Postindustrial Society

Postindustrial society represents a major conceptual underpinning of geography and geographical discourses, with particular salience for social, economic, and urban geography as well as for allied disciplines and fields. Initially framed by the American sociologist Daniel Bell as a forecast of social change and as an explanation of social tendencies among advanced societies and states during the wrenching experiences of industrial restructuring in the latter half of the 20th century, the idea of the postindustrial society was also positioned as a critique of Marxist theories of production, labor, and social class formation and, more specifically, Marx's insistence on a dominant social binary of capital and proletarian classes.

Initial references to the idea of the postindustrial society include David Riesman's (1958) interpretation of the term to connote leisure rather than work and an earlier invocation of postindustrial society as a hoped-for return to artisanal workshop vocations by the British Guild Socialist Arthur Penty (Old Worlds for New: A Study of the Post-Industrial State) in 1917. The definitive usage was established by Daniel Bell in his seminal work The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). Before committing to postindustrialism as a descriptor of change, Bell had experimented with the idea of alternatives such as the “knowledge society,” the “information society,” and the “professional society,” and he also gave consideration to Dahrendorff's thesis of a post-capitalist society in Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society (1959). Bell's (1973) preference for postindustrial society as a descriptor of social transformation was derived from his sense that

The sources of this historic “upheaval” are acknowledged as scientific and technological but “are also cultural, since culture, I believe, has achieved autonomy in western society” (p. 37).

According to Bell's formulation, the five dimensions or components of postindustrial society are the following:

• 1.
  Economic sector: The change from a goods-producing to a service economy
• 2.
  Occupational distribution: The preeminence of the professional and technical class
• 3.
  Axial principle: The centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of information and of policy formulation for the society
• 4.
  Future orientation: The control of technology and technological assessment
• 5.
  Decision making: The creation of a new “intellectual” technology

Bell (1973) acknowledged a debt to Colin Clark, who postulated that income growth would lead to the expansion of services, and asserts that the “simplest characteristic of a post-industrial society is that the majority of the labor force is no longer engaged in agriculture or manufacturing but in services” (p. 15). Bell made a crucial distinction between the menial, low-value service employment that characterized developing societies such as India and the specialized, knowledge-intensive services that increasingly define advanced societies. These include occupations in health, education, research, and government and provided the basis for a “new intelligentsia” and, in turn, the “pre-eminence of the professional and technical class” (p. 15).

Bell's prediction of a secular decline in industrial production and the laboring classes, and the ideological shift implied in this transition, achieved a powerful resonance within the academic and policy communities as well as fierce contestation. Criticisms of postindustrialism included opposition to the notion of an expansionist, autonomous service sector decoupled from manufacturing and industry. More specifically, scholars affirmed that the fastest-growing, most knowledge-intensive, and most deeply professionalized service industries were those most intimately linked to production: the so-called producer services. Other scholars, notably those associated with variants of Marxism, objected strenuously to the ideological tenor and policy implications of a postindustrial agenda, which implied a discounting of the value of industrial labor, class, and communities and a corresponding privileging of the interests of capital, epitomized by the neoliberal state regimes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

...