The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  The British census of 1851—for all its inaccuracies—shows a country in which agriculture and domestic service were far and away the most important occupations; in which most of the labour force was engaged in industries of the old type: building trades, tailoring, shoemaking, unskilled work of all sorts. Even in the cotton manufacture, with over three-fifths of its working force of over half a million (of a total of almost sixteen millions) in mills, almost two-thirds of the units making returns employed less than fifty men; the average mill in England employed less than 200; and tens of thousands of hand looms were still at work in rural cottages.1

  If Britain was barely advanced, at mid-century, continental Europe was about a generation behind her in industrial development. In Belgium, the most industrialized nation on the continent, about half the labor force was engaged in agriculture (in Britain it was only one-fourth). Germany took another twenty-five years just to reach that 50 percent industrial mark; indeed, as late as 1895 there were more people engaged in agriculture than in industry. And in France the number of persons in-industry was outnumbered by those in agriculture until the Second World War! To return to Marx’s day, in the Prussia of 1852, which in this respect was representative of all of Germany, 72 percent of the population was classified as rural. As Sir John Clapham comments: “German industry in general could in no sense be called capitalistic; and before 1840 large enterprises of the factory type were extraordinarily rare.” In France in 1851, only 10½ percent of the population lived in towns and, writes Clapham, “the number of concerns employing more than a hundred people in 1848 was so small that they could not much affect the average for the whole country; outside mining and metallurgy they hardly existed [and] true factory conditions were exceptional in the France of 1848.” In the United States in 1850, of a population of 23 million persons, 19.6 million lived in rural territory (defined as places with under 2,500 persons), and of a labor force of 7.7 million, 4.9 were engaged in agriculture, 1.2 in manufacturing and construction combined (it was only in 1870 that the two figures were separated), and almost one million in domestic service.2

  Marx’s vision of the inexorable rise of industrial society was thus a bold one. But the most important social change in Western society of the last hundred years has been not simply the diffusion of industrial work but the concomitant disappearance of the farmer—and in a Ricardian world of diminishing returns in land, the idea that agricultural productivity would be two or three times that of industry (which it has been in the United States for the last thirty years) was completely undreamed of.

  The transformation of agrarian life (whose habits had marked civilization for four thousand years) has been the signal fact of the time. In beholding the application of steam power to a textile mill, one could venture predictions about the spread of mechanization and the extension of factory work. But who would, with equal confidence, have made similar predictions following the invention by Cyrus McCormick of the reaper in 1832 and its exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851? Yet in the United States today, only 4 percent of the labor force is engaged in agriculture; the work of little more than three million persons (as against more than twice that number two decades ago) feeds 207 million persons, and if all crop restraints were released, they could probably feed fifty million more.

  In place of the farmer came the industrial worker, and for the last hundred years or so the vicissitudes of the industrial worker—his claims to dignity and status, his demand for a rising share of industrial returns, his desire for a voice in the conditions which affected his work and conditions of employment—have marked the social struggles of the century. But beyond that, in the Utopian visions of Marx and the socialist movement, the working class, made conscious of its fate by the conditions of struggle, was seen as the agency not only of industrial but of human emancipation; the last great brakes on production and abundance would be removed when the working class took over control of the means of production and ushered in the socialist millennium.

  Yet if one takes the industrial worker as the instrument of the future, or, more specifically, the factory worker as the symbol of the proletariat, then this vision is warped. For the paradoxical fact is that as one goes along the trajectory of industrialization—the increasing replacement of men by machines—one comes logically to the erosion of the industrial worker himself.3In fact, by the end of the century the proportion of factory workers in the labor force may be as small as the proportion of farmers today; indeed, the entire area of blue-collar work may have diminished so greatly that the term will lose its sociological meaning as new categories, more appropriate to the divisions of the new labor force, are established. Instead of the industrial worker, we see the dominance of the professional and technical class in the labor force—so much so that by 1980 it will be the second largest occupational group in the society, and by the end of the century the largest. This is the new dual revolution taking place in the structure of occupations and, to the extent that occupation determines other modes of behavior (but this, too, is diminishing), it is a revolution in the class structure of society as well. This change in the character of production and of occupations is one aspect of the emergence of the “post-industrial” society.

  The concept of a post-industrial society gains meaning by comparing its attributes with those of an industrial society and pre-industrial society.

  In pre-industrial societies—still the condition of most of the world today—the labor force is engaged overwhelmingly in the extractive industries: mining, fishing, forestry, agriculture. Life is primarily a game against nature. One works with raw muscle power, in inherited ways, and one’s sense of the world is conditioned by dependence on the elements—the seasons, the nature of the soil, the amount of water. The rhythm of life is shaped by these contingencies. The sense of time is one of durée, of long and short moments, and the pace of work varies with the seasons and the storms. Because it is a game against nature, productivity is low, and the economy is subject to the vicissitudes of tangible nature and to capricious fluctuations of raw-material prices in the world economy. The unit of social life is the extended household. Welfare consists of taking in the extra mouths when necessary—which is almost always. Because of low productivity and large population, there is a high percentage of underemployment, which is usually distributed throughout the agricultural and domestic-service sectors. Thus there is a high service component, but of the personal or household sort. Since individuals often seek only enough to feed themselves, domestic service is cheap and plentiful. (In England, up to the mid-Victorian period, the single largest occupational class in the society was the domestic servant. In Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp and Captain Rawdon Crawley are penniless, but they have a servant; Karl Marx and his large family lived in two rooms in Soho in the 1850s and were sometimes evicted for failing to pay rent, but they had a faithful servant, Lenchen, sometimes two.) Pre-industrial societies are agrarian societies structured in traditional ways of routine and authority.

  Industrial societies—principally those around the North Atlantic littoral plus the Soviet Union and Japan—are goods-producing societies. Life is a game against fabricated nature. The world has become technical and rationalized. The machine predominates, and the rhythms of life are mechanically paced: time is chronological, methodical, evenly spaced. Energy has replaced raw muscle and provides the power that is the basis of productivity—the art of making more with less—and is responsible for the mass output of goods which characterizes industrial society. Energy and machines transform the nature of work. Skills are broken down into simpler components, and the artisan of the past is replaced by two new figures —the engineer, who is responsible for the layout and flow of work, and the semi-skilled worker, the human cog between machines— until the technical ingenuity of the engineer creates a new machine which replaces him as well. It is a world of coordination in which men, materials, and markets are dovetailed for the production and distribution of goods. It is a world of scheduling and
programming in which the components of goods are brought together at the right time and in the right proportions so as to speed the flow of goods. It is a world of organization—of hierarchy and bureaucracy—in which men are treated as “things” because one can more easily coordinate things than men. Thus a necessary distinction is introduced between the role and the person, and this is formalized on the organization chart of the enterprise. Organizations deal with the requirements of roles, not persons. The criterion of techne is efficiency, and the mode of life is modeled on economics: how does one extract the greatest amount of energy from a given unit of embedded nature (coal, oil, gas, water power) with the best machine at what comparative price? The watchwords are maximization and optimization, in a cosmology derived from utility and the felicific calculus of Jeremy Bentham. The unit is the individual, and the free society is the sum total of individual decisions as aggregated by the demands registered, eventually, in a market. In actual fact, life is never as “one-dimensional” as those who convert every tendency into an ontological absolute make it out to be. Traditional elements remain. Work groups intervene to impose their own rhythms and “bogeys” (or output restrictions) when they can. Waste runs high. Particularism and politics abound. These soften the unrelenting quality of industrial life. Yet the essential, technical features remain.

  A post-industrial society is based on services. Hence, it is a game between persons. What counts is not raw muscle power, or energy, but information. The central person is the professional, for he is equipped, by his education and training, to provide the kinds of skill which are increasingly demanded in the post-industrial society. If an industrial society is defined by the quantity of goods as marking a standard of living, the post-industrial society is defined by the quality of life as measured by the services and amenities—health, education, recreation, and the arts—which are now deemed desirable and possible for everyone.

  The word “services” disguises different things, and in the transformation of industrial to post-industrial society there are several different stages. First, in the very development of industry there is a necessary expansion of transportation and of public utilities as auxiliary services in the movement of goods and the increasing use of energy, and an increase in the non-manufacturing but still blue-collar force. Second, in the mass consumption of goods and the growth of populations there is an increase in distribution (wholesale and retail), and finance, real estate, and insurance, the traditional centers of white-collar employment. Third, as national incomes rise, one finds, as in the theorem of Christian Engel, a German statistician of the latter half of the nineteenth century, that the proportion of money devoted to food at home begins to drop, and the marginal increments are used first for durables (clothing, housing, automobiles) and then for luxury items, recreation, and the like. Thus, a third sector, that of personal services, begins to grow: restaurants, hotels, auto services, travel, entertainment, sports, as people’s horizons expand and new wants and tastes develop. But here a new consciousness begins to intervene. The claims to the good life which the society has promised become centered on the two areas that are fundamental to that life—health and education. The elimination of disease and the increasing numbers of people who can live out a full life, plus the efforts to expand the span of life, make health services a crucial feature of modern society; and the growth of technical requirements and professional skills makes education, and access to higher education, the condition of entry into the post-industrial society itself. So we have here the growth of a new intelligentsia, particularly of teachers. Finally, the claims for more services and the inadequacy of the market in meeting people’s needs for a decent environment as well as better health and education lead to the growth of government, particularly at the state and local level, where such needs have to be met.

