The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  The fabled library of the past was the Library of Alexandria, founded at the behest of Alexander the Great. It was a museum, a school, and the center of scholarly research where the largest collection of Greek books were gathered and classified. To that library is owed not only the preservation of ancient texts but much of the learning required for their understanding. The library continued to exist under Roman rule until the third century of the Christian era. Will a modern Library of Alexandria now be assembled and available on any individual’s desktop? Enthusiasts already hail that possibility. Yet it is not entirely clear that such a “universal library” is possible in the near future. There are enormous problems to solve before we can efficiently search all the available text documents, let alone non-text information such as mathematical formulas and music and art, where there are large problems of creating indexes (how does one index a painting or a movie?). Developing abstracting programs that can summarize results in a manageable form is another awesome task. Yet various efforts are under way, the most important being the U.S. Digital Libraries Initiative, which has been trying to meld all the specialized libraries (from astronomy to zoology) into a digitized form and make these available to users.

  Equally problematic are the claims that the Internet will become an electronic marketplace creating a “virtual retailing” experience for the consumer. Along with churches and museums, Americans like shopping malls: They are a family experience, and often (as when browsing in a library), one is tempted by new and exotic products. Touching and feeling are truly “virtual,” and vicarious experience cannot replace them. But it is true that when one knows exactly what one wants or needs or when convenience becomes a primary consideration, the electronic marketplace has its advantages. In financial services, trades placed over the Internet accounted for more than 20 percent of all individual-investor stock transactions in 1998. Travel reservations increasingly are made on-line, especially when airlines use the “Dutch auction,” selling seats far in advance at lower rates and increasing the rates as the time comes closer to the actual flight date. Purchases of books and records are common now online, especially when one is not near a book or record store or wants hard-to-find books and records. Looking for houses becomes more convenient when one can “shop” the inventory of a realtor before deciding on a closer look. Electronic banking becomes more of a “virtual” reality, especially when one can bank twenty-four hours a day rather than the archaic banking hours of 9 A.M. to 3 P.M. Ticket Master, the largest seller of theater and show tickets, has found a ready market, since buyers find a computer service that automatically finds the best seats available more convenient than ordering by telephone. Yet the relative failure of many home-shopping channels on television indicates that the electronic marketplace on the Internet may itself become a segmented service rather than the “virtual retailing” that its enthusiasts proclaim.31

  VII

  WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?

  Perhaps the most common word in all the discussions about data, information, and knowledge is explosion. Yet the word has little meaning because there is usually no measure other than “more” to indicate the quantity—let alone the quality—of the information that is being produced. Equally, there is confusion because terms become conflated: Data become interchangeable with information, and information becomes equated with knowledge. The dictionaries are of little help and, worse, sometimes multiply die confusion. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, perhaps the most widely used popular source, defines data as “factual information (as measurements or statistics) used as a basis for reasoning, discussion or calculation.” Information is defined as “the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence.” And knowledge is defined as “the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association.” This situation is hopeless.

  We can, for a start, identify data as sequences of events or statistics in an ordered fashion, such as reports of consumer prices or gross national product or the structure of DNA or the combinations in the periodic table of chemistry. Information has meaning—news, events, and data—when we can establish a context that shows relationships among these items and presents them as organized topics. And knowledge? But there, before we can attempt a definition, we have to try to make relevant distinctions about the kinds of beliefs people have and the validity of those beliefs.

  Willard Van Orman Quine, perhaps die outstanding logician and analytical philosopher in the United States today, has tried to establish die conditions of knowing. In his philosophical dictionary Quiddities, Quine asks: “What counts as knowing? First, one must believe it. Second, it must be true. Knowledge is true belief.” Yet as he worries the problem, he concludes that something may be believed for the wrong reason. So, knowledge has to be considered as “justified true belief.” Yet this definition may still not suffice, for the grounds may not be reasonable. And besides, there is a vagueness of boundary: “Knowledge connotes certainty; what shall we count as certain?”

