by Daniel Bell
The Dimensions of Post-Industrial Society
Analytically, society can be divided into three parts: the social structure, the polity, and the culture. The social structure comprises the economy, technology, and the occupational system. The polity regulates the distribution of power and adjudicates the conflicting claims and demands of individuals and groups. The culture is the realm of expressive symbolism and meanings. It is useful to divide society in this way because each aspect is ruled by a different axial principle. In modern Western society the axial principle of the social structure is economizing—a way of allocating resources according to principles of least cost, substitutability, optimization, maximization, and the like. The axial principle of the modern polity is participation, sometimes mobilized or controlled, sometimes demanded from below. The axial principle of the culture is the desire for the fulfillment and enhancement of the self. In the past, these three areas were linked by a common value system (and in bourgeois society through a common character structure). But in our times there has been an increasing disjunction of the three and, for reasons I discuss in the Coda, this will widen.
The concept of the post-industrial society deals primarily with changes in the social structure, the way in which the economy is being transformed and the occupational system reworked, and with the new relations between theory and empiricism, particularly science and technology. These changes can be charted, as I seek to do in this book. But I do not claim that these changes in social structure determine corresponding changes in the polity or the culture. Rather, the changes in social structure pose questions for the rest of society in three ways. First, the social structure—especially the social structure—is a structure of roles, designed to coordinate the actions of individuals to achieve specific ends. Roles segment individuals by defining limited modes of behavior appropriate to a particular position, but individuals do not always willingly accept the requirements of a role. One aspect of the post-industrial society, for example, is the increasing bureaucratization of science and the increasing specialization of intellectual work into minute parts. Yet it is not clear that individuals entering science will accept this segmentation, as did the individuals who entered the factory system a hundred and fifty years ago.
Second, changes in social structure pose “management” problems for the political system. In a society which becomes increasingly conscious of its fate, and seeks to control its own fortunes, the political order necessarily becomes paramount. Since the post-industrial society increases the importance of the technical component of knowledge, it forces the hierophants of the new society—the scientists, engineers, and technocrats—either to compete with politicians or become their allies. The relationship between the social structure and the political order thus becomes one of the chief problems of power in a post-industrial society. And, third, the new modes of life, which depend strongly on the primacy of cognitive and theoretical knowledge, inevitably challenge the tendencies of the culture, which strives for the enhancement of the self and turns increasingly antinomian and anti-institutional.
In this book, I am concerned chiefly with the social structural and political consequences of the post-industrial society. In a later work I shall deal with its relation to culture. But the heart of the endeavor is to trace the societal changes primarily within the social structure.
“Too large a generalization,” Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “leads to mere barrenness. It is the large generalization, limited by a happy particularity, which is the fruitful conception.” 14 It is easy—and particularly so today—to set forth an extravagant theory which, in its historical sweep, makes a striking claim to originality. But when tested eventually by reality, it turns into a caricature—viz. James Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution thirty years ago, or C. Wright Mills’s conception of the power elite, or W. W. Rostow’s stages of economic growth. I have tried to resist that impulse. Instead, I am dealing here with tendencies, and have sought to explore the meaning and consequences of those tendencies if the changes in social structure that I describe were to work themselves to their logical limits. But there is no guarantee that they will. Social tensions and social conflicts may modify a society considerably; wars and recriminations can destroy it; the tendencies may provoke a set of reactions that inhibit change. Thus I am writing what Hans Vahinger called an “as if,” a fiction, a logical construction of what could be, against which the future social reality can be compared in order to see what intervened to change society in the direction it did take.
The concept of the post-industrial society is a large generalization. Its meaning can be more easily understood if one specifies five dimensions, or components, of the term:
1. Economic sector: the change from a goods-producing to a service economy:
2. Occupational distribution: the pre-eminence of the professional and technical class;
3. Axial principle: the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation 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.”
Creation of a service economy. About thirty years ago, Colin Clark, in his Conditions of Economic Progress, analytically divided the economy into three sectors—primary, secondary, and tertiary —the primary being principally agriculture; the secondary, manufacturing or industrial; and the tertiary, services. Any economy is a mixture in different proportions of each. But Clark argued that, as nations became industrialized, there was an inevitable trajectory whereby, because of sectoral differences in productivity, a larger proportion of the labor force would pass into manufacturing, and as national incomes rose, there would be a greater demand for services and a corresponding shift in that slope.
By this criterion, the first and 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, which are defined, residually, as trade, finance, transport, health, recreation, research, education, and government.
