by Daniel Bell
With the Richta study, we come full circle. The vision here, out of Marxist theory, is what might be called a post-socialist society. That society is one which is also post-industrial. But such a society merges—in its problems, not necessarily in its outcomes—with the post-capitalist societies in that the new determining feature of social structure (but not necessarily of politics and culture) is the scientific and technological revolution, or what I have called in my writings the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the axial principle of social organization, while the character of the new stratification system will be the division between the scientific and technical classes and those who will stand outside.
The term post is relevant in all this, not because it is a definition of the new social form, but because it signifies a transition. What the new society will be remains to be seen, for the controlling agency is not the technology but the character of the political managers who will have to organize this new strategic resource and use it to buttress their political system.
In all this—if we face a new and puzzling kind of social change —we have to retreat from theory—if by theory one means a model of social structure that specifies the determinate interaction of the crucial variables of a system, establishes empirical regularities that predict future states of relation, and provides an explanatory principle of its history and operation. What we are forced back to is the creation of new paradigms in the sense that Thomas Kuhn has used the term, i.e. conceptual schemes which themselves are neither models nor theories but standpoints from which models can be generated and theories developed.
The Post-Industrial Society: A Conceptual Schema
The concept “post-industrial society” emphasizes the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the axis around which new technology, economic growth and the stratification of society will be organized. Empirically one can try to show that this axial principle is becoming more and more predominant in advanced industrial societies.
This is not to suggest a principle of convergence. The idea of convergence is based on the premise that there is one overriding institution that can define a society. Thus, years ago, Pitirim Sorokin and C. Wright Mills thought that the Soviet Union and the United States were coming to be “alike” because both were becoming centralized, bureaucratic societies mobilized around the single purpose of war. In a different way, Jan Tinbergen and his associates have argued that, because of the nature of economic rationality, both communist and capitalist countries are veering toward a common model of modified planning (direct or indirect) tied to the use of markets. And Marion Levy and, to some extent, Wilbert Moore, have argued that in their central features all industrial societies were becoming “alike” because of the common requirements of factory production, the relation of education to occupation, and the character of technical knowledge.91 But few societies, as distinct historic and political entities, can be defined completely around a single institution as Marx believed, i.e. that one could define a system as capitalist and that all other relations, cultural, religious, political, derived from that foundational base. Societies differ in the way they relate their political systems to social structure and culture. And within the social structure (as in the political order and culture) there are different axes around which institutions are built. And even when different societies may be compared in their economy or social structure along one axis, they may differ markedly along another. Thus, along the axis of property, different societies could be defined as capitalist, but along the axis of, say, political consensus, these societies would differ as democratic and authoritarian.
In a different sense, one can say that the sequences of feudalism, capitalism and socialism, and pre-industrial and post-industrial society both proceed from Marx. Marx defined a mode of production as including both the social relations and the “forces” (i.e., techniques). He called the present mode of production capitalist, but if we restrict the term capitalist to social relations and industrial to techniques, then we can see, analytically, how the different sequences unfold. In this sense there can be socialist post-industrial societies as there could be capitalist, just as both the Soviet Union and the United States, though separated along the axis of property, are both industrial societies.
Further, one has to make a distinction between convergence and internationalization. One may have an internationalization of style, in painting or music or architecture, so that a “modern” artist may paint the same way in France, England, Japan, and Mexico. And there may be an internationalization of scientific knowledge and technological processes, but societies, as specific historical entities, represent distinct institutionalized combinations which are difficult to match directly to each other. On different dimensions (technology, architecture) they may resemble each other, or draw from a common fund of knowledge or style, yet on other dimensions (values, political systems, traditions)—and the ways these become formulated, say, in educational systems—they may differ. If there is a meaning to the idea of convergence it is that societies resemble each other somewhat along the same dimensions, or they may confront a similar core of problems. But this in no way guarantees a common or like response. The response will be relative to the different political and cultural organization of the specific society.
The idea of a post-industrial society, like that of industrial society, or capitalism, has meaning only as a conceptual scheme. It identifies a new axial principle of social organization and defines a common core of problems which societies that become more and more post-industrial have to confront. The idea of a post-industrial society does not rest, as Jean Floud seems to think, on the concept of a social system. I do not believe that societies are organic or so integrated as to be analyzable as a single system. In fact, my major theoretical preoccupation today is the disjunction, in Western society, between the culture and the social structure, the one becoming increasingly anti-institutional and antinomian, the other oriented to functional rationality and meritocracy. The concept of post-industrialism is an effort to identify a change in the social structure. But there is no necessary correlate, as I have argued repeatedly, between the changes in that realm as against changes in the other two analytical dimensions of a society, that of politics and culture.