  So, at the end, Quine says, “I think that for scientific or philosophical purposes, the best we can do is to give up die notion of knowledge as a bad job and make do rather with its separate ingredients.” The term retains a rough utility, like the word “big” in the vernacular, but it does not meet the standards of “coherence and precision.”32

  And yet there may be another way to set forth some utilities. Quine began with the standpoint of belief, that of the knower and his understandings, but classical philosophy made the distinction between the knower and the known and rejected the standpoint of the knower. Knowers see things differently and thus are wayward or contingent in their knowing. But what is known? For Plato what is known are the qualities or properties of an object, such as “whiteness.” But more important, what are known are the forms of objects, the essence that is the object’s ideal or perfected quality. Any knowledge, by the knower, is inherently imperfect, but one can approach the true by crossing “the divided line” from the visible to the intelligible and from opinion to knowledge. Aristode reformulated this process as the “realization of form.” Every object has a natural end and seeks to realize this unless deflected by accident, just as the acorn grows into the oak tree. Thus out of inchoate matter (hyle) we have an arche, or beginning, and a telos, or an end; and the entelechy, or inner design, is our knowledge of that object. Thus in poetry or painting or music, we have genres and forms, and the logical unfolding of variations within the genres or forms is the determinate knowledge we have in a work of art.

  More broadly, knowledge derives from verified theory. We know, for example, of a civilization that for a thousand years kept astronomical records yet never generalized those empirical data into a theory of earthly or solar orbital movements. They were the Babylonians. But the Greeks invented concepts, which allowed them to group data into connected experience (Aristotle’s term for knowledge) and create theory. Thus Euclid could take the relation of stones in a field, plot their angles, and create geometry, whose relationships transcend any particular association. Theory allows one to take a finding and generalize from any one context to another context. From verified theory—Newton’s laws of motion—we can accept the finding in a new context as knowledge.33

  But what of the knower? There is a distinction, as Quine points out, following Gilbert Ryle, between knowing how and knowing that. Knowing how is a practical matter, a skill that does not derive from theory. No one learns how to ride a bicycle from the theory of aerodynamics. Knowing that something is so, however, comes from fitting the information into context and theory. Equally, there is a distinction between knowing about something and knowing of something. Information is knowing about news, events, and happenings. Knowing of the significance of events comes from the knowledge verified by context or theory.34

  These distinctions may allow us to mark off data from information and information from knowledge. A simple example may be the index of a book—this or any other. Data are like the name index; they
are organized in a sequential form, usually in a convenient, alphabetized way. Information is like the subject index, which is a grouping of headings that the author puts together to guide the reader to topics explored in the book. But a serious reader may often construct his or her own analytical index for purposes different than the author’s. This task involves judgments, and judgments are derived from the knowledge of the “that it is so,” or from a theory of the subject.

  In that respect, one can say, with John Dewey (in his Art As Experience), that judgment arises from the self-conscious use of the prefix re: the desire to re-order, to re-arrange, to re-design what one knows and thus create new angles of vision or new knowledge for scientific or aesthetic purposes. In that way, perhaps, the knower and the known are joined.

  VIII

  FRAMEWORKS OF SOCIAL CHANGE

  The ramifications of post-industrial society are large. Indeed, as these structural changes are less than fifty years old, as contrasted to the changes that began with “the industrial revolution” more than two hundred years ago, we can only now begin to see the large variety of social changes that are beginning to take hold in Western society. Thus, in this section I wish to note some of these themes, even if only in a brief discussion.

  THE DEATH OF CLASS

  For the past hundred years or more, the theme of class has been the axis of social cleavages in Western societies and the chief concern of sociological theory. The preoccupation derived, in the first instance, from the influence of Marxism and Marx’s prediction of the demise of capitalism as the working class grew ever stronger and as capitalist crises unfolded. There was also the fact of stratification of the differences in power and role, even if only by age and gender, that were institutionally embedded in all societies. The appeal of Marxism was the promise of a classless society and the end of all stratification with the victory of communism.

  Stratification in feudal society—in both Europe and Japan—was based on landed wealth and military power, with obligatory service to the lord. Authority was defined by rank. Feudalism was a rigid social structure with little mobility, though wealth could be gained outside the system by merchants and traders who lived in cities initially given charters by a king. Capitalist society was different. It grew primarily from those classes outside the feudal system on the basis of private property embedded in manufacture or enterprise. It was relatively open and somewhat fluid, but as a social system, it was rooted in family. Family capitalism, a system that Marx strangely never considered, provided the reproduction of the system through inheritance. In Europe and the United States, most firms for several generations were family firms. (In the United States, companies with names such as Ford, Swift, Armor, and Grace, and many industries such as textiles, brewing, and newspapers were family-dominated enterprises.)35

  Post-industrial society makes higher education—human capital—the foundation for position and privilege in the society. It is true that family wealth may provide a cultural advantage in preparing one’s children for schooling and even some entry into elite schools, but achievement in school and competing on the job, become the necessary conditions for professional position. Within the family firm inheritance gives way, increasingly, to a managerial class, and even when, on occasion, managers become owners through a leveraged buyout, they can pass on wealth but not executive positions to their sons and daughters. And as ownership of companies becomes disbursed through mutual funds and pension plans, we approach the anomaly of a capitalist system without capitalists. It remains as an economic system but is less of a social system.

