by Daniel Bell
FIGURE 1
Thus, if one divides the countries by the horizontal axis of technology, both the United States and the U.S.S.R., are industrial societies, whereas Indonesia and China are not. Yet if one divides the countries along the vertical axis of property relations, there is a divergence, in that the United States and Indonesia are capitalist while the Soviet Union and China are both “socialist” or state collectivist.
(Yet that congruence does not explain why there is such fierce rivalry and tension between the two communist countries.)
And if we uncouple the concepts, we can also specify different schemata of social development: feudal, capitalist, and socialist; or pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial; or, within the Weberian framework of political authority, that of patriarchical, patrimonial, and legal-rational bureaucracy—so long as one does not claim that the particular conceptual scheme is exhaustive, and subsumes all others. Within a given historical period, it may well be that a specific axial principle is so important that it becomes determinative of most other social relations. I think it is quite evident that in the nineteenth century the capitalist mode of social relations (i.e., private property, commodity production, etc.) become the prevailing ethos and substantially shaped much of character and culture. But that is different from the claim that the mode of production always determines the “superstructure” of a society.
The mode of production does not unify a society. National differences have not disappeared. There are no unilineal sequences of societal change, no “laws of social development.” The most grievous mistake in the social sciences is to read the character of a society through a single overriding concept, whether it be capitalism or totalitarianism, and to mislead one as to the complex (overlapping and even contradictory) features of any modern society, or to assume that there are “laws of social development” in which one social system succeeds another by some inexorable necessity. Any society, since it mingles different kinds of economic, technological, political, and cultural systems (some features of which are common to all, some of which are historical and idiosyncratic), has to be analyzed from different vantage points, depending on the question one has in mind. My focus has been on the influence of technology, not as an autonomous factor but as an analytical element, in order to see what social changes come in the wake of new technologies, and what problems the society, and its political system, must then attempt to solve.
The concept “post-industrial” is counterposed to that of “pre-industrial” and “industrial.” A pre-industrial sector is primarily extractive, its economy based on agriculture, mining, fishing, timber, and other resources such as natural gas or oil. An industrial sector is primarily fabricating, using energy and machine technology, for the manufacture of goods. A post-industrial sector is one of processing in which telecommunications and computers are strategic for the exchange of information and knowledge.
In recent years, the world has become dramatically aware of the strategic role of energy and natural resources as limiting factors of industrial growth, and the question is raised whether these limitations do not modify the onset of a post-industrial sector.
To this, there is an empirical and a theoretical answer. As a practical fact, the introduction of post-industrial elements, which are capital intensive, does depend—in the timing, rate of diffusion, and extensivity of use—on the productivity of the other sectors. The development of an industrial sector depends in considerable measure on the economic surplus of an agrarian sector; yet once industrialization is under way, the productivity of the agrarian sector itself is increased through the use of fertilizer and other petro-chemical products. Similarly, the introduction of new information and processing devices may be delayed by rising costs in the industrial sector or lagging productivity, but once introduced they may be the very means of raising that productivity.
Theoretically, one can say that post-industrial society is, in principle, different from the other two. As a theoretical principle, the idea of industrialism did not derive from an agrarian mode. And similarly, the strategic role of theoretical knowledge as the new basis of technological innovation, or the role of information in re-creating social processes, does not derive from the role of energy in creating a manufacturing or fabricating society. In short, these are, analytically, independent principles.
Broadly speaking, if industrial society is based on machine technology, post-industrial society is shaped by an intellectual technology. And if capital and labor are the major structural features of industrial society, information and knowledge are those of the post-industrial society.3 For this reason, the social organization of a post-industrial sector is vastly different from an industrial sector, and one can see this by contrasting the economic features of the two.
Industrial commodities are produced in discrete, identifiable units, exchanged and sold, consumed and used up, as are a loaf of bread or an automobile. One buys the products from a seller and takes physical possession of it. The exchange is governed by specific legal rules of contract. But information and knowledge are not consumed or “used up.” Knowledge is a social product and the question of its costs, price, or value is vastly different from that of industrial items.
In the manufacture of industrial goods, one can set up a “production function,” (i.e., the relative proportions of capital and labor to be employed) and determine the appropriate mix, at the relative costs, of each factor. If capital is embodied labor, one can talk of a labor theory of value.
But a post-industrial society is characterized not by a labor theory but by a knowledge theory of value.4 It is the codification of knowledge that becomes directive of innovation. Yet knowledge, even when it is sold, remains also with the producer. It is a “collective good” in that, once it has been created, it is by its character available to all, and thus there is little incentive for any single person or enterprise to pay for the production of such knowledge unless they can obtain a proprietary advantage, such as a patent or a copyright. But, increasingly, patents no longer guarantee exclusiveness, and many firms lose out by spending money on research only to find that a competitor can quickly modify the product and circumvent the patent; similarly, the question of copyright becomes increasingly difficult to police when individuals or libraries can Xerox whatever pages they need from technical journals or books, or individuals and schools can tape music off the air or record a television performance on video disks.