Today, the overwhelming number of countries in the world (see Tables 1 and 2) are still dependent on the primary sector: agriculture, mining, fishing, forestry. These economies are based entirely on natural resources. Their productivity is low, and they are subject to wide swings of income because of the fluctuations of raw material and primary-product prices. In Africa and Asia, agrarian economies account for more than 70 percent of the labor force. In western and northern Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union, the major portion of the labor force is engaged in industry or the manufacture of goods. The United States today is the only nation in the world in which the service sector accounts for more than half the total employment and more than half the Gross National Product. It is the first service economy, the first nation, in which the major portion of the population is engaged in neither agrarian nor industrial pursuits. Today about 60 percent of the United States labor force is engaged in services; by 1980, the figure will have risen to 70 percent.
The term “services,” if used generically, risks being deceptive about the actual trends in the society. Many agrarian societies such as India have a high proportion of persons engaged in services, but of a personal sort (e.g. household servants) because labor is cheap and usually underemployed. In an industrial society different services tend to increase because of the need for auxiliary help for production, e.g. transportation and distribution. But in a post-industrial society the emphasis is on a different kind of service. If we group services as personal (retail stores, laundries, garages, beauty shops); business (banking and finance, real estate, insurance); transportation, communication and utilities; and health, education, research, and government; then it is the growth of the last category which is decisive for post-industrial society. And this is the category that represents the expansion of a new intelligentsia—in the universities, research organizations, professions, and
government.
The pre-eminence of the professional and technical class. The second way of defining a post-industrial society is through the change in occupational distributions; i.e. not only where people work, but the kind of work they do. In large measure, occupation is the most important determinant of class and stratification in the society.
The onset of industrialization created a new phenomenon, the semi-skilled worker, who could be trained within a few weeks to do the simple routine operations required in machine work. Within industrial societies, the semi-skilled worker has been the single largest category in the labor force. The expansion of the service economy, with its emphasis on office work, education, and government, has naturally brought about a shift to white-collar occupations. In the United States, by 1956, the number of white-collar workers, for the first time in the history of industrial civilization, outnumbered the blue-collar workers in the occupational structure. Since then the ratio has been widening steadily; by 1970 the white-collar workers outnumbered the blue-collar by more than five to four.
TABLE 1
The World’s Labor Force by Broad Economic Sector,
and by Continent and Region,1960*
SOURCE: International Labour Review (January-February, 1967); ILO estimates based on national censuses and sample surveys.
NOTE: Owing to independent rounding, the sum of the parts may not add up to group totals.
a More developed regions.
b Excluding Polynesia and Micronesia.
TABLE 2
Labor Force and GNP in Western Europe and United States by Sectors, 1969
SOURCE: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (Paris, 1969).
But the most startling change has been the growth of professional and technical employment—jobs that usually require some college education—at a rate twice that of the average. In 1940 there were 3.9 million such persons in the society; by 1964 the number had risen to 8.6 million; and it is estimated that by 1975 there will be 13.2 million professional and technical persons, making it the second-largest of the eight occupational divisions in the country, exceeded only by the semi-skilled workers (see Table 3). One further statistical breakdown will round out the picture—the role of the scientists and engineers, who form the key group in the post-industrial society. While the growth rate of the professional and technical class as a whole has been twice that of the average labor force, the growth rate of the scientists and engineers has been triple that of the working population. By 1975 the United States may have about 550,000 scientists (natural and social scientists), as against 275,000 in 1960, and almost a million and a half engineers, compared to 800,000 in 1960. Table 4 15 gives the breakdown of the professional and technical occupations—the heart of the post-industrial society.
TABLE 3
Employment by Major Occupation Group, 1964,
and Projected Requirements, 1975a
SOURCE: Technology and the American Economy, Report of the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1966), p. 30; derived from Bureau of Labor Statistics, America’s Industrial and Occupational Manpower Requirements, 1964–1975.
NOTE: Because of rounding, sums of individual items may not equal totals.
a Projections assume a national unemployment rate of 3 percent in 1975. The choice of 3 percent unemployment as a basis for these projections does not indicate an endorsement or even a willingness to accept that level of unemployment.
b Less than 3 percent.
