Postindustrial Society

First popularized during the 1970s, especially by famed sociologist Daniel Bell and futurist Alvin Toffler, the term postindustrial has come to include a loose group of views about the social and spatial structure of advanced capitalism. This perspective became increasingly popular in the wake of the sustained deindustrialization that Europe and North America suffered during the late 20th century. Highly optimistic in nature, it viewed postindustrialism as a natural stage of capitalism in an evolutionary process from agrarian poverty to worldwide cosmopolitanism.

Essentially, the postindustrial society thesis maintained that manufacturing created one society, with a corresponding landscape, and that a services-based society would create a qualitatively different society and corresponding geography. This view largely equated services with information-processing activities, focusing on occupations of skilled, well-educated professionals (producer services) such as clerical activity, executive decision making, telecommunications, and the media. Such a view heralded information processing as a qualitatively new form of economic activity; thus, services were held to represent a historically new form of capitalism. Post-industrialism held that the growth of services signaled a change from a world of work in which people used their bodies to one in which they used their minds. It maintained that the evolution of societies from those dominated by blue-collar forms of work into cleaner, white-collar ones would unleash massive rounds of productivity growth that effectively would put an end to scarcity and hence to poverty and its related social ills. This transformation allegedly would allow for a greater focus on the quality of life, including matters concerning equity rather than efficiency, that is, human needs and social equality rather than simple efficiency and productivity.

Geographically, the postindustrial thesis maintained that the shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a services-based economy entailed a reconfiguration of spatial relations. In particular, this view upheld the central role played by telecommunications that would allow intangibles such as services to be widely distributed via an “electronic cottage.” Thus, the postindustrial argument anticipated the Internet by three decades. However, in assuming that all services could be produced, transmitted, and relayed in this manner, postindustrialists exaggerated the argument, holding that the new, dispersed, polynucleated landscapes of electronic cottage workers would obviate the need for commuting, rendering large cities effectively obsolete. Such a view naively assumed that telecommunications only promote the decentralization of activity rather than more complex patterns of simultaneous concentration and deconcentration.

The postindustrial view suffered from several severe analytical flaws. Although many service jobs do involve the collection, processing, and transmission of large quantities of data, many others do not; for example, the trash collector, restaurant chef, security guard, and janitor all work in the service sector, but the degree to which these activities center around information processing is minimal. Indeed, in contrast to early, overly optimistic, postindustrial expectations that a service-based economy would eliminate[Page 374] poverty, a large share of new service jobs pay poorly, offer few benefits, and are part-time or temporary in duration, leading to widespread concerns about the “McDonaldization” or “Kmartization” of the economy. Finally, as the geography of producer services over the past four decades has shown, many advanced services centralize in large cities due to the agglomeration economies available there rather than decentralize to the rural periphery.

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