  What, then, of class? In the sociological literature, there have been three schemes of class. One centers on different occupations and the aggregation of numbers. The second derives from Marxism and the structural relations within the enterprise, with property or authority as the basis of class. The third is “social class,” defined either by prestige or lifestyle.

  In the occupational structure, as we see in these pages, the industrial working class has been shrinking steadily. In part this has been due to the reduced or changed role of manufacturing and, with that, the gradual elimination of the semi-skilled worker as automated processes take over. The trade union movement, the heart of the organized labor force, has gone from 30 percent of a 70 million labor force in i960 to about 15 percent of a 135 million labor force in 1996. And about 40 percent of union membership is in die public sector.

  If one turns to education, the United States has gone from an elite to a class and now to a mass system of higher education. In 1940, there were about 30 million individuals in school, but fewer than 1.5 million persons were enrolled in higher education. In 1996, of about 66 million in school, almost 15 million were in colleges and universities. By 1996, more than 80 percent of individuals 25 years of age and older had completed high school, while almost 24 percent had completed four years of college or more.

  This picture is reflected in the changing weights of the occupational structure of the United States. Managers and professionals in the United States number (in 1996) more than 36 million persons out of a total of 126.7 million, or nearly 30 percent of the labor force. Half of these are executives and administrators; an equal number are professionals—engineers, computer scientists, health professionals, college teachers, lawyers, and the like.36

  Do they constitute a “class”? If one reverts to my definition of a class as having a community of interest and a continuity of succession (in their children), occupation is not a source of cohesion. Surely, what unites them and what divides them is not determined by their occupational position but more often may be related to religion, cultural interests, family upbringing, and the like.

  In the scheme I have proposed in this book, I have proposed a distinction between knowledge workers (in terms of their functions) as “professional estates” (scientific, applied technological, administrative, and cultural) and their “situses,” or employment locations (business firms, governments, universities, and social services) where they are distributed (see coda, section one). A scientist may be employed in a business firm or a university, and his or her sense of what his “interests” are may vary. A knowledge worker’s interests may be determined by his or her “professional” identification or by his or her “situses.” There are no fixed rules of determination.

  The Marxian theory of class was inextricably related to a belief in a series of increasing crises that were endemic to capitalism. Marx had three different theories of crises: one, the idea of under-con-sumption; the second, the differential rates of growth of produced goods and consumer goods leading to excess capacity or over-production; and the third, the most powerful, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Competition for Marx was the fulcrum of the system. As capitalists competed, they sought either to cut wages or increase the working day or, as these became difficult, to substitute machinery for labor. But as labor was the source of surplus value, the shrinkage of that base would force the rate of profit to fall, prompting capitalists to expand so that there would be an increase in the volume of profits.

  In all these instances, crises would create class struggles as workers fought back against increasing exploitation. Marx never could envisage that the government might intervene, as with Keynesian programs, to redress some of the crises in the system. But without the idea of class struggle, the Marxian conception of a cohesive class has little meaning.

  And, increasingly, property relations play less and less of a role in the definition of class. Who “owns” General Motors or AT&T or General Motors or IBM? Legally the shareholders are the property owners, but in seeking a higher return, they move in and out of shareholdings regularly and have no identification with the firm. In a number of instances, especially in companies built through entrepreneurial initiative, as in the computer industry, a Bill Gates at Microsoft or an Andrew Grove at Intel may be die “owner” (though often with minor percentages of the stock); yet when they retire (as did the founders of IBM, Tom Watson and his sons)
, the enterprise passes into the control of professional managers.

  The third conception of “social class” has greater resonance because of the visibility of lifestyles. But this conception too often confuses status and prestige and celebrity with lifestyles. “The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once said. “Yes,” replied Ernest Hemingway, “they have more money.” They now have even more money: The gap between rich and not-rich has been broadening in the United States in recent years; but that gap has widened more because the rich have become richer than because die poor have become poorer (the number of families below the poverty line has decreased somewhat). One does not have to be a Pollyanna to note that 67 percent of American families own their own homes or that 135 million persons own automobiles, and so forth. Social class, in these respects, is an object primarily for market research. But if one thinks of class as a basis for an “action group” or an “interest group,” social class (other than “consumer groups”) has little potential for major political roles.37