  The post-industrial society, thus, is also a “communal” society in which the social unit is the community rather than the individual, and one has to achieve a “social decision” as against, simply, the sum total of individual decisions which, when aggregated, end up as nightmares, on the model of the individual automobile and collective traffic congestion. But cooperation between men is more difficult than the management of things. Participation becomes a condition of community, but when many different groups want too many different things and are not prepared for bargaining or trade-off, then increased conflict or deadlocks result. Either there is a politics of consensus or a politics of stymie.

  As a game between persons, social life becomes more difficult because political claims and social rights multiply, the rapidity of social change and shifting cultural fashion bewilders the old, and the orientation to the future erodes the traditional guides and moralities of the past. Information becomes a central resource, and within organizations a source of power. Professionalism thus becomes a criterion of position, but it clashes, too, with the populism which is generated by the claims for more rights and greater participation in the society. If the struggle between capitalist and worker, in the locus of the factory, was the hallmark or industrial society, the clash between the professional and the populace, in the organization and in the community, is the hallmark of conflict in the post-industrial society.

  This, then, is the sociological canvas of the scheme of social development leading to the post-industrial society.4 To identify its structural lineaments and trend lines more directly, let me turn now to the distribution of jobs by economic sector and the changing profile of occupations in the American economy.

  The Sectors of Work and Occupations

  Shortly after the turn of the century, only three in every ten workers in the country were employed in service industries and seven out of ten were engaged in the production of goods. By 1940, these proportions were more evenly balanced. By i960, the proportions had shifted so that six out of every ten were in services. By 1980, with the rising predominance of services, close to seven in every ten workers will be in the service industries. (See Tables 2-1, 2-2, and 2-3.) Between 1900 and 1980, in exact reversal of the proportions between the sectors, there occurred two structural changes in the American economy, one, the shift to services, and two, the rise of the public sector as a major area of employment.

  In historic fact, the shift of employment to services does not represent any sudden departure from previous long-run trends. As Victor Fuchs points out, “For as long as we have records on the industrial distribution of the labor force, we find a secular tendency for the percentage accounted for by the Service sector to rise.5 From 1870 to 1920, the shift to services could be explained almost entirely by the movement from agricultural to industrial pursuits; employment in services rose as rapidly as industry and the major increases in services were in the auxiliary areas of transportation, utilities, and distribution. This was the historic period of industrialization in American life. After 1920, however, the rates of growth in the non-agricultural sector began to diverge. Industrial employment still increased numerically, but already its share of total employment tended to decline, as employment in services began to grow at a faster rate, and from 1968 to 1980, if we take manufacturing as the key to the industrial sector, the growth rate will be less than half of the labor force as a whole.

  TABLE 2-1

  Sector Distribution of Employment by Goods and Services, 1870-1940

  (in thousands)

  SOURCE: Adapted from Historical Statistics of the United States: 1820-1940, series D57-71, p. 74.

  NOTE: The totals do not always add up because of small numbers not allocated, and rounding of figures.

  The great divide began in 1947, after World War II. At that time, overall civilian employment (inclusive of agriculture, self-employed and household domestics) was still close to the pre-war balance. But from then on, the growth rates began to diverge in new, accelerated fashion: only ten years later, the goods-producing industries provided less than 42 percent of all jobs and, by 1968, the proportion was down to 35.9 percent (Table 2-3). Despite the rising output of
goods, this fall in proportion will persist. Altogether the goods producing industries accounted for about 29 million jobs in 1968 and this number is expected to increase to 31.6 million by 1980. However, those jobs will then represent less than 32 percent of total employment.

  Within the goods-producing sector, employment in agriculture and mining will continue to decline in absolute terms. The major change—and the impetus to new jobs in that sector—will come in construction. The national housing goals for the 1968-1978 decade call for the building of 20 million new housing units in the private market and 6 million new and rehabilitated units through public subsidy. If these goals were to be met, employment in construction would rise by 35 percent in this decade.

  Manufacturing is still the single largest source of jobs in the economy. It grew at 0.9 percent a year during the 1960s largely because of increased employment in defense industries—aircraft, missiles, ordnance, communications equipment and the like—which have higher labor components because the work is more “custom-crafted” than in mass production industries. But the shift away from defense spending—with its consequent unemployment in aircraft, missiles, and communications—means a slower rate of growth for manufacturing in the future. Any increase will appear largely in the manufacture of building materials for housing construction.

  To return to the larger picture, the most important growth area in employment since 1947 has been government. One out of every six American workers today is employed by one of the 80,000 or so entities which make up the government of the United States today. In 1929, three million persons worked for the government, or about 6.4 percent of the labor force. Today, twelve million persons work for the government—about 16 percent of the labor force. By 1980 that figure will rise to seventeen million, or 17 percent of the labor force.