The primacy of theoretical knowledge. In identifying a new and emerging social system, it is not only in the extrapolated social trends, such as the creation of a service economy or the expansion of the professional and technical class, that one seeks to understand fundamental social change. Rather, it is through some specifically defining characteristic of a social system, which becomes the axial principle, that one establishes a conceptual schema. Industrial society is the coordination of machines and men for the production of goods. Post-industrial society is organized around knowledge, for the purpose of social control and the directing of innovation and change; and this in turn gives rise to new social relationships and new structures which have to be managed politically.
TABLE 4
The Make-up of Professional and Technical Occupations,
1960 and 1975 {in thousands)
SOURCE: BLS Bulletin no. 1606, “Tomorrow’s Manpower Needs,” vol. IV (February 1969), Appendix E, pp. 28–29.
Now, knowledge has of course been necessary in the functioning of any society. What is distinctive about the post-industrial society is the change in the character of knowledge itself. What has become decisive for the organization of decisions and the direction of change is the centrality of theoretical knowledge—the primacy of theory over empiricism and the codification of knowledge into abstract systems of symbols that, as in any axiomatic system, can be used to illuminate many different and varied areas of experience.
Every modern society now lives by innovation and the social control of change, and tries to anticipate the future in order to plan ahead. This commitment to social control introduces the need for planning and forecasting into society. It is the altered awareness of the nature of innovation that makes theoretical knowledge so crucial.
One can see this, first, in the changed relationship between science and technology. Almost all the major industries we still have—steel, electric power, telegraph, telephone, automobiles, aviation— were nineteenth-century industries (although steel begins in the eighteenth century and aviation in the twentieth), in that they were mainly the creation of inventors, inspired and talented tinkerers who were indifferent to science and the fundamental laws underlying their investigations. Kelly and Bessemer, who (independently) created the oxidation process that makes possible the steel converter and the mass production of steel, were unaware of their contemporary, Henry Clifton Sorby, whose work in metallurgy disclosed the true microstructure of steel. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, was in Clerk Maxwell’s opinion a mere elocutionist who “to gain his private ends [money] has become an electrician.” Edison’s work on “etheric sparks,” which led to the development of the electric light and generated a vast new revolution in technology, was undertaken outside the theoretical research in electromagnetism and even in hostility to it. But the further development of electrodynamics, particularly in the replacement of steam engines, could only come from engineers with formal training in mathematical physics. Edison, as one biographer has written, lacked “the power of abstraction.” 16
What might be called the first “modern” industry, because of its intricate linking of science and technology, is chemistry, since one must have a theoretical knowledge of the macromolecules one is manipulating in order to do chemical synthesis—the recombination and transformation of compounds.17 In 1909 Walter Nerst and Fritz Haber converted nitrogen and hydrogen to produce synthetic ammonia. Working from theoretical principles first predicated by the Frenchman Henri Le Chatelier in 1888, the two German chemists provided a spectacular confirmation of Kant’s dictum that there is nothing so practical as a good theory.18 The irony, however, lies in the use of the result.
War is a technological forcing house, but modern war has yoked science to technology in a radically new way. Before World War I, every General Staff calculated that Germany would either win a quick, smashing victory or, if France could hold, the war would end quickly in a German defeat (either in the field or at the negotiating table). The reasoning was based on the simple fact that Chile was Germany’s (and the world’s) major source of the natural nitrates needed for fertilizer and for explosives and, in wartime, Germany’s access to Chile would be cut off by the British Navy. In 1913 Germany used about 225,000 tons of nitrogen, half of which was imported. Stocks began to fall, but the Haber-Bosch process for the manufacture of synthetic ammonia developed so rapidly that by 1917 it accounted for 45 percent of Germany’s production of nitrogen compound
s. By the armistice Germany was almost self-sufficient in nitrogen,19 and because she was able to hold out, the war became a protracted struggle of static trench warfare and slaughter.
In the latter sense, World War I was the very last of the “old” wars of human civilization. But with the new role of science it was also the first of the “new” wars. The eventual symbolic fusion of science and war was, of course, in World War II the atom bomb. It was a demonstration, as Gerald Holton has written, “that a chain of operations, starting in a scientific laboratory, can result in an event of the scale and suddenness of a mythological occurrence.” Since the end of World War II the extraordinary development of scientific technology has led to hydrogen bombs, distant-early-warning networks coordinated in real time through computer systems, intercontinental ballistics missiles, and, in Vietnam, the beginning of an “automated” battlefield through the use of large-scale electronic sensing devices and computer-controlled retaliatory strikes. War, too, has now come under the “terrible” dominion of science, and the shape of war, like all other human activity, has been drastically changed.
