12/15/2018 T6.

Post-industrial society: Daniel Bell - Google Docs

Post-industrial society: Daniel Bell

Among those thinkers who subscribe to the notion that a new sort of society is
emerging, the best-known characterisation of the ‘information society’ is Daniel
Bell’s theory of post-industrialism. The terms are generally used synonymously.
It might be added that, though Bell coined the term ‘post-industrial society’ (PIS)
as long ago as the late 1950s, he took to substituting the words ‘information’ and
‘knowledge’ for the prefix ‘post-industrial’ round about 1980 when a resurgent
interest in futurology was swelled by interest in developments in computer and
communications technologies.

The Coming of PostIndustrial Society, a sophisticated sociological portrait of an embryonic

future
which was first published as a book in 1973, though it had appeared in essay
form much earlier, fitted well with the explosive technological changes experienced by advanced
societies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Faced with the
sudden arrival of new technologies which rapidly permeated into offices, industrial processes,
schools and the home – computers soon seemed everywhere –
there was an understandable and urgent search to discover where all these
changes were leading.

Bell contends that we are entering a new system, a post-industrial society,

which, while it has several distinguishing features, is characterised throughout by
a heightened presence and significance of information. As we shall see, Daniel
Bell argues that information and knowledge are crucial for PIS both quantitatively
and qualitatively. On the one hand, features of post-industrialism lead to greater
amounts of information being in use. On the other hand, Bell claims that in the
post-industrial society there is a qualitative shift evident especially in the rise to
prominence of what he calls ‘theoretical knowledge’. In the world of PIS, in other
words, there is not just more information; there is also a different kind of information/knowledge
in play.

● Neo-evolutionism

Daniel Bell suggests that the United States leads the world on a path towards a
new type of system – the post-industrial society. Though he does not claim
outright that the development of PIS is an inevitable outcome of history, he does
think it is possible to trace a movement from pre-industrial, through industrial,
to post-industrial societies.

For example, Britain in the early eighteenth

century was pre-industrial – i.e. agricultural; by the late nineteenth century it was
distinctively industrial – i.e. manufacturing was the emphasis; and nowadays signs

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of post-industrialism are clear for all to see – i.e. services predominate.

Bell was confident

enough of its direction to contend in the early 1970s that post-industrialism ‘will
be a major feature of the twenty-first century . . . in the social structures of the
United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe’ (Bell, 1973, p. x).
Evolutionist thinking has usually been out of favour in social science circles,
though it does have a habit of coming and going.

It can seem distastefully self-satisfied and,

moreover, is intellectually vulnerable to a number of charges. Two of these are
connected and especially noteworthy. The first is the fallacy of historicism

The second is the trap of teleological thinking

Daniel Bell is far too sophisticated a thinker to fall for these charges. Indeed,
it is a feature of his work that he is alert to these and other related and well
rehearsed shortcomings of social science (such as, as we shall see, technological
determinism and technocratic assumptions). He is quick to repudiate such accusations,

Separate realms

an important theoretical and methodological point that is fundamental

to Daniel Bell’s oeuvre: PIS emerges through changes in social structure rather
than in politics or culture.

Bell is emphatic that change

cannot be seen to be emanating from any one sector to influence every other
dimension of society.Bell is emphatic that change
cannot be seen to be emanating from any one sector to influence every other
dimension of society.

Put in other terms, Bell is an anti-holist, iterating over and again that societies
are not ‘organic or so integrated as to be analysable as a single system’

Post-industrial society

PIS emerges from changes only in the social structure. This includes the economy,
the occupational structure and the stratification system, but excludes politics and
cultural issues. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society is therefore an account of
changes taking place in one sector of society only – and one must not presume,
says Bell, that these are the most consequential parts.

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Bell offers a typology of different societies that is dependent on the predominant mode of
employment at any one stage. In his view the type of work that
is most common becomes a defining feature of particular societies. Thus Bell
suggests that while in pre-industrial societies agricultural labour is pretty well
ubiquitous, and in industrial societies factory work is the norm, in post-industrial
societies it is service employment which predominates.
Why these changes should have happened is explained by Bell when he identifies increases in
productivity as the key to change.

In the
pre-industrial epoch everyone had to work the land just to eke out a subsistence
existence. However, as it becomes feasible to feed an entire population without
everyone working on the land (for example, through improved agricultural practices, crop
rotation and animal husbandry), so it becomes possible to release a
proportion of the people from farms so they may do other things while still being
assured of an adequate food supply. Accordingly, they drift to the towns and
villages to supply growing factories with labour while buying their food from the
excess produced in the country. As the process continues, thanks to increased
agricultural surpluses

it becomes possible to release most people from farming

to work in the burgeoning factory system. The process has never stopped in agriculture, so that
today tiny numbers are employed in farming, yet productivity is
enormous because of high technology such as combine harvesters, factory
farming and genetic engineering.

