where the estates are distributed.

  But to return to my primary theme of technology: The techno-economic realm does not determine the political and cultural spheres, but as the initiator of change it poses problems for the political order (often of managing the disruptions created by change) and the cultural realm in confronting the claims of instrumental reason as it spreads through the society.

  Finally, as I wrote in the introduction, I was not predicting the future but writing what the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger called an als ob, an “as if,” a fiction, a logical construction of what could be, against which the future social reality could be compared in order to see what intervened to change society in the direction it did take. Twenty-five years later, the interested reader can judge not how accurate I was, for this was a “prospective” history of the sociologist (as against the “retrospective” construction of the historian), but how the features of society today compare with the world of a quarter of a century ago.

  In the quarter-century since the publication of this book, and especially in the past decade or so, more than a dozen books have explored and extended the themes of post-industrial society.7 In the early years, surprisingly, among the first to hail the idea of the post-industrial society were the young radicals of the New Left. The Port Huron statement, which launched the Students for Democratic Society, based itself on a post-industrial premise of a new stage in society, one that rendered the Old Left obsolete. Massimo Teodori, who assembled a documentary history of the New Left, remarked that “die American New Left is perhaps the first embryonic expression of a new force which confronts the problems of post-industrial society.” A New Left book by SDS leaders Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman (A Disrupted History) embracing post-industrial language describes the “scientific, technical and professional workers” needed to “design and turn ... automated and cybernated machinery,” workers who displace the “old working class” and Marx’s proletarian strategy. And, following C. Wright Mills, the students lead the revolution, making the university “a living model of the struggle for a new society” beyond work and scarcity.8

  The premise here was the idea that scarcity would now be eliminated and we would be entering a “post-economic” stage of society. The rationale for this belief was laid out in a 1964 manifesto, “The Triple Revolution,” signed by, among others, Robert Heilbroner, Irving Howe, Gunnar Myrdal, Tom Hayden, and the chief authors, Robert Theobold and Donald Michael. They saw in automation and cybernation “a new era of production” sparked by gains in productivity so large that one could cope with the disruptive effects only by severing the link between employment and income maintained by the old industrial society of scarcity and distributing die usufruct freely to the populace at large. But this was not to be. And since the problem of scarcity bedevils all societies and eradicating scarcity is the underlying Utopian hope of all reform movements, I shall return to this crucial question at the conclusion of this new foreword.9

  Of the many books published on post-industrial developments, I would single out a number for the new directions they have opened up and for the serious exploration of new themes. One of the first was The Computerization of Society by Simon Nora and Hilary Mine, which was a report to the President of France in 1978 on how the nation should respond to the role of computers in society. It presents a model of how a serious government responds to a technological issue, and the report was one of the first to propose an information highway to tie together computers and telecommunications. One result was the creation of the Minitel program, whereby every subscriber to the telephone network was a given a computer terminal (originally to replace the printed directory of telephone numbers) and could quickly find a variety of information services such as airline schedules, cinema times, and health services.10

  Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998) breaks new ground in exploring the consequences for the character of individuals, their sense of personhood and integrity, in the world of corporate re-engineering, re-organized work teams, and constant adaptiveness. Sennett takes as the salient contrast the description of industrial work in my 1956 monograph, Work and Its Discontents. In describing the highly coordinated system of functional rationality, I identified three principles, “the logic of size, the logic of ‘metric time,’ and die logic of hierarchy.” Size meant concentrating production in large plants to achieve economies of scale. Hierarchy was the system of drawing the “brainwork” from the shop floor to planning and scheduling departments. “Metric time,” the invention of Frederick Winslow Taylor, was the minute engineering of work and payment on the basis of fractions of hours worked.11 All three “logics” have been discarded or displaced by die new principles of organization. The outcome may be a more dynamic economy, but as Sennett points out, there has also been a loss of anchorage and moral identity as individuals find themselves endlessly shifted about in re-engineered corporations.

  The books of Charles Sabel and Michael Piore are benchmark works in our understanding of the historical settings of industrial society and the breakdown of the older system of production. In his Work and Politics, Sabel brilliantly details the way mass production developed, the system he calls Fordism—a term that has passed into the vocabulary of leftist critics of society—and shows how the demand for standard products, and investment in product-specific machines, have been breaking down with both the differentiation of tastes and the flexible specialization of production. The later and more ambitious book of Piore and Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide, argues that we may be witnessing “a new industrial order: both with the advances in microelectronics and computers but more, with the development of regional economies such as the Veneto in Italy or Baden-Württemberg in Germany,” where “islands of ‘postindustrial society” spawn small- and medium-sized enterprises that build markets in specialized or customized products using flexibly adaptive and quickly responsive production systems.12

  For Saskia Sassen, a social geographer now at the University of Chicago, the growth of the producer services sector is the transforming feature of global cities in the post-industrial economy. Producer services—business, financial, technical, and professional services—have experienced large growth as a result of huge expansions in trade and banking and investment and the rise of post-industrial employment, which in turn are a consequence of computers and telecommunications. As Sassen points out, “Both neo-classical and Keynesian economics long ignored any distinction between the production of goods and that of services, let alone among the service industries.” Yet the major changes in urban centers—and here she takes New York, London, and Tokyo as her prime examples—are due to the expansion of producer services.13

  Manuel Castells’s three-volume The Information Age—Economy, Society, and Culture is the most ambitious effort to redraw the map of society.14 While making obeisance to the early work of myself and Alain Touraine, Castells says that die appropriate distinction is not between an industrial and post-industrial economy but between the two forms of knowledge base in agrarian, industrial, and service production. He points out that the early dieories of post-industrialism (here he singles out me, not Touraine) were based on the productivity studies of Solow and Kendrick, whose data derived from the first half of the twentieth century, but he proposes to “shift the analytical emphasis from postindustrialism to informationalism.” By the latter he means “the current revolution [in] the technologies of information
, processing and communication.” For Castells, it is not “the centrality of knowledge and information” but the “application of such knowledge and information to knowledge-generation and information-processing/communication devices, in a cumulative feedback between innovation and the uses of innovation.”15

  My difference with Castells arises from his conflation, I would argue, of knowledge and information as a single term or process and from his failure to distinguish among invention, innovation, and diffusion. I do not think that there has been a “knowledge revolution” or a “knowledge explosion.” We can put aside the spurious relativism of the individuals who vulgarize the work of Tom Kuhn and the post-modern logorrhea of deconstructionism. We do have to meet the serious epistemological challenges of Van Quine and Hilary Putnam on limiting the grounds of certainty in knowledge. But my differences arise from the failure to distinguish information from knowledge and the strange view that there are “technologies of knowledge,” since knowledge, au fond, is a set of judgments, and judgments are assessed not only by empirical evidence but by the purposes of the actions that are being judged. These are all issues that I shall try to deal with in the later pages of this foreword.

  II

  A RUSSIAN ADVENTURE

  The Coming of Post-Industrial Society was also published in England and translated into German, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Dutch. Simultaneous with this new edition there will also be a translation in Russian published jointly by Nauka and Academia Press. And there hangs a curious tale.