Post-Industrial Society: Definition and Characteristics

Post-Industrial Society: Definition and Characteristics.

Introduction

Since the 1960 and 70 the US economy was threatened by the economic recovery of Europe and Japan. It was facing the challenge of third world nationalism and an unprecedented rise of oil prices. The war in Vietnam had further weakened the US and its economy was losing its competitive advantage. This was the time the US government and corporations had to take notice and adopt new strategies to counter the decline.

These changes have been traced by different writers over a period of time. Daniel Bell an eminent sociologist who had been analysing these trends, sees this as a shift to postindustrial society. He sees the coming of new information technology as a decisive feature of this shift. Bell points out that the industrial revolution was marked by an innovation of energy. This was a time when steam and electricity transformed the method and scale of manufacturing. He argues that now the post-industrial society moves at a very different quantum level where energy is transformed into information and knowledge. Further “and yet in a broad sense seeing the way in which information serves as a resource, as a control device, as we organise large masses of material and production, we begin to get a sense of how a new kind of change is taking place.” He considers the relocation of industries as a break up of the older systems as a result of the speed through which communication develops. This led to the spreading out of industries, what he calls a wider integration. He also sees a political fragmentation”since the instruments of management are not responsive and perhaps cannot be responsive to these areas of change.

Changes in Society

The concept of post—industrial society emphasizes the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the axis around which new technology. economic growth and the stratification of the society is organised. Post-industrialism is then an effort to identify a change in the social structure.

In the stratification system of the industrial society, the historic base of power was property and the means of access through inheritance. In the post-industrial society while property remains an important base, technical skills becomes another, sometimes a rival base along with education as a means of access to the attainment of technical skill.

The post·industrial society sees the continuation of the trends of the industrial society in a historical sense. Both St. Simon and Marx had emphasized the crucial role of engineers and science in transforming the society.

Bell gives the example of how in the industrial society great industrial complexes came into existence with traditional means of transport and communication. Waterways for example facilitated iron and steel industries to come up in a concentrated form, example in Detroit. With communication technologies and transport, developing industrial units can be located in a dispersed fashion.

Production of textile goods for example, can mean having production and design units in locations in different parts of the world. You can send design online to a production firm located in South Asia from the U.S. This design`s individual requirements can be speedily catered to. Today many production and design units of textile industry in the U.S. are located in different countries of South Asia.

A Differing Viewpoint

It is clear here that Galbraith is speaking of developments in the 1960s and 1970s whereas Bell is more sensitive to what has happened in the 1980s and 1990s. Bell has drawn attention to the process of political fragmentation as more and more big corporation activities get located overseas. In the 1990s the cold war is over and therefore the earlier compulsions of the military industrial state of 1970 and 1980s are no longer there and the society as such takes a new direction. This is a society full of optimism about how to harness technology to further needs of the day to day life. There is also Movement here towards freeing human life from technocratic compulsions. However we need to be aware that the technocratic legacy is by no means over. As Marcuse has pointed out, this is a ‘behaviorist universe’ where technologically linked thought patterns are still the order of the day. Bell is pointing to the promises this society holds for us. But equally important to remember here is that the ‘good life’ comes at a price. The heaviest price is the way our thought belief systems are reified. That is to say how they are delinked from nature and presented to us as some kind of logical or mathematical symbols.