As productivity soars, surpluses are produced from the factories that enable
expenditures to be made on things once unthinkable luxuries: for example,
teachers, hospitals, entertainment, even holidays. In turn, these expenditures of
industrial-earned wealth create employment opportunities in services, occupations aimed at
satisfying new needs that have emerged, and have become
affordable, courtesy of industrial society’s bounty. The more wealth industry
manages to create, and the fewer workers it needs to do this thanks to technical
innovations (the familiar motor of ‘more for less’), the more services can be
afforded and the more people can be released from industry to find employment
in services.
So long as this process continues – and Bell insists that it is ongoing as we
enter PIS – we are assured of:
• a decline in the number of workers employed in industry, ultimately reducing
to a situation where very few people find work there (the era of ‘robotic
factories’, ‘total automation’, etc.)
• accompanying this decline in industrial employment, continuing and sustained
increases in industrial output because of unrelenting rationalisation

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• continued increases of wealth, translated from industry’s output, which may

be spent on new needs people may feel disposed to originate and fulfil
(anything from hospital facilities to masseurs)
• continuous release of people from employment in industrial occupations
• creation of a never-ending supply of new job opportunities in services aimed
at fulfilling the new needs that more wealth generates (i.e. as people get richer
they discover new things to spend their money on and these require service
workers)

The role of information

If one can accept that sustained increases in wealth result in service jobs predominating, one
may still wonder where information comes into the equation. Why
should Bell feel able to state boldly that ‘[t]he post-industrial society is an information society’
(1973, p. 467) and that a ‘service economy’ indicates the arrival
of post-industrialism? It is not difficult to understand information’s place in the
theorisation; Bell explains with a number of connected observations. Crucially it
involves the character of life in different epochs. In pre-industrial society life is
‘a game against nature’ where ‘[o]ne works with raw muscle power’ (Bell, 1973,
p. 126); in the industrial era, where the ‘machine predominates’ in a ‘technical
and rationalised’ existence, life ‘is a game against fabricated nature’ (p. 126). In
contrast to both, life in a ‘post-industrial society [which] is based on services . . .
is a game between persons’ (p. 127). ‘[W]hat counts is not raw muscle power, or
energy, but information’ (p. 127).

Daniel Bell, however, goes further than this to depict PIS as an especially
appealing place to live for several reasons. First of all, information work is mostly
white-collar employment that, since it involves dealing with people rather than
with things, brings promise of greater job satisfaction than hitherto. Second,
within the service sector professional jobs flourish, accounting, Bell claims, for
more than 30 per cent of the labour force by the late 1980s (Bell, 1989, p. 168).
This means that the ‘central person’ in PIS ‘is the professional, for he is equipped,
by his education and training, to provide the kinds of skill which are increasingly
demanded in the post-industrial society’ (1973, p. 127). Third, ‘[t]he core of the
post-industrial society is its professional technical services’ (Bell, 1987, p. 33),
the ‘scientists and engineers, who form the key group in the post-industrial
society’ (Bell, 1973, p. 17). Fourth, it is a particular segment of services that ‘is
decisive for post-industrial society’. This is those professionals in health, education, research
and government, where we are able to witness ‘the expansion of
a new intelligentsia – in the universities, research organisations, professions, and
government’ (p. 15).
More professional work, a greater role for the intellectuals, more importance

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placed on qualifications, and more person-to-person employment. Not only does

this provide an especially appealing prospect, but it also promotes the role of
information/knowledge.

Intellectual conservatism

increases in information work and

a greater availability of professional occupations operating on knowledge-based
credentials lead Daniel Bell to identify a distinctive break between industrial and
post-industrial societies. While it is incontestable that there is more information
employment than hitherto, and that there is an obvious increase in information
in use, there are major problems with Bell’s argument that post-industrialism
marks a system break with previous societies.

One difficulty is There is no inherent reason why increases

in professionals, even striking ones, should lead one to conclude that a new
age is upon us.

Post-industrial service society?

Bell cites the undeniable fact that the service sector of the
economy has expanded while industrial and agricultural sectors have declined as
prima facie evidence of the coming of ‘post-industrialism’.

It is important that we understand the reasoning being applied here. Bell is

dividing employment into three separate sectors – primary, secondary, tertiary
(broadly, agriculture, manufacture, services) – but he is also decisively linking
them in the following way. He is arguing that services are dependent on the
outputs from the other two sectors in so far as services consume resources while
agriculture and manufacturing generate them.

A key point to be grasped is that Bell is not simply taking the classification
of employment into different sectors as indicative of the rise of a post-industrial
society. He is also operating with a theory of causation,

Bell’s ‘stages’ view of development – from pre-industrial, to industrial, finally reaching

post-industrialism as
wealth expands sufficiently to allow initially a majority in manufacturing and
later on most moving to service sector employment – is historically cavalier.

The
most spectacular change has not been one of transfer from factory to service
employment, but from agriculture to services. Moreover, even in Britain, historically

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the most industrialised of countries, the proportion of the labour force occupied
in manufacture was remarkably stable at 45–50 per cent between 1840 and 1980,
and it was the collapse of manufacturing industry owing to recession and government policies
during the 1980s, combined with the feminisation of the workforce,
which dramatically reduced this proportion to less than one-third.
All this is to say that talk of evolutionary shifts from one sector to the next
is at the least dubious. Other than in England, nowhere has a majority of the
population at any time worked in industry, and even in England it is hard to
sustain the argument that employment has shifted in any sequential way.

The bald point is that the division of society into wealth-creating and wealthconsuming sectors
or, more explicitly in Bell’s theory of ‘post-industrialism’, into
goods-producing and service sectors, is a ‘heroic oversimplification’

Services and manufacture

People must be spending more on services, argues Bell, since there are
so many more service employees around now. Initially this does appear plausible. However, it is
mistaken, and it is a mistake which stems from Bell’s failure
to look at what service workers actually do. As we have seen already, a great deal
of service work can be accounted for by differentiation in the division of labour
aimed at making more effective the production of goods.
Another major problem with Bell’s account is his failure to consider that
people might satisfy their service requirements by investing in goods rather than
in employing service workers to do it for them. Gershuny and Miles come to this
proposition

people want services as their

standard of living increases (Engel’s theorem conceded), but they are not
prepared to pay the price of people doing the services for them when there are
service products available on the market that they can buy and use to do the
service for themselves – for example, people want a convenient way of cleaning
their homes, but because they are not prepared to pay wages to a cleaner they
get a vacuum cleaner and do it for themselves;

Gershuny and Miles agree that Engel’s theorem still holds, and people do
indeed want services, but the cost of having that service performed by another
person becomes unattractive when set against the price of buying a machine to
do it.

Gershuny himself claims, with impressive empirical

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documentation, that the spread of service products signifies the growth of a ‘selfservice
economy’ – almost the antithesis of Bell’s ‘post-industrial service society

Theoretical knowledge

as one cannot assert that more service occupations prove there

is emerging a new sort of society, so it is not enough to contend that more
information of itself represents a new society.
However, if we cannot accept that more information can of itself create
a new sort of society in the way Bell envisages, there are other elements of his

views on information that deserve attention. Describing post-industrial society,

Bell sees not only an expansion in information as a result of more service sector
employees. There is another, more qualitatively distinct feature of information
in PIS. This is Bell’s identification of what he calls ‘theoretical knowledge’. Now,
while an expansion of professionals will certainly increase the number of people
using and contributing to ‘theoretical knowledge’,

‘theoretical knowledge’s’ centrality to PIS does not, in principle at least, require major changes
in
jobs or, indeed, the nature of work.
It does, however, have enormously significant effects on all aspects of life.
Bell’s argument is that ‘what is radically new today is the codification of theoretical knowledge
and its centrality for innovation, both of new knowledge and
for economic goods and services’

The constituents of ‘theoretical knowledge’ can be better understood by

contrasting PIS with ‘industrial’ society. In the past innovations were made, on
the whole, by ‘talented amateurs’ who, encountering a practical problem, worked
in an empirical and trial-and-error way towards a solution. One thinks, for
example, of Henry Ford, a talented
tinkerer who pioneered the automobile without benefit of formal schooling in
engineering, but with an insatiable curiosity and an enviably practical dexterity.
In contrast, PIS is characterised by ‘the primacy of theory over empiricism
and the codification of knowledge into abstract systems of symbols
for example, computer science takes off from Alan Turing’s seminal
paper ‘On Computable Numbers’

The proposal is that nowadays theory is pre-eminent not just in the area of
technological innovation, but even in social and economic affairs. For example,
governments introduce policies that are premised on theoretical models of the
economy.

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Bell thinks this change has important consequences. Perhaps most important,
the primacy of theory in all spheres gives PIS a capacity to plan and hence to
control futures to a much greater degree than previous societies. This capability
of course accords with the professionals’ predisposition to organise and arrange
life. In addition, theories are made more versatile thanks to the advent of information
technologies. Computerisation allows not just the management of
‘organised complexity’, but also, through programming, the creation of ‘intellectual technology’
(Bell, 1973, p. 29) that incorporates knowledge (rules, procedures
and the like) and in turn facilitates innovations based on theoretical knowledge.

Nonetheless, a major difficulty with this notion is defining precisely what is

meant by theoretical knowledge

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