by Daniel Bell
A third constraint, more peculiar to the United States, is the evident fact that (from a businessman’s point of view) American manufactured goods are pricing themselves out of the world market. From the view of theoretical economics, in the inevitable “product cycle” of goods production a more advanced industrial society finds itself at a price disadvantage when a product becomes standardized, inputs are predictable, price elasticity of demand is higher, and labor costs make a difference, so that less advanced but competing nations can now make the product more cheaply. And this is now happening in American manufacture. In the world economy the United States is now a “mature” nation and in a position to be pushed off the top of the hill by more aggressive countries, as happened to England at the end of the first quarter of this century.
If one looks at the position of the United States today in the world economy, three facts are evident:
1. Only in technology-intensive products does the United States have a favorable commercial balance in its trade with the rest of the world. In agricultural products, in minerals, fuels, and other non-manufactured and non-agricultural products, and in non-technology-intensive manufactured products, the balance is heavily the other way. In textiles, in such technological products as transistor radios, typewriters, and expensive cameras, which have now become standardized, the United States market has been swept by foreign goods. Even in technology-intensive products (computers, lasers, instruments) there has been a decline: in 1962 the favorable balance was 4:1 (exports of 10.2 billion and imports of 2.5 billion dollars); in 1968 it was 2:1 (exports of 18.4 billion against imports of 9.4 billion). In 1971 the unfavorable balance of trade as a whole was running at a deficit rate of $12 billion when President Nixon moved to force the revaluation of competing currencies and tighten the quotas of foreign goods to be sold in the United States.
2. The reduction in costs of transport, and the differential in wages, has made it increasingly possible for American multi-national corporations to manufacture significant proportions of components abroad and bring them back here for assembly. The Ford Motor Company could only bring out its low-priced Pinto by having most of the components manufactured abroad, and Chrysler has announced that an increasing proportion of the parts for all its cars will be manufactured abroad rather than in Detroit.
3. Increasingly the United States is becoming a rentier society, in which a substantial and increasing proportion of the balance of trade consists of the return on investments abroad by American corporations, rather than exports.
All of this poses a very serious problem for American labor. The area where it is best organized, manufacture, faces a serious erosion of jobs. In response, American labor, which has traditionally been committed to free trade, is now heavily protectionist. This may save jobs in some sectors (textiles, electronics, steel, automobiles), but at a higher price to the consumer.
In effect, because of the constraints in two major areas—in the changing ratios between goods- and service-producing industries, and in the newly threatened position of American manufactures in the world economy—there may be less margin for social experiment. Thus, at a time when workers may be asking for more control over the conditions of work—which will inevitably increase costs— the squeeze may be greatest because of the changed condition of the economy.
The largest constraint is the very multiplicity of competing demands in the polity itself. A post-industrial society, as I pointed out earlier, is increasingly a communal society wherein public mechanisms rather than the market become the allocators of goods, and public choice, rather than individual demand, becomes the arbiter of services. A communal society by its very nature multiplies the definition of rights—the rights of children, of students, of the poor, of minorities—and translates them into claims of the community. The rise of externalities—the effects of private actions on the commonweal—turns clean air, clean water, and mass transit into public issues and increases the need for social regulations and controls. The demand for higher education and better health necessarily expands greatly the role of government as funder and setter of standards. The need for amenities, the cry for a better quality of life, brings government into the arena of environment, recreation, and culture.
But all this involves two problems: we don’t really know, given our lack of social-science knowledge, how to do many of these things effectively; equally important, since there may not be enough money to satisfy all or even most of the claims, how do we decide what to do first? In 1960 the Eisenhower Commission on National Goals formulated a set of minimum standards for the quality of life— standards which already seem primitive a decade later—and when the National Planning Association projected these goals to 1975 and sought to cost them out (assuming a 4 percent growth rate, which we have not maintained), it found that we would be $150 billion dollars short in trying to achieve all those goals. So the problem is one of priorities and choice.
But how to achieve this? One of the facts of a communal society is the increased participation of individuals and groups in communal life. In fact, there is probably more participation today, at the city level, than at any other time in American history.30But the very increase in participation leads to a paradox: the greater the number of groups, each seeking diverse or competing ends, the more likelihood that these groups will veto one another’s interests, with the consequent sense of frustration and powerlessness as such stalemates incur. This is true not only locally but nationally, where, in the last twenty years, new constituencies have multiplied. The standard entities of interest-group politics used to be corporate, labor, and farm, with the ethnic groups playing a role largely in state and city politics. But in the last two decades we have seen the rise of scientists, educators, the intelligentsia, blacks, youth, and poor, all playing a role in the game of influence and resource allocation.31And the old coalitions are no longer decisive. What we have been witnessing in the last decade, in fact, is the rise of an independent component, committed to neither of the two parties, whose swing vote becomes increasingly important. Thus the problem of how to achieve consensus on political questions will become more difficult. Without consensus there is only conflict, and persistent conflict simply tears a society apart, leaving the way open to repression by one sizeable force or another.
Industrial society in the West was marked by three distinctive features: the growth of the large corporation as the prototype of all business enterprise; the imprint of the machine and its rhythms on the character of work; and labor conflict, as the form of polarized class conflict, which threatened to tear society apart. All three of these elements are markedly changed in the post-industrial society.
The modern business corporation was a social invention, fashioned at the turn of the century, to implement the “economizing mode” which had become the engine of social change in the society.32 It was a device which differed markedly from the army and the church (the two historic forms of large-scale organization) in its ability to coordinate men, materials and markets for the mass production of goods. In the first half of this century, beginning symbolically with the formation of the first billion-dollar corporation, United States Steel Company in 1901 by J. P. Morgan, the role of the corporation grew steadily and the economy came to be dominated by such familiar giants as General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, and the other monoliths that make up the banner listing of Fortune’s 500 industrials. Yet by 1956 the corporation seemed to reach a plateau in the economy, when incorporated businesses accounted for over 57 percent of the total national income, and since then the proportion has remained stable.
The modern business corporation is marked by large size: of assets, sales, and the number of employees. (General Motors, the largest corporation in the United States, in 1970 had 695,790 employees; Arvin Industries, the five-hundreth-largest, had 7,850.) But the distinctive character of the services sector is the small size of unit enterprise. Though one finds giant corporations in the services fields as large as any industrial c
orporation—in utilities (American Telephone and Telegraph), banking (Chase Manhattan), insurance (Metropolitan Life), retail trade (Sears Roebuck)—most of the firms in retail trade, personal and professional services, finance and real estate, and hospitals employ less than a thousand persons. The word government conjures up a picture of huge bureaucracy, but employment at the local level of government exceeds that of state and federal, and half of this local employment is in governmental units with fewer than 500 employees.33
Even where unit size is larger, in hospitals and in schools, what is different about these enterprises is the larger degree of autonomy of smaller units (the departments in the hospitals and colleges) and the greater degree of professional control. Surely this is an “organizational society” in that the organization rather than the small town is the locus of one’s life, but to make this observation, as many sociologists do, is to miss the fact that what has been appearing is a multiplicity of diverse types of organization and that the received model we have, that of the large business corporation, while still pre-eminent, is not pervasive. New forms of small professional firms, research institutes, diverse kinds of government agencies, plus schools and hospitals, which are subject to professional and community control, become the locus of life for more and more persons in the society.
The change has come not only in place, but also in character of work. In an essay I published in 1956 Work and Its Discontents, I wrote: “The image of tens of thousands of workers streaming from the sprawling factories marks indelibly the picture of industrial America, as much as the fringed buckskin and rifle marked the nineteenth-century frontier, or the peruke and lace that of Colonial Virginia. The majority of Americans may not work in factories, as the majority of Americans never were on the frontier, or never lived in Georgian houses; yet the distinctive ethos of each time lies in these archetypes.” I argued, further, that while a large variety of occupations and jobs were far removed from the factory, “the factory is archetypal because its rhythms, in subtle fashion, affect the general character of work the way a dye suffuses a cloth.” 34
The rhythms of mechanization are still pervasive in the United States. The nature of materials handling has been revolutionized by the introduction of mechanized devices. Office work, particularly in large insurance companies, banks, utilities, and industrial corporations has the same mechanical and dronelike quality, for routing procedures serve the same pacing functions as assembly lines. And yet, the distinctive archetype has gone. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times at one time symbolized industrial civilization, but today it is a period piece. The rhythms are no longer that pervasive. The beat has been broken.
Does a new archetype exist today? The fact that in services relations are between persons led C. Wright Mills twenty years ago to declare that the white-collar world had become a “personality market,” in which each person “sold himself in order to impress another and get ahead. Mills’s prototype was the salesman and the setting was “the big store.”35 But even at that time his argument was not entirely convincing (especially to those who tried to get service in some of these stores), and it is even less so today. New stereotypes abound. An important one—to judge from some of the television commercials—is the researcher or the laboratory technician in a white coat, carrying out an experiment (usually to prove that the sponsor’s product is better than the rival’s). But this is more an effort to catch the reflected authority of science than the mimesis of a new civilization.