I do believe that the major orders, or realms, of societies can best be studied by trying to identify axial institutions or principles, which are the major lines around which other institutions are draped, and which pose the major problems of solution for the society. In capitalist society the axial institution has been private property and in the post-industrial society it is the centrality of theoretical knowledge. In Western culture in the last one hundred years the axial thread has been “modernism” with its onslaught on tradition and established institutions. In the Western political systems the axial problem is the relation between the desire for popular participation and bureaucracy.
One of the difficulties for social analysis is the overlapping and conflicting nature of these principles vis-à-vis one another, and within a single system itself. Thus, in the stratification system, which sociologists take as basic for any society, the historic base of power has been property, and the means of access through inheritance. Yet while property remains as an important base, technical skill becomes another, sometimes rival, base with education the means of access to the attainment of technical skill. But equally, a political office becomes a base for power and privilege (particularly for groups such as ethnic groups that find barriers in the other two modes), and political mobilization or cooptation becomes the means of access to political office. It is the contradictory nature of the three modes that makes identification of consistent social groups and political interests so difficult.92 Culture has replaced technology as a source of change in the society, and the tensions between the adversary culture and the eroded Protestant ethic have created a remarkable contradiction in the value system of American society.93
In what way does a post-industrial society differ from previous society
? In an historical sense, Professor Tominaga is right: the post-industrial society is a continuation of trends unfolding out of industrial society, and many of the developments were foreseen long ago. Both St. Simon and Marx, for example, were obsessed with the crucial role of engineers (in the one case) and science (in the other) in transforming society, though neither of them had, or could have, any sense of the change in the fundamental relation of science to economic and technological development, the fact, for instance, that most of the major industries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—steel, telegraph, telephone, electricity, auto, aviation—were developed largely by talented tinkerers who worked independently of the fundamental work in science; while the first modern industry is chemistry, since one has to have a theoretical a priori knowledge of the properties of the macromolecules one is manipulating in order to create new products.
Yet for analytical purposes, one can divide societies into pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial and see them in contrast along many different dimensions. Thus, I have tried to show in the accompanying schematic table how, along different dimensions, the three kinds of societies differ radically. (See Table 1-1, General Schema of Social Change.) These are, of course, ideal-type constructions, yet the purpose of such constructs is to Illuminate essential differences. Thus, the “design” of pre-industrial society is a “game against nature”: its resources are drawn from extractive industries and it is subject to the laws of diminishing returns and low productivity; the “design” of industrial society is a “game against fabricated nature” which is centered on man-machine relationships and uses energy to transform the natural environment into a technical environment; the “design” of a post-industrial society is a “game between persons” in which an “intellectual technology,” based on information, rises alongside of machine technology. Because of these different designs, there are vast differences in the character of economic sector distribution and the slopes of occupations. The methodology of each society differs and, most important, there are distinctly different axial principles around which the institutional and organizational features of the society are draped.
Because of all this, there are crucial differences in the kinds of structural problems that engage each kind of society. In industrial society the chief economic problem has been the problem of capital: how to institutionalize a process of creating sufficient savings and the conversion of these moneys into investment areas; and this has been done through the equity market, investment banks, self-financing, and state taxation. The locus of social relations has been the enterprise or firm and the major social problem that of industrial conflict between employer and worker. To the extent that the investment process has been routinized and the “class conflicts” encapsulated so that the issue of class strife no longer acts to polarize a country around a single issue, those older problems of an industrial society have been muted if not “solved.”
In the post-industrial society, the chief problem is the organization of science, and the primary institution the university or the research institute where such work is carried out. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the strength of nations was their industrial capacity, the chief index of which was steel production. The strength of Germany before the First World War was measured by the fact that she had overtaken Great Britain in steel production. After the Second World War, the scientific capacity of a country has become a determinant of its potential and power, and research and development (R & D) has replaced steel as a comparative measure of the strength of the powers. For this reason the nature and kinds of state support for science, the politicization of science, the sociological problems of the organization of work by science teams all become central policy issues in a post-industrial society. (See Table 1-2, Structure and Problems of the Post-Industrial Society.)
