The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  The second technological revolution, only a hundred years or so ago, can be identified with two innovations: electricity and chemistry. Electricity gave us a new, enhanced form of power that could be transmitted hundred of miles, as steam could not, thus permitting new kinds of decentralization that the bunching of machines in a factory, to minimize the loss of steam heat, could not. Electricity gave us a new source of light, changing our rhythms of night and day. Electricity allowed us to code messages on wires or to transform voice electric signals so as to create telephone and radio. Chemistry, for the first time, allowed us to create synthetics, from dyes to plastics, from fibers to vinyls, that are unknown in nature.

  And now, we are experiencing a third technological revolution. If we think of the changes that are beginning to occur, we think inevitably of products such as computers, telecommunications, and the like. But to think in these terms is to ignore the underlying processes that are crucial for understanding this revolution. Only by identifying these relevant processes can we begin to chart the vast number of changes in socio-economic and political structures that may take place.

  Four innovations underlie this new technological revolution, and I shall describe each briefly.

  1. The change of all mechanical and electric and electromechanical systems to electronics: The machines of industrial society were mechanical instruments. Increasingly, electronic systems have taken over and replaced mechanical parts. A telephone system was basically a set of mechanical parts (e.g., a dial system) in which signals were converted into electricity; today, the telephone is entirely electronic. Printing was a system in which mechanical type with inked surfaces was applied to paper; today, printing is electronic. So too is television with its solid-state circuits. Electronics makes possible a reduction in the large number of parts and an incredible increase in the speed of transmission. In modern computers, we have speeds of nanoseconds, or one-billionth (10–9) of a second (or thirty years of seconds, if one sought to add these up), and even picoseconds, or one-trillionth (10–12) of a second, permitting “lightning” calculation of problems.

  2. Miniaturization: One of the most remarkable changes is the “shrinkage” of units that conduct electricity or switch electrical impulses. Our previous modes were vacuum tubes, each, as in the old-fashioned radios, about two or three inches high. The invention of the transistor is akin to the invention of steam power, for it represented a quantum change in the ability to manufacture microelectronic devices for the hundreds of different functions of control, regulation, direction, and memory that microprocessors perform. We had 4KB (K = 1,000; B = bits, or bytes) on a chip the size of a thin fingernail, then 32KB, 64KB, and now we begin to construct megabytes, or a million binary digits, or bits, on a chip.

  In the past two decades we have seen an exponential growth in components per chip, by a factor of one hundred per decade. Today a tiny chip of silicon contains an electronic circuit consisting of tens of thousands of transistors and all the necessary interconnecting conductors, and it costs only a few dollars. The circuitry on that chip, now made by printed boards, is equivalent to about ten years’ work by a person soldering discrete components onto that printed wiring board. A single chip can itself be a microcomputer with input/output processing capability and random-access memory and is smaller than an American dime.

  3. Digitalization: In the new technology, information is represented by digits. Digits are numbers, discrete in their relation to one another, rather than continuous variables. Telephones used to be based on an analog system, for sound is a wave. Through digital switching telephones are converted to binary systems. The distinct advantage is in the degree of precision and control. The changeover also allows the merging of computers, which are digital, with image and sound systems. The third technological revolution involves the conversion of all previous systems into digital form.

  4. Software: Older computers had the instructions or operating systems wired into the machine, and one had to learn a programming language such as COBOL or FORTRAN or the more specialized languages such as Pascal or LISP to use the machine. Software, an independent program, frees the user to do various tasks quickly. In distributed processing the software directing die work of a particular computer terminal operates independently of software on other terminals or in the central processing unit. Personal computers have specific software programs—for financial analysis or information database retrieval—that tailor the system to particular user needs and become, in the argot of die computer world, “user-friendly.”

  Software—the basis of customization—is still a developing art. It may take a programmer about a month to produce several thousand lines of code. In telecommunications, large electronic switching machines (to route die hundreds of thousands of calls onto different lines) use more than two million lines.22 Breaking the “bottleneck” of software programming is the key to the rapid spread of the personal computer into the small business and the home. And in the wings is the possibility of reducing the number of functions and applications within the personal computer and (in the innovations of Netscape and ORACLE) to buy them “off the shelf,” so to speak, for one’s need. If this innovation takes hold, it widens immensely the number of programs and applications available to a user and simplifies the operation of a personal computer.