If there is less and less incentive for individual persons or private enterprises to produce knowledge without particular gain, then the need and effort falls increasingly on some social unit, be it university or government, to underwrite the costs. And since there is no ready market test (how does one estimate the value of “basic research?”) there is a challenge to economic theory to design a socially optimal policy of investment in knowledge (e.g., how much money should be spent for basic research; what allocations should be made for education, and for what fields; in what areas do we obtain the “better returns” in health; and so on), and how to “price” information and knowledge to users.5
In a narrower, technical sense, the major problem for the post-industrial society will be the development of an appropriate “infrastructure” for the developing compunications networks (the phrase is Anthony Oettinger’s) of digital information technologies that will tie the post-industrial society together. The first infra-structure in society is transportation—roads, canals, rail, air—for the movement of people and goods. The second infra-structure has been the energy utilities—oil pipeline, gas, electricity—for the transmission of power. The third infra-structure has been telecommunications, principally the voice telephone, radio, and television. But now with the explosive growth of computers and terminals for data (the number of data terminals in use in the United States went from 185,000 in 1970 to 800,000 in 1976) and the rapid decrease in the costs of computation and information storage, the question of hitching together the varied ways information is transmitted in the co
untry becomes a major issue of economic and social policy.
The “economics of information” is not the same character as the “economics of goods,” and the social relations created by the new networks of information (from an interactive research group communicating through computer terminals to the large cultural homogenization created by national television) are not the older social patterns—or work relations—of industrial society.6 We have here—if this kind of society develops—the foundations of a vastly different kind of social structure than we have previously known.
The post-industrial society, as I have implied, does not displace the industrial society, just as an industrial society has not done away with the agrarian sectors of the economy. Like palimpsests, the new developments overlie the previous layers, erasing some features and thickening the texture of society as a whole. In orienting a reader to the detailed arguments in this book, therefore, it might be useful to highlight some of the new dimensions of post-industrial society.
1. The centrality of theoretical knowledge. Every society has always existed on the basis of knowledge, but only now has there been a change whereby the codification of theoretical knowledge and materials science becomes the basis of innovations in technology. One sees this primarily in the new science-based industries—computers, electronics, optics, polymers—that mark the last third of the century.
2. The creation of a new intellectual technology. Through new mathematical and economic techniques—based on the computer linear programming, Markov chains, stochastic processes and the like—we can utilize modeling, simulation and other tools of system analysis and decision theory in order to chart more efficient, “rational” solutions to economic and engineering, if not social, problems.
3. The spread of a knowledge class. The fastest growing group in society is the technical and professional class. In the United States this group, together with managers, made up 25 percent of a labor force of eight million persons in 1975. By the year 2000, the technical and professional class will be the largest single group in the society.
4. The change from goods to services. In the United States today more than 65 out of every 100 persons are engaged in services. By 1980, the figure will be about 70 in every 100. A large service sector exists in every society. In a pre-industrial society this is mainly a household and domestic class. (In England, it was the single largest class in the society until about 1870.) In an industrial society, the services are transportation utilities, and finance, which are auxiliary to the production of goods, and personal service (beauticians, restaurant employees, and so forth). But in a post-industrial society, the new services are primarily human services (principally in health, education and social services) and professional and technical services (e.g., research, evaluation, computers, and systems analysis). The expansion of these services becomes a constraint on economic growth and a source of persistent inflation.
5. A change in the character of work. In a pre-industrial world, life is a game against nature in which men wrest their living from the soil, the waters, or the forests, working usually in small groups, subject to the vicissitudes of nature. In an industrial society, work is a game against fabricated nature, in which men become dwarfed by machines as they turn out goods and things. But in a post-industrial world, work is primarily a “game between persons” (between bureaucrat and client, doctor and patient, teacher and student, or within research groups, office groups, service groups). Thus in the experience of work and the daily routine, nature is excluded, artifacts are excluded, and persons have to learn how to live with one another. In the history of human society, this is a completely new and unparalleled state of affairs.
6. The role of women. Work in the industrial sector (e.g., the factory) has largely been men’s work, from which women have been usually excluded. Work in the post-industrial sector (e.g., human services) provides expanded employment opportunities for women. For the first time, one can say that women have a secure base for economic independence. One sees this in the steadily rising curve of women’s participation in the labor force, in the number of families (now 60 percent of the total) that have more than one regular wage earner, and in the rising incidence of divorce as women increasingly feel less dependent, economically, on men.
