by Daniel Bell
The problem of the number of variables has been a crucial factor in the burgeoning fields of systems analysis for military or business decisions. In the design of an airplane, say, a single performance parameter (speed, or distance, or capacity) cannot be the measure of the intrinsic worth of a design, since these are all interrelated. Charles J. Hitch has used this to illustrate the problems of systems analysis for bombers. “Suppose we ruthlessly simplify aircraft characteristics to three—speed, range, altitude. What else do we have to consider in measuring the effectiveness of the bombers of 1965? At least the following: the formation they will use, their flight path to target, the base system, the target system, the bombs, and the enemy defenses. This may not sound like many parameters (in fact, it is far fewer than would be necessary) but if we go no higher than ten, and if we let each parameter take only two alternative values, we already have 2 10 cases to calculate and compare (2 10 1000). If we let each parameter take four alternative values we have 4 10 cases (4 10 1,000,000).” 37 The choice of a new kind of bomber system was thus not simply a question one could leave to the “old” air force generals. It had to be computed in terms of cost-effectiveness on the weighing of these many variables.
The crucial point is the argument of Jay Forrester and others, that the nature of complex systems is “counterintuitive.” A complex system, they insist, involves the interaction of too many variables for the mind to hold in correct order simultaneously. Or, as Forrester also suggests, intuitive judgments respond to immediate cause-and-effect relations which are characteristic of simpler systems, whereas in complex systems the actual causes may be deeply hidden or remote in time or, more often, may lie in the very structure (i.e. pattern) of the system itself, which is not immediately recognizable. For this reason, one has to use algorithms, rather than intuitive judgments, in making decisions.38
The cause-and-effect deception is illustrated in Forrester’s computer simulation model of how a central city first grows, then stagnates and decays. The model is composed of three major sectors, each containing three elements. The business sector has new, mature, and declining industries; the housing sector has premium, worker, and underemployed housing; and the population sector holds managerial-professionals, laborers, and underemployed. These nine elements are linked first with twenty-two modes of interaction (e.g. different kinds of migrations) and then with the outside world through multiplier functions. The whole, however, is a closed, dynamic system which models the life-history of the city. At first the vacant land fills up, different elements readjust, an equilibrium is attained, then stagnation develops as industries die and taxes increase. The sequence runs over a period of 250 years.
From this model, Forrester has drawn a number of policy conclusions. He argues that increased low-income housing in the central city has the negative effects of bringing in more low-income people, decreasing the tax base, and discouraging new industry. Job-training programs have the undesirable consequence of taking trained workers out of the city. None of this surprises Forrester because, as he points out, the direct approach is to say that if there is a need for more homes, build more housing, whereas the more difficult and complex approach would be to try to change the job patterns and population balances. In this sense, the policies which are wrong are the immediate cause-and-effect judgments, whereas the better policies would be the “counter-intuitive ones.”
The decision-making logic which follows systems analysis is clear. In the case of Rand and the Air Force, it led to the installation of technocrats in the Defense Department, the creation of the Program Planning Budget Systems (PPBS), which was responsible in large measure for the realignment of strategic and tactical programs, and the imposition of cost-effectiveness criteria in the choice of weapons systems. In Forrester’s illustration, it would lead to the substitution of economic rather than political judgments in the crucial policy decisions of city life.
The goal of the new intellectual technology is, neither more nor less, to realize a social alchemist’s dream: the dream of “ordering” the mass society. In this society today, millions of persons daily make billions of decisions about what to buy, how many children to have, whom to vote for, what job to take, and the like. Any single choice may be as unpredictable as the quantum atom responding erratically to the measuring instrument, yet the aggregate patterns could be charted as neatly as the geometer triangulates the height and the horizon. If the computer is the tool, then decision theory is its master. Just as Pascal sought to play dice with God, and the physiocrats attempted to draw an economic grid that would array all exchanges among men, so the decision theorists seek their own tableau entier—the compass of rationality, the “best” solution to the choices perplexing men.
That this dream—as Utopian, in its way, as the dreams of a perfect commonwealth—has faltered is laid, on the part of its believers, to the human resistance to rationality. But it may also be due to the very idea of rationality which guides the enterprise—the definition of function without a justification of reason. This, too, is a theme I explore in these essays.
The History of an Idea
No idea ever emerges full-blown from the head of Jove, or a secondary muse, and the five dimensions which coalesced in the concept of the post-industrial society (its intellectual antecedents are sketched in Chapter 1) have had a long and complicated history. These may be of interest to the reader.
