by Daniel Bell
In the information society, the major problem is the management of time. Human beings live by a circadian rhythm, and there are only twenty-four hours in a day. Across the globe are time zones that are divided according to the movement of the sun. Most of life, traditionally, was organized around the rhythm of agrarian life; individuals rose with the sun and went to sleep at sunset. The creation of artificial lighting changed our patterns of night and day. Yet information and activities around the globe take place in “real time”—a strange term, as if previously time was unreal. The term simply means that information is transmitted almost instantaneously: When a person in Tokyo speaks on the telephone to a person in Boston, the words are heard at the same time they are spoken. And now we also have “virtual reality,” which means that we eliminate the boundaries of space and can by “simulation devices” feel that we are in another three-dimensional space. We can move about as if we were in the skies or in a cave, as if we were there.
The break-up of space and time, the coordinates we have used to organize reality, is one of the major steps forward into the information society. This step translates into practical problems and products. Twenty or so years ago, if one wanted to see a television program, one had to be there “on time” or miss the program, just as one would miss a plane or train by not arriving on schedule. But with the invention of the VCR one can tape the program and play it on one’s “own” time, just as one can take a music recording and play it when one wants to. Previously, if one wanted to listen to a music recording, one had to put the record or the disk in a large box with speakers and listen at the place of the box. With the invention of die Walkman, due to miniaturization, one can play the music anywhere. Many years ago, if one wanted to withdraw money from a bank, one had to go to the bank at the times when the bank was open. Wth ATM machines, one can withdraw money from an account anywhere a machine is placed and thousands of miles from home, since the relevant information is stored in a central place and the transaction takes place electronically. The newest development in communication between persons is e-mail (electronic mail). The postal system, old and clumsy, involves human labor to collect, transmit, and deliver mail. Fax speeds the process of communication but involves the step of taking the letter and sending it through the fax machine. E-mail through the computer is simple and direct. Thus time and space have been reorganized for the purposes of control by the individual.
Yet all of these innovations take a toll. As I pointed out twenty-five years ago (see the coda, section four), in calculating the relative costs and gains from different “savings of time” these choices rein-troduce utility analysis by the back door. Man, in his calculations of leisure, becomes homo economicus.
For the knowledge class, particularly managers, the decisions one encounters involve greater complexity of tasks and, often, the need to be available at all times. As Stephen Roach has put it, “One is never offline” as one moves from office to airport lounge to hotel or to home, hooked up by pagers or by cellular phones.45 With “the death of distance” and information persistently crossing all borders twenty-four hours a day, managers and financial traders are always “on call” and have to make rapid calculations in response to political events, exchange rates, stock and bond prices, as well as deal with the multifarious problems that arise from the complexity of the decisions they encounter. This situation becomes, as Alfred North Whitehead once said, an instant of time without duration. Or, as Staffan Burenstam Linder is quoted in these pages, “time may become the scarcest commodity of all.”
THE DILEMMA OF SCALE
The problem is how new social structures will be created in response to the different values of societies, to the new technological instruments of a post-industrial world. There is one crucial variable that must be taken into account—the change in scale.
It is a cliche of the time that ours is an era of acceleration in the pace of change. I confess that I do not understand what this means. If we seek to use this concept analytically, we find a lack of boundary and meaning. If one speaks of a pace, or of acceleration in pace, the words imply a metric—a unit of measurement. But what of change, what is being measured? To speak of “change” in itself is meaningless, for the question remains: Change of what? To say that “everything” changes is hardly illuminating.
However, one can gain a better perspective by thinking of the concept of scale. A change in scale is a change of form. Metaphorically, this proposition goes back to Galileo’s square-cube law: If you double the size of an object, you triple its volume. If you double the numbers in a social institution, you change it in qualitative ways. A university with fifty thousand students may still have the same name it had thirty years before with five thousand students, but the increase in numbers necessitates a change in the institutional structure.
The revolutions in communication are changing the scale of human activities. Given the nature of “real time” communication, we are for the first time forging an interdependent global economy with more and more characteristics of an unstable system in which changes in the magnitudes of some variables, or shocks and disturbances in some of the units, have immediate repercussions in all the others.
The management of scale has been one of the oldest problems in social institutions, whether the church, the army, or economic enterprise, let alone the political order. Societies have tended to function reasonably well when there is a congruence of scale among economic activities, social organization, and political and administrative control units. But increasingly what is happening is a mismatch of scale. As I stated in an essay many years ago, the national state has become too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems.46 The national state, with its political policies, is increasingly ineffective in dealing with the tidal waves of the international economy (coordination through economic summitry is only a charade) and too big, when political decisions are concentrated in a bureaucratic center, for the diversity and initiative of the varied local and regional units under its control. To that extent, if there is a single overriding sociological problem in the post-industrial society—particularly in the management of transition—it is the management of scale.
