Bell, Daniel

Daniel Bell (b. 1919) is best known for the conception of postindustrial society found in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) and for the analysis of contemporary culture found in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). These are two major case studies in Bell's larger project to theorize macro-social organization. Bell argues that the integration of the three major realms of society—the techno-economic sphere, the polity, and the culture—is not more common historically than a disjuncture between realms. Bell's position contrasts sharply with functionalism and Marxism, both of which emphasize as the typical condition the integration of society in relation either to consensus values and norms (as in the case of functionalism) or a dominant mode of production (as in the case of Marxism). Bell's general conception of social organization, while less rigorously developed than either functionalism or Marxism, provides a preferable level of analytical flexibility.

Bell provides examples of societies in which the three realms are well integrated, mentioning the churchdominated society of early medieval Europe and the bourgeois society that emerged in Western Europe and North America following the Industrial Revolution. However, in the case of the emerging postindustrial society, Bell is clear that the major principles of organization of the three realms are in [Page 48]conflict. The axial principle of the techno-economic sphere is functional rationality, a combination of efficiency and productivity oriented to material growth. The axial principle of the polity is legitimacy, based on equality and participation and oriented to obtaining the consent of the governed for the use of power. The axial principle of the culture is development of the self, encouraging a denial of any limits or boundaries to experience and a distance from bourgeois norms. From this framework, Bell describes a key contradiction of the emerging postindustrial society: between a social structure based on the discipline of occupational specialization within bureaucratic hierarchies and a culture based on the enhancement and fulfillment of the self and the “whole person.” The two are in contradiction because one requires self-renunciation in the service of institutional goals, while the other promotes an uninhibited pursuit of self-realization. Bell observes that other contradictions also exist in postindustrial society, for example, between the ideal of meritocracy and equality, reflecting the tensions between a social structure of graded occupational specializations and a polity based on equal rights.

Bell's approach to the study of social change is to extract the underlying principles of change in contemporary industrial societies and to develop a portrait of societies of the future based on the more complete realization of these principles. Industrial society is based on commodity production, a mix of scientific and empirical knowledge in the service of industrial technology, corporations as the key institutions, and market competition as society's primary steering mechanism. In Bell's formulation, postindustrial society is based on a shift from goods to services production, the centrality of theoretical knowledge both in the development of new technological breakthroughs and professional services, universities as the key institutions, and the subordination of the market to economic and social planning based on analytical tools. Bell argues that the idea of postindustrial society concerns the means of production only and that postindustrialism can exist in societies marked either by capitalist or socialist relations of production.

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