Postindustrial Society Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

As the importance of industrial manufacturing declines and economic development becomes more centered on the service sector, information technology, and knowledge-based growth, questions arise regarding what social, political, and cultural challenges advanced capitalist economies will encounter in the twenty-first century. These questions, concerned with the nature of postindustrial society, have occupied a central place in social scientific research for over three decades.

According to the pioneering work of American sociologist Daniel Bell, the movement toward a postindustrial society should be conceived as a historical progression gradually supplanting, without eliminating, industrial society. Bell forecasted, in 1973, that the reliance on information, technology, and services instead of material goods as the driving forces of the economy would lead to deep transformations in the underlying social structure—or what he referred to as society’s economic-technological-industrial order. This in turn would have political and cultural consequences; the most significant of these would be the empowerment of a whole new class of technical elites using their knowledge and expertise to place new demands on the polity for rationalized planning “and the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation and of policy formulation for the society” (Bell, 14).

Bell’s work on the postindustrial society was not without its detractors. During the course of the 1970s, a range of scholars debated the merits of his approach. The main criticisms leveled against Bell for overstating the feasibility of universities replacing firms as the primary engines of technological innovation and economic growth. Additional criticisms accused Bell of portraying the transition to postindustrialism as a teleological process, and neglecting the social conflicts that underpin capitalist societies.

While the 1980s witnessed a retreat from, and in some cases even a rejection of, the notion of postindustrial society within academic discourse, it underwent a substantial revival in the 1990s. Although scholars from this second-generation debate tend to agree varieties of postindustrial society—also termed information or network society—now existed across the advanced capitalist world, they differed radically in their interpretations of its exact characteristics. Scholarship from this period tended to place less emphasis on forecasting future scenarios, and instead studied the actual conditions of postindustrial society in various contexts. Although Bell’s predictions about the political rise of technical elites have been largely discarded, scholars on the whole have concurred with Bell’s assertions that postindustrial development would transform many of the foundational institutions of industrial society (e.g., the welfare state, social class, nationalism, and political parties). In scrutinizing categories, such as the working class, more recent work on postindustrial society is increasingly bound up with discussions of the postmodernist philosophical movement and its rejection of the metanarrative of modernity.

Bibliography:

Bell, Daniel. The Coming Post Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Bendix, R., S. D. Berger, A. Etzioni, and D. Bell. “Review Symposium: The Coming Post Industrial Society.” Contemporary Sociology 3, no. 2 (1974): 101–105.
Block, Fred. Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Clark,Terry N., and Seymour M. Lipset. “Are Social Classes Dying?” International Sociology 6, no. 4 (1991): 397–410.
Cohen, Steven S., and John Zysman. Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-industrial Economy. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
Esping-Andersen, Gosta. Changing Classes: Stratification and Mobility in Postindustrial Societies. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1993.
Rose, Margaret. The Post-modern and the Post-industrial: A Critical Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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