A Conclusion
Throughout this foreword, as in this book, I write about post-industrial society. Yet the term is a misnomer if one thinks of a society in terms of the total social structure. One is caught by the adjective form, as in capitalist society, or industrial society, or modern society, which seem to imply that we can characterize a society by a single ramrod that holds together all sectors in the way that a Marxian notion of the mode of production or Pitirim Sorokin’s ideas of sensate and ideational cultures imply a unified entity. To enlarge on what I said earlier, I think of society as comprising three different realms that hang together over time in different ways and that move in different historical rhythms. These realms are the techno-economic system, the political order, and the cultural sphere.
The techno-economic realm is, more or less, a system because its component variables are so interconnected and interrelated (in production and consumption and investment) that changes in the nature and magnitude of any of these variables have a determinate effect on the other related variables. In an economy, there is a clear principle of linear change, that of substitution: If some other method of production is better and more efficient, then, subject to cost, it replaces the previous one. The key terms are “maximization” and “optimization,” the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends in the quest for greater productivity.
The political order is not a system. It is a set of laws and procedures, formalized in a constitution, written or unwritten (as in Great Britain or Israel), or, in a theocratic state, religious or ideological, by scripture or doctrine, tradition and rituals. The political order is ruled either by coercion or consent—the coercion by the military or a party, the consent by the willing compliance by the citizenry. These rules prescribe the methods for meting out justice and maintainin
g security and determine the modes of access to place, privilege, and power in the society. These rules gain legitimacy to the extent to which they are in accord with the values and mores of the populace. There are no linear changes in this order, but alterations of classes or holders of power, or changes in normative ideas and ideologies as reflections of changes in values and the legitimacy of the rules.
The cultural sphere is the realm of meanings and expressive imagination—meanings as codified by religious or philosophical doctrine; expressive imagination as in the arts. There are several kinds of changes in cultural expression:
• Changes in tradition, which guards the portals of change and determines what to admit or reject where tradition is undergirded by authority.
• Changes of immanence, which is the logical unfolding of form, as in the sonata form in music or perspective and illusion in painting.
• Changes that lead to experimentation, which often arise when the older forms are exhausted, for example, serial music and twelve-tone scales, and the closing of the “shutters” of interior distance in painting leading to abstract expressionism in painting.
• Changes that lead to syncretism, which is the wide borrowing and jumbling of styles and artifacts, as in so much of popular art, or Picasso’s adaptation of African forms.
But since culture is primarily the realm of meanings, one finds two modes. There is syncretism, such as the mixture of religions. (The Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris had counterparts in the Phoenician gods Ishtar and Astarte, the great sibyls appeared in various cultures of the ancient world, and both Mithraism and Manicheanism were practiced in the Roman Empire.)
But of greater significance is the persistence of the great historic religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—over millennia. Political empires have crumbled, and economic systems have disappeared; yet the great historic religions are still recognizable at their core. We still recognize the dharma of Hinduism and of Buddhism, the monotheism of Judaism, the Eucharist in Catholicism, and the Koran in Islam. There is a transcendental power to those beliefs and doctrines that is the source of their persistence.
If we see different principles operating over long periods of time in the realms of society, how can we think of history as marked off by unified periods, each one qualitatively different from another, as in the Hegelian sense of a Geist unique to its time or a Marxian scheme of different modes of production—slave, feudal, and capitalist—defining the character of social formations? (And in that respect, what meaning is there to the simplistic phrase “the end of History”?)
The post-industrial society deals with fundamental changes in the techno-economic sphere and has its greatest impact in the areas of education and work and occupations that are the centers of this sphere. And since the techno-economic changes pose “control” problems for the political order, we find that the older social structures are cracking because political scales of sovereignty and authority do not match the economic scales. In many areas we have more and more economic integration and political fragmentation.
Yet there is also the fact that as against previous technological developments, post-industrial society results from the codification of theoretical knowledge; thus science is a special feature of its character. Historically, science has been a force for freedom and openness, since its discoveries and theories of nature are rooted in verification of observations. Yet as my discussion (in the Coda, Section 2) points out, the role of science, like that of many institutions in society, is threatened by bureaucratization or subordination to political or corporate ends. This is a recurrent problem of intellectual and cultural life throughout history.
Yet over time, the force of liberty and free inquiry break through. The “subversive” influence of knowledge is illustrated most recently by the views of Fang Lizhi, the Chinese astrophysicist who was Vice-President of the Chinese University of Science and technology and who became the spokesman for all Chinese intellectuals. Like Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union, Fang Lizhi raised the banner of science as the necessary condition for the future of freedom in China. Influenced to some extent by my writing (which had been published in samizdat in China), Fang argued that knowledge rather than labor or other material means of production was the foundation of future economic development and that “intellectuals who own and create information and knowledge are the most dynamic component of the productive forces.”47
Like many advances in human history, post-industrial developments promise men and women greater control of their social destinies. But this is only possible under conditions of intellectual freedom and open political institutions, the freedom to pursue truth against those who wish to restrict it. This is the alpha and omega of the alphabet of knowledge.
TABLE 1
The Post-Industrial Society: A Comparative Scheme
FOREWORD: 1976
The phrase “post-industrial society” has passed quickly into the sociological literature—whether for better or worse remains to be seen. In one sense, the reception was logical and understandable. Once it was clear that countries with diverse social systems could be defined commonly as “industrial societies,” it was inevitable that societies which were primarily extractive rather than fabricating would be classified as “pre-industrial,” and, as significant changes in the character of technology took place, one could think about “post-industrial” societies as well. Given, too, the vogue of “future schlock,” in which breathless prose is mistaken for the pace of change, a hypothesis about the lineaments of a new society is bound to provoke interest. If I have been a beneficiary of fashion, I regret it.
As I indicate in the book, the idea of a post-industrial society is not a point-in-time prediction of the future but a speculative construct, an as if based on emergent features, against which the sociological reality could be measured decades hence, so that, in comparing the two, one might seek to determine the operative factors in effecting societal change. Equally, I rejected the temptation to label these emergent features as the “service society” or the “information society” or the “knowledge society,” even though all these elements are present, since such terms are only partial, or they seek to catch a fashionable wind and twist it for modish purposes.1
I employed the term “post-industrial” for two reasons. First, to emphasize the interstitial and transitory nature of these changes. And second, to underline a major axial principle, that of an intellectual technology. But such emphasis does not mean that technology is the primary determinant of all other societal changes. No conceptual scheme ever exhausts a social reality. Each conceptual scheme is a prism which selects some features, rather than others, in order to highlight historical change or, more specifically, to answer certain questions.
One can see this by relating the concept of post-industrial society to that of capitalism. Some critics have argued that post-industrial society will not “succeed” capitalism. But this sets up a false confrontation between two different conceptual schemata organized along two different axes. The post-industrial schema refers to the socio-technical dimension of a society, capitalism to the socio-economic dimension.
The confusion between the two arose in the first place because Marx thought that the mode of production (the sub-structure of a society) determines and encompasses all other dimensions of a society. Since capitalism is the prevailing mode of production in Western society, Marxists sought to use that concept to explain all realms of social conduct, from economics through politics to culture. And since Marx felt that industrialization as the advanced feature of capitalist production would spread throughout the world, there would be, ultimately, global uniformity in the mode of production, and a uniformity in the conditions of life. National differences would disappear, and in the end only the two classes, capitalists and proletariat, would be left in stark, final confrontation.
I think this is demonstrably not so. Societies are not unified entities. The nature of the polity—whether a natio
n is democratic or not— rests not on the economic “foundation” but on historic traditions, on value systems, and on the way in which power is concentrated or dispersed throughout the society. Democracy cannot be easily “discarded,” even when it begins to hobble the economic power of capitalists.2 Equally, contemporary Western culture is not the “bourgeois” culture of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, but a modernism, hostile to the economizing mode, that has been absorbed by a “cultural mass” and transformed into a materialistic hedonism which is promoted, paradoxically, by capitalism itself.
For Marx, the mode of production united social relations and forces of production under a single historical rubric. The social relations were primarily property relations; the forces of production, technological. Yet the same forces of production (i.e., technology)
exist within a wide variety of different systems of social relations. One cannot say that the technology (or chemistry or physics) of the Soviet Union is different from the technology (or chemistry or physics) of the capitalist world.
Rather than assume a single linkage between the social relations and the forces of production, if we uncouple the two dimensions, we can get different “answers” to the question of the relation between different social systems. Thus, if one asks: Is there a “convergence” between the Soviet Union and the United States? the answer would depend on the axis specified. This can be indicated, graphically, by Figure 1.