The starting point for me was a theme implicit in my book The End of Ideology—the role of technical decision-making in society. Technical decision-making, in fact, can be viewed as the diametric opposite of ideology: the one calculating and instrumental, the other emotional and expressive. The theme of The End of Ideology was the exhaustion of old political passions; the theories that developed into “The Post-Industrial Society” sought to explore technocratic thought in its relation to politics.39
The interest in the role of technical decision-making and the nature of the new technical elites was expressed in a section of a paper I wrote in the spring of 1955 for a conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, in Milan, “The Break-up of Family Capitalism.” The argument was, briefly, that capitalism had to be understood not only as an economic system but also as a social system tied through the family enterprise, which provided the system’s social cement by creating both a community of interest and a continuity of interest through the family dynasty. The rise of managerial capitalism, therefore, had to be seen not only as part of the professionalization of the corporation, but as a “crack” in that social cement. After describing the break-up of family capitalism in America (in part because of the intervention of investment banking), the essay argued that two “silent revolutions” in the relationship between power and social class were taking place: the decline of inherited power (but not necessarily of wealth) meant that the social upper class of wealthy businessmen and their descendants no longer constituted a ruling class; the rise of the managers meant that there was no continuity of power in the hands of a specific special group. The continuity of power was in the institutional position. Rule was largely in the hands of the technical-intellectual elite, including corporate managers, and the political directorate who occupied the institutional position at the time. Individuals and families pass; the institutional power remains.40
A second strand was a series of studies I did in Fortune magazine in the early 1950s on the changing composition of the labor force, with particular reference to the decline of the industrial worker relative to the non-production worker in the factory, and the technical and professional employee in the occupational system. Here the influence of Colin Clark’s Conditions of Economic Progress was apparent. A more direct influence, however, was an article, unjustly neglected, by Paul Hatt and Nelson Foote, in the American Economic Review of May 1953, which not only refined Clark’s “tertiary” category (setting forth quaternary and quinary sectors) but linked these sector changes to patterns of social mobility. In relating changes in sector distributions to occupational p
atterns, Hatt and Foote singled out as the most important development the trend toward professionalization of work and the crucial importance of the quinary or intellectual sector.
A third influence was Joseph Schumpeter’s emphasis on technology as an open sea (ideas which were developed in the various studies by Arthur Cole, Fritz Redlich, and Hugh Aitken at the Harvard Center for Entrepreneurial Studies in the 1950s).41 Schumpeter’s argument, reread in the early 1960s, turned my mind to the question of technological forecasting. Capitalist society had been able to regularize growth when it found the means to institutionalize the mechanisms of savings and credit which could then be transformed into investment. One of the problems of the post-industrial society would be the need to iron out the indeterminacy of the future by some means of “charting” the open sea. The various efforts at technological forecasting in the 1960s (summed up by Erich Jantsch in Technological Forecasting in Perspective, Paris, OECD, 1967) argued the feasibility of the proposition.
And finally, in this inventory of influences, I would single out an essay by the physicist and historian of science, Gerald Holton, in illuminating for me the significance of theoretical knowledge in its changing relation to technology, and the codification of theory as the basis for innovation not only in science, which Holton demonstrated, but in technology and economic policy as well. Holton’s paper is a masterly exposition of the development of science as a set of codifications and branchings of knowledge.42
I first presented many of these ideas, using the term “post-industrial society,” in a series of lectures at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria in the summer of 1959. The emphasis then was largely on the shifts in sectors and the change from a goods-producing to a service society. In the spring of 1962, I wrote a long paper for a forum in Boston entitled, “The Post-Industrial Society: A Speculative View of the United States in 1985 and Beyond.” Here the theme had shifted to the decisive role of “intellectual technology” and science in social change and as constituting the significant features of the post-industrial society. Though the paper was not published, it was widely circulated in academic and government circles.43 A variant of this paper was presented in the winter of 1962-63 before the Seminar on Technology and Social Change at Columbia University, and printed in truncated form a year later in the papers of that seminar edited by Eli Ginzberg. The centrality of the university and of intellectual organizations as institutions of the post-industrial society was a theme I developed in my book, The Reforming of General Education, 1966 (and for that reason I have omitted a discussion of the university in this book). The emphasis on conceptual schemes arose in connection with my work as chairman of the Commission on the Year 2000, in developing frameworks for the analysis of the future of American society. A number of memoranda I wrote at that time dealt with the concepts of a national society, a communal society, and a post-industrial society as a means of understanding the changes in American society created by the revolutions in transportation and communication, the demand for group rights and the rise of non-market public decision-making, and the centrality of theoretical knowledge and research institutions. The idea of axial structures emerged from my efforts to deal more theoretically with problems of social change, and is the basis for a stock-taking of theories of social change that is underway for the Russell Sage Foundation.44
The question has been asked why I have called this speculative concept the “post-industrial” society, rather than the knowledge society, or the information society, or the professional society, all of which are somewhat apt in describing salient aspects of what is emerging. At the time, I was undoubtedly influenced by Ralf Dahrendorf, who in his Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society (1959) had written of a “post-capitalist” society, and by W.W. Rostow, who in his Stages of Economic Growth had suggested a “post-maturity” economy.45 The sense was present—and still is—that in Western society we are in the midst of a vast historical change in which old social relations (which were property-bound), existing power structures (centered on narrow elites), and bourgeois culture (based on notions of restraint and delayed gratification) are being rapidly eroded. The sources of the upheaval are scientific and technological. But they are also cultural, since culture, I believe, has achieved autonomy in Western society. What these new social forms will be like is not completely clear. Nor is it likely that they will achieve the unity of the economic system and character structure which was characteristic of capitalist civilization from the mideighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The use of the hyphenated prefix post- indicates, thus, that sense of living in interstitial time.
I have been using the idea of the post-industrial society for nearly a decade, and in recent years it has come into more common usage, though with shades of meaning that differ from mine. It may be useful to make note of some of these differences.
Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener make the post-industrial society the pivot of their book The Year 2000,46 but they give the term an almost entirely economic meaning (and in their descriptive table it is equated with a post-mass-consumption society). They depict a society so affluent (in which per-capita income is doubled every eighteen years) that work and efficiency have lost their meaning; and increase in the pace of change would produce an “acculturation” trauma or future shock. Kahn and Wiener almost assume a “post-economic” society in which there is no scarcity and the only problems are how to use abundance. Yet the concept “post-economic” has no logical meaning since it implies a social situation in which there are no costs for anything (for economics is the management of costs) or the resources are endless. Some five years ago there was euphoric talk of a triple revolution whereby “cybernation” would bring about a full cornucopia of goods. Now we hear of a devastated planet and the need for zero economic growth lest we completely pollute or hopelessly deplete all the resources of the world. Both of these apocalyptic visions, I think, are wrong.
Zbigniew Brzezinski thinks he has made an accurate “fix” on the future through his neologism the “technetronic” society: “a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics—particularly in the area of computers and communications.” 47 But the formulation has two drawbacks. First, Brzezinski’s neologism shifts the focus of change from theoretical knowledge to the practical applications of technology, yet in his exposition he refers to many kinds of knowledge, pure and applied, from molecular biology to economics, which are of critical importance in the new society. Second, the idea of the “shaping” nature or primacy of the “technetronic” factors implies a technological determinism which is belied by the subordination of economics to the political system. I do not believe that the social structure “determines” other aspects of the society but rather that changes in social structure (which are predictable) pose management problems or policy issues for the political system (whose responses are much less predictable). And as I have indicated, I believe that the present-day autonomy of culture brings about changes in life styles and values which do not derive from changes in the social structure itself.
Another group of writers, such as Kenneth Keniston and Paul Goodman, have used the term post-industrial society to denote a major shift in values for a significant section of youth, among whom, as Keniston writes, there is “the quest for a world beyond materialism, the rejection of careerism and vocationalism.” Goodman believes there is a turn toward “a personal subsistence economy,” independent of the excesses of a machine civilization.48 Whether there is any staying power to these impulses remains to be seen.49 I think there is a radical disjunction between the social structure and the culture, but its sources lie deep in the anti-bourgeois character of a modernist movement and work themselves out in a much more differentiated way than simply the impulsiveness of a youth movement.50
Finally, the theme of the post-industrial society has appeared in the writings of a number of European neo-Marxist theoreticians such as Radovan Richta, Serge Mallet, An
dre Gorz, Alain Touraine, and Roger Garaudy, who have emphasized the decisive role of science and technology in transforming the industrial structure and thus calling into question the “ordained” role of the working class as the historic agent of change in society. Their work has spawned a variety of theories that, in one way or another, emphasize the fusion of science and technical personnel with the “advanced” working class, or propose the theory of a “new working class” made up principally of technically skilled personnel.51 While all these writers have sensed the urgency of the structural changes in the society, they become tediously theological in their debates about the “old” and “new” working class, for their aim is not to illuminate actual social changes in the society but to “save” the Marxist concept of social change and the Leninist idea of the agency of change. For a real ideological crisis does exist. If there is an erosion of the working class in post-industrial society, how can Marx’s vision of social change be maintained? And if the working class will not inherit the world (and is in fact shrinking), how does one justify the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the role of the Communist Party as the “vanguard” of the working class? One cannot save the theory by insisting that almost everybody is a member of the “new working class.” 52
The Plan of the Book