  One can point to a significant development that promises the enlargement and enhancement of the new technology: photonics. Photonics is the key technology for transmitting large amounts of digital information through laser and ultra-pure glass or optical fibers. Photonics provides a transmission capability that far exceeds the copper wire and radio. In laboratory experiments, the AT&T Bell laboratories set a “distance record” by transmitting 420 million bits per second over 125 miles without amplification, and 2 billion bits per second over eighty miles without amplification. The pulse code modulation can transmit the entire thirty-volume Encyclopaedia Britannka in a few seconds. But photonics are still in the development stage, and we are concerned here with already proven technologies that are in the process of marketing and diffusion.

  The most crucial fact about the new technology is that it is not a separate domain (such as the label “high-tech” implies) but a set of changes that pervade all aspects of society and reorganize all older relationships. The industrial revolution produced an age of motors—something we take for granted. Motors are everywhere, from automobiles to boats to power tools and even household devices (such as electric toothbrushes and carving knives) that can run on fractional horsepower—motors of one-half and one-quarter horsepower. The post-industrial era will see similarly pervasive changes. In the coming decades, we shall be pervaded by computers—not just the large ones but the “computer on a chip,” the microprocessor, which will transform all our equipment and homes. Automobiles, appliances, tools, and home computers will each be run by a microcomputer with the computing power of ten MIPS (millions of instructions per second).

  We can already see the shape of the manifold changes. The old distinctions in communication among telephone (voice), television (image), computer (data), and text (facsimile) have been broken down, physically interconnected by digital switching, and made compatible as a single unified set of teletransmissions. The introduction of computer-aided design and simulation has revolutionized engineering and architectural practices. Computer-aided manufacturing and robotics are beginning to transform the production floor. Computers are now indispensable in record keeping, inventory, scheduling, and other aspects of management information systems in business firms, hospitals, universities—any organization. Database and information retrieval systems reshape analysis for decisions and intellectual work. The household is being transformed as digital devices begin to program and control household appliances and, in the newer home designs, all aspects of the household environment. Computers, linked to television screens, begin to change the way we communicate, make transactions, and receive and apply information.

  The intellectual task is how
to “order” these changes in comprehensible ways, rather than just describing the multitude of changes, and thus to provide some basis of analysis rooted in sociological theory. In the following section I present a number of formal grids that may allow us to see how existing structures come under pressure for change and the ways in which such changes may occur. To repeat one caveat stated earlier: Technology does not determine social change; technology provides instrumentalities and potentialities. The ways that these are used involve social choices.

  IV

  THE “TRAJECTORIES” OF TECHNOLOGY

  Most people use the term technology indiscriminately despite the enormous changes in the character of technology and its differentiations. For most people, technology still means machines or mechanical modes—mechanisms that still exist, of course. But the newer technology of telecommunications and computers—which is the basis of post-industrial society—is an intellectual technology with very different roots and patterns of learning than the mechanical technology that created the industrial world. What I propose to do, therefore, is to present a “map” of modern technology and its “trajectories,” setting forth five grids to lay out these changes.

  The first grid is on the historical distinctions:

  * * *

  GRID 1

  Technology: The Historical Distinctions from

  Industrial to Post-Industrial Society

  From a mechanical technology: machines

  To an electrical technology: wired and wireless communication

  To an intellectual technology: programming, linguistics, algorithms

  * * *

  There are three consequences of these changes:

  1. Systems that were mechanical become electro-mechanical and then electronic. The telephone was originally a mechanical system (e.g., a dial system), then electromechanical, and then electronic (e.g., a touch-tone system).

  2. A change from analog to digital modes. Analog systems are wave-like (such as the sound systems in telephones); digital systems are “pulse.” By converting systems to digital (as zero/one pulses), one can control sound and other digitized systems more precisely.

  3. Industrial society is characterized by motors to drive power tools. Post-industrial technology is organized around microprocessors, which become the “control” mechanisms of all switching and computational systems.

  The second grid states that the source of modern technological change and invention is the codification of theoretical knowledge. Every human society has existed on the basis of the transmission of knowledge. What makes us different from all other species is the development of language and the codes that organize language into intelligible patterns. We move from language to concepts, which are the groupings of ideas that allow us to sort out experiences and generalize our ideas. But the codification of theoretical knowledge is something new, and a feature largely of the twentieth century.

  * * *

  GRID 2

  Technology: The Sources of Change

  The change from “nineteenth century” technology to “twentieth century” technology arose from the codification of theoretical knowledge.

  Older industries—steel, telephone, radio and motion picture, automobiles, even aviation—arose from trial-and-error empiricism, by hands-on inventors who worked independently of the developments of science and theoretical knowledge in their day (Darby and Bessemer in steel, Alexander Graham Bell in telephone, Marconi and Edison in radio and electricity, Ford in automobiles, Wright brothers in aviation).

  The post-industrial industries of the late twentieth century arose from the new revolutions in physics: quantum theory, relativity, optics, solid-state physics, materials science. The model of the electron (Niels Bohr, Felix Bloch) led to semi-conductors and transistors. Einstein’s paper on optics as quanta led to all subsequent work on photo-electrical cells and lasers (an acronym: light stimulated by the emission of radiation). These new products all derived from the codifications of theoretical knowledge.

  The revolution in materials technology reduces our dependence on natural resources and on geographical sites.

  The most dramatic change: from copper wires to optical fibers (or spun glass).

  The engine of change: motors in industrial society, microprocessors in post-industrial society.

  * * *

  The crucial point is that theoretical knowledge comes out of basic research. But there is often little guarantee that basic research will have immediate, if any, payoffs. And it has to be disinterested, i.e., not geared toward applied research and products.

  The home of basic research is research institutions. In the United States these are largely in universities or, in some fields such as medicine, in government-run national institutes. In Germany, basic research is conducted in government-funded Max Planck Gesellschaften; in the U.K., in a combination of institutions; in Japan, often in the laboratories of large corporations or in special research complexes such as Tsukuba, north of Tokyo.

  Third, there is a distinction between initiating products, qualitatively improving products, and making standardized products.

  The schema here suggests a trajectory of change and a new international division of labor. In the United States there has developed what I have called “distributed manufacturing.” This term refers to industries and firms that are primarily concerned with concept, design, and marketing. The Gap, for example, a huge retail clothing chain, has 250 quality-control inspectors in fifty different countries for sub-contractors that it monitors. With worldwide manufacturing, the company can quickly change production in response to changes in market and demand. The Gap has its own retail outlets. Reebok, until recently one of the most successful of the athletic-shoe firms, has no retail outlets of its own but concentrates primarily on research and design marketing. Thus these firms do not “make” products, but they initiate them.

  * * *

  GRID 3

  Technology: The Output of Products

  The major distinction: initiating products and making products

  Initiating products comes from science-based research and development.

  Making of products is of two kinds:

  1) qualitative improvements and 2) standardized production based on labor costs.

  In die past half-century, the United States has been the leader in initiating technology. This superiority derives from 1) strong science-based research universities and 2) a strong entrepreneurial culture.

  In the past half-century, Japan has been the leader in making qualitative improvements—in automobiles, in consumer electronic products. This superiority derives from strong engineering skills and a dedicated work culture.

  In the past half-century, there has been a further shift of production, based on cheaper labor costs, to Korea, Hong Kong, and now China in the making of standardized products.

  * * *

  The fourth distinction is among invention, innovation, and diffusion. Too often these days, the announcement of an idea or product creates a “gee-whiz” excitement; it is assumed that once something emerges, it will “revolutionize” (the most overworked work in technology) a product line or industry. Yet many interesting inventions or products that are announced with great hoopla often fail. One thinks of holograms, for which its inventor, Dennis Gabor, won a Nobel Prize, or the “picture phone” that would be attached to every telephone so that one could see as well as talk to the caller. So, a set of relevant distinctions is in order:

  * * *

  GRID 4

  Products: The Character of Change

  The distinctions are among invention, innovation, and diffusion.

  Invention is “science driven.” It arises from the unfolding of the logic of technology, e.g., miniaturization, greater speeds, adaptation to new materials.

  Innovation is “organization adaptive.” It arises from the capacity or flexibility of an organization to use (or resist) new inventions. (Case study: the resistance of IBM to PCs because of the strength of its
mainframe business.)

  Diffusion is “market driven.” The use and sale of products spread because of reduction of costs (e.g., faxes) or, more important, when a product becomes userfriendly and can easily replace, because of efficiency or reliability, a previous product.

  * * *

  Inventions, by and large today, derive from the codification of theoretical knowledge. Almost all the work in optics derives from a single paper by Einstein in 1904 on reformulating light as a “quanta” (as well as a wave); his work led to photoelectric cells, lasers, and the like. The development of transistors comes out of solid-state physics.

  Yet there is no automatic guarantee that new developments will lead to innovations. That depends on the adaptability of organizations. We know that IBM, because it was wedded to its profitable mainframe computers, set aside the development of PCs (personal computers), in which it held the lead, and allowed Microsoft to develop what it had innovated.

  And diffusion depends on very different factors. Facsimile, now in common use, was developed thirty years ago. (The Japanese newspaper Asahi once thought of producing newspapers through facsimile to markets in the north because transportation to Hokkaido was so expensive.) But when the cost of facsimile came down and the speed of transmission increased, it could be and was marketed as a business and then as a consumer product.

  Fifth and most important is the differentiation of processes in the development of specific technologies.