If there are no primary images of work, what is central to the new relationship is encounter or communication, and the response of ego to alter, and back—from the irritation of a customer at an airline-ticket office to the sympathetic or harassed response of teacher to student. But the fact that individuals now talk to other individuals, rather than interact with a machine, is the fundamental fact about work in the post-industrial society.
Finally, for more than a hundred years, the “labor issue” dominated Western society. The conflict between worker and boss (whether capitalist or corporate manager) overshadowed all other conflicts and was the axis around which the major social divisions of the society rotated. Marx had assumed, in the logic of commodity production, that in the end both bourgeoisie and worker would be reduced to the abstract economic relation in which all other social attributes would be eliminated so that the two would face each other nakedly—as would all society—in their class roles.36Two things, however, have gone awry with this prediction. The first has been the persistent strength of what Max Weber called “segregated status groups”—race, ethnic, linguistic, religious—whose loyalties, ties, and emotional identifications have been more powerful and compelling than class at most times, and whose own divisions have overridden class lines. In advanced industrial countries such as Belgium or Canada, no less than in tribal societies such as Africa or communal societies such as India, the “status groups” have generated conflicts that have torn the society apart more sharply, often, than class issues. Second, the labor problem has become “encapsulated.” An interest conflict and a labor issue—in the sense of disproportionate power between manager and worker over the conditions of work— remain, but the disproportions have shifted and the methods of negotiation have become institutionalized. Not only has the political tension become encapsulated, there is even the question whether the occupational psychology which Veblen and Dewey made so central to their sociology carries over into other aspects of a man’s behavior as well. (A bourgeois was a bourgeois by day and a bourgeois by night; it would be hard to say this about some of the managers who are executives by day and swingers at night.) The crucial fact is that the “labor issue” qua labor is no longer central, nor does it have the sociological and cultural weight to polarize all other issues along that axis.
In the next decade, the possible demands for the reorganization of work, the decline in productivity, and the persistent threat of inflation because of the disproportionate productivity in the goods and services sectors, the threats of foreign competition, and other issues such as the recalcitrance of some unions on race, or the bilateral monopolies of unions and builders in the construction trades, all may-make labor issues increasingly salient and even rancorous. The fact that some unions may even turn from concern with income and consumption to problems of production and the character of work is all to the good. But it is highly unlikely that these will become ideological or “class” issues, although they may become politicized.
The politics of the next decade is more likely to concern itself, on the national level, with such public-interest issues as health, education, and the environment, and, on the local level, crime, municipal services, and costs. These are all communal issues, and on these matters labor may find itself, on the national level, largely liberal, yet, on the local level, divided by the factious issues that split community life.
But all this is a far cry from the vision of The Communist Manifesto of 1848 and the student revolutionaries of 1968. In the economy, a labor issue remains. But not in the sociology and culture. To that extent, the changes which are summed up in the post-industrial society may represent a historic metamorphosis in Western society.37
CHAPTER
3
* * *
The Dimensions of
Knowledge and Technology
The New Class Structure
of Post-Industrial Society
LET US begin with a parable: all the rest is exegesis.
... the Library is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, excluded by very low railings. ...
Everything is there: the minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on this gospel, the veridical account of your death, a version of each boo
k in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
When it was proclaimed that the Library comprised all books, the first impression was one of extravagant joy. Alf men felt themselves lords of a secret, intact treasure. There was no personal or universal problem whose eloquent solution did not exist—in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly expanded to the limitless dimension of hope. ...
The uncommon hope was followed, naturally enough, by a deep depression. The certainty that some shelf in some hexagon contained precious books and that these books were inaccessible seemed almost intolerable. A blasphemous sect suggested that all searches be given up and that men everywhere shuffle letters and symbols until they succeeded in composing, by means of an improbable stroke of luck, the canonical books. ...
Other men, inversely, thought that the primary task was to eliminate useless works. They would invade the hexagons, exhibiting credentials which were not always false, skim through a volume with annoyance, and then condemn entire bookshelves to destruction: their ascetic, hygienic fury is responsible for the senseless loss of millions of books. Their name is execrated; but those who mourn the “treasures” destroyed by this frenzy overlook two notorious facts. One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction undertaken by humans is infinitesimal. Two: each book is unique, irreplaceable, but (inasmuch as the Library is total) there are always several hundreds of thousands of imperfect facsimiles—of works which differ only by one letter or one comma. ...