TABLE 1-1
General Schema of Social Change
A major social change brings a major reaction. The student revolts of the late 1960s were, in part, a reflection of the new power of an adversary culture reacting against the growth of a science-based society. But in greater measure the student revolt was a reaction to the “organizational harnesses” a post-industrial society inevitably drops on intellectual work, and this was signified by the increasing pressures on young people, at an earlier and earlier age, to choose a good college, the pressure to choose a main subject, and the anxiety about graduate school and a career.
Politically, the problem of a post-industrial society, as François Bourricaud rightly points out, is the growth of a non-market welfare economics and the lack of adequate mechanisms to decide the allocation of public goods. For technical and conceptual reasons one cannot measure the value of such goods in market terms; because such goods are distributed to all, there is a disincentive on the part of a citizenry to support such expenditures. Most important, the nature of non-market political decisions invites direct conflict: as against the market which disperses responsibility, in politics the decision points are open and visible, and the consequences of political decisions, as to who would lose and who would gain, are clear. Because there is such a focal point, conflict flares more readily when such decisions are to be reached.
TABLE 1-2
Structure and Problems of the Post-Industrial Society
AXIAL PRINCIPLE: THE CENTRALITY OF AND CODIFICATION OF THEORETICAL KNOWLEDGE
Primary institutions: University
Academy institutes
Research corporations
Economic ground: Science-based industries
Primary resource: Human capital
Political problem: Science policy
Education policy
Structural problem: Balance of private and public sectors
Stratification: Base—
Access— Skill
Education
Theoretical issue: Cohesiveness of “new class”
Sociological reactions: The resistance to bureaucratization
The adversary culture
In the broadest sense, the most besetting dilemma confronting all modern society is bureaucratization, or the “rule of rules.” Historically, bureaucratization was in part an advance of freedom. Against the arbitrary and capricious power, say, of a foreman, the adoption of impersonal rules was a guarantee of rights. But when an entire world becomes impersonal, and bureaucratic organizations are run by mechanical rules (and often for the benefit and convenience of the bureaucratic staff), then inevitably the principle has swung too far.
All of these changes take place in the context of a society that is multiplying its constituencies (especially the scientific and technical claimants), that mixes technocratic and political decisions, and that sees the rise of a new class which may or may not be struggling to establish a corporate cohesiveness as a new ruling class in society. It is all these issues that frame the problems of a post-industrial society.
The concept of a post-industrial society is not a picture of a complete social order; it is an attempt to describe and explain an axial change in the social structure (defined as the economy, the technology and the stratification system) of the society. But such a change implies no specific determinism between a “base” and a “superstructure”; on the contrary, the initiative in organizing a society these days comes largely from the political system. Just as various industrial societies—the United States, Great Britain, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, post-World War II Japan—have distinctively different political and cultural features, so it is likely that the various societies that are entering a post-industrial phase will have different political and cultural configurations. The essential division in modern society today is not between those who own the means of production and an undifferentiated “proletariat” but the bureaucratic and authority relations between those who have powers of decision and those who have not, in all kinds of organizations, political, economic, and social. It becomes the task of the political system to manage these relations in response to the various pr
essures for distributive shares and social justice.
What the concept of a post-industrial society suggests is that there is a common core of problems, hinging largely on the relation of science to public policy, which will have to be solved by these societies; but these can be solved in different ways and for different purposes. The sociologist seeks those “ordering devices” that allow one to see the way social change takes place in a society. The concept of the post-industrial society is one such “ordering device” to make more intelligible the complex changes in Western social structure.
CHAPTER
2
* * *
From Goods to Services:
The Changing Shape
of the Economy
IN The Communist Manifesto, which was completed in February 1848, Marx and Engels envisaged a society in which there would be only two classes, captialist and worker—the few who owned the means of production and the many who lived by selling their labor power—as the last two great antagonistic classes of social history, locked in final conflict. In many ways this was a remarkable prediction, if only because at that time the vast majority of persons in Europe and the United States were neither capitalist nor worker but farmer and peasant, and the tenor of life in these countries was overwhelmingly agrarian and artisan.
England was the evident model for industrialization, but despite Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and Sheffield, Great Britain at the mid-century mark was not at all industrial, a fact which is clearly demonstrated in the occupational statistics. As David Landes writes: