Postindustrial Society

The term postindustrial society has been used in a variety of contexts and senses, but it reached prominence only in the 1970s. The most significant text on the subject, providing a substantial analysis with a weight of background data and conceptualization, was Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, published in 1973. This was the culmination of a substantial body of work, not least that conducted for major U.S. commissions—the National Commission on Technology, Automation and American Progress (1964–1966; exploring the implications of automation for employment), and the Presidential Commission on the Year 2000 (1966–1968). The term postindustrial society signified a fundamental shift in the socioeconomic ordering of affluent societies, undermining the traditional relationship between work (production) and identity and thus opening new avenues for the expression of identities through consumption.

Bell argued that the industrial society was being displaced by a postindustrial society, which represented a new social formation in several key respects. Most obviously, perhaps, was the shift from manufacturing to service industries, which was readily observable in statistics on employment. Though the United States led here, most industrial countries were in the 1970s following a similar path, and this became increasingly evident over the last decades of the twentieth century. This is the key feature of the “service economy,” as spelled out by many commentators—but Bell considers social as well as economic dimensions of postindustrialism.

Another feature of the postindustrial society, as seen by Bell, was the centrality of knowledge as an “axial principle” of social structure and development. Among the most important industries are those based on new areas of science and technology—and Bell paid a great deal of attention to computing and information technologies in this respect. (Indeed, he is also often hailed as a pioneering analyst of information society.) Among the most important occupations are those involving high degrees of knowledge, in industry and public service alike. Technical elites grow in number and importance. The growth of service jobs meant that concerns about loss of manufacturing jobs as a result of automation are less salient than they would be otherwise. Indeed, hard physical labor was being displaced by white-collar work, interactions with heavy machinery and raw materials by interactions between people. Lifestyles were changing, reflecting the declining of the identities and affiliations that come from manual work [Page 1122](be it dangerous or routine), and the need for more educated and sophisticated employees.

In earlier work, Bell had written of an “end of ideology” brought about by the decreasing relevance of the traditional (manufacturing) proletariat and of the (industrial) bourgeoisie, the two great classes of industrial society, whose conflict underlay the great ideologies of much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While this theme was stressed less in his later formulations of postindustrialism, the idea that new service classes were much less bound to traditional political extremes was still present.

This differentiated Bell, and many other American commentators on postindustrialism, from those social theorists in Europe who had also advanced similar perspectives. For example, Alain Touraine's The Post-Industrial Society (English publication 1974) was subtitled Tomorrow's Social History: Classes, Conflicts and Culture in the Programmed Society, hinting at how far this account is from Bell's meritocratic and even harmonious vision. (Touraine went on to publish studies of the May “evenements” and the antinuclear movement in France.) In later work, such as The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Bell focused on how capitalist consumer societies were undermining themselves—with hedonic consumerism eroding the values behind high culture and undermining the work ethic itself.

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