7. Science as the imago. The scientific community, going back to the seventeenth century, has been a unique institution in human society. It has been charismatic, in that it has been revolutionary in its quest for truth and open in its methods and procedures; it derives its legitimacy from the credo that knowledge itself, not any specific instrumental ends, is the goal of science. Unlike other charismatic communities (principally religious groups and messianic political movements), it has not “routinized” its creeds and enforced official dogmas. Yet until recently, science did not have to deal with the bureaucratization of research, the subordination of its inquiries to state-directed goals, and the “test” of its results on the basis of some instrumental payoff. Now science has become inextricably intertwined not only with technology but with the military and with social technologies and societal needs. In all this—a central feature of the post-industrial society—the character of the new scientific institutions—will be crucial for the future of free ifquiry and knowledge.
8. Situses as political units. Most of sociologicad analysis has focused its attention on classes or strata, horizontal units of society that exist in superior-subordinate relation to each other. Yet for the post-industrial sectors, it may well be that situses (from the Latin situ, location), a set of vertical orders, will be the more important loci of political attachment. On pp. 374-375 I sketch the possible situses of the post-industrial order. There are four functional situses—scientific, technological (i.e., applied skills: engineering, economics, medicine), administrative and cultural—and five institutional situses—economic enterprises, government bureaus, universities and research complexes, social complexes (e.g., hospitals, social-service centers), and the military. My argument is that the major interest conflicts will be between the situs groups, and that the attachments to these situses might be sufficiently strong to prevent the organization of the new professional groups into a coherent class in society.7
9. Meritocracy. A post-industrial society, being primarily a technical society, awards place less on the basis of inheritance or property (though these can command wealth or cultural advantage) than on education and skill. Inevitably the question of a meritocracy becomes a crucial normative question. In this book I attempt to define the character of meritocracy and defend the idea of a “just meritocracy,” or of place based on achievement, through the respect of peers.
10. The end of scarcity? Most socialist and utopian theories of the nineteenth century ascribed almost all the ills of society to the scarcity of goods and the competition of men for these scarce goods. In fact, one of the most common definitions of economics characterized it as the art of efficient allocation of scarce goods among competing ends. Marx and other socialists argued that abundance was the precondition for socialism and claimed, in fact, that under socialism there would be no need to adopt normative rules of just distribution, since there would be enough for everyone’s needs. In that sense, the definition of communism was the abolition of economics, or the “material embodiment” of philosophy. Yet it is quite clear that scarcity will always be with us. I mean not just the question of scarce resources (for this is still a moot point) but that a post-industrial society, by its nature, brings new scarcities which nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers had never thought of. The socialists and liberals had talked of the scarcities of goods; but in the post-industrial society, as I point out, there will be scarcities of information and of time. And the problems of allocation inevitably remain, in the cruder form, even, of man becoming homo economicus in the disposition of his leisure time.
11. The economics of information. As I pointed out earlier, information is by its nature a collective, not a private, good (i.e., a property). In the marketing of
individual goods, it is clear that a “competitive” strategy between producers is to be preferred lest enterprise become slothful or monopolistic. Yet for the optimal social investment in knowledge, we have to follow a “cooperative” strategy in order to increase the spread and use of knowledge in society. This new problem regarding information poses the most fascinating challenges to economists and decision makers in respect to both theory and policy in the post-industrial society.
Most of the examples in this book are taken from the United States. The question that arises is whether other industrial nations in Western Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union will become post-industrial as well. As I indicated, Marx took England as the chief illustration of his theoretical ideas and assumed, as against the German reader who might shrug off the transformation of England, that capitalism would spread everywhere, because of “natural laws” working themselves out “with iron necessity towards inevitable results.” I do not believe that any social system is subject to such a causal trajectory. Yet the very features of post-industrial society indicate that, as tendencies, they are emergent in all industrial societies, and the extent to which they do appear depends upon a host of economic and political factors that have to do with the balance of world power, the ability of “third world” countries to organize effectively for a political and economic redistribution of wealth, the tensions between the major powers which might erupt into war or not. But it is clear that, as a theoretical construct, the continuing economic growth of all these societies necessarily involves the introduction of post-industrial elements.
The two large dimensions of a post-industrial society, as they are elaborated in this book, are the centrality of theoretical knowledge and the expansion of the service sector as against a manufacturing economy. The first means an increasing dependence on science as the means of innovating and organizing technological change. Most of the industrial societies are highly sensitive to the need for access to scientific knowledge, the organization of research, and the increasing importance of information as the strategic resource in the society. And to that extent a shift in the sociological weight of the sectors within the advanced societies, and the increasing role of science-based industries, are a crescive fact.8