The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  6 Marx thought that the mode of production was constitutive of society, that is, intrinsic to the structure of all societies in the way, say, that the periodic table is constitutive of chemistry. But Marx was taking a scheme from capitalism and reading that back into all history, a reading that does not hold. Marx’s mode of production is actually a conceptual, not constitutive, scheme, just as Max Weber’s scheme of authority as patriarchal, patrimonial, and legal-rational is an historical scheme that can serve as a palimpsest over slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. Conceptual schemes are neither true nor false but are useful or not. In many respects, Marx’s is still the most useful conceptual scheme to understand Western capitalist society from ca. 1750 to 1950, its chief failing being the decline of the industrial working class. I have dealt with this question at length in my essay “The Misreading of Ideology: The Social Determination of Ideas in Marx’s Work,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 35 (1990).

  7 Among those that an interested reader might wish to consult are die following: Jerold Hage and Charles II. Powers, Post-Industrial Lives: Roles and Relationships in the 21st Century (Sage, 1992) (a general survey of problems of work, information gathering, flexible adjustments, and the new kinds of roles engendered by these changes); Fred Block, Post-Industrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse (University of California Press, 1990) (an ambitious effort to recocneptualize the economy emphasizing qualitative growth as against the traditional quantitative numbers of gross domestic product); Leigh Estabook, ed.. Libraries in Post-Industrial Society (Oryx Press, 1977) (a misleading title, for it is a general anthology of thirty essays on professional organizations and services as well as libraries); Boris Frankel, The Post-Industrial Utopians (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987; original publication in the U.K. by Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell) (contrasts my work with the theorists of the Green movement, in particular Rudolf Bahro and André Gorz, and envisages a decentralized small artisan society based on the premise of the end of scarcity); William J. Stull and Janice Fanning Madden, Post-Industrial Philadelphia: Structural Changes in the Metropolitan Economy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) (a study by the Economic Monitoring Project of the Wharton School, charting the decline of manufacturing employment and the rise of producer services); Stephen A. Herzenberg, John A. Alic, and Howard Wial, New Rules for a New Econony: Employment and Opportunity in Post-indusriial America (a Twentieth Century Fund Book, 1998) (pointing out that three-quarters of the American work force is now employed in services, it concentrates on those in low-paying, deadend jobs and proposes new rules to reshape labor-market institutions); Thomas M. Stanback Jr., Peter J. Bearse, Thierry J. Noyelle, and Robert A. Karasek, Services: The Netv Economy (Conservation of Human Resources Project, Columbia University, 1981) (a pathbreaking study of the service function within the large industrial corporation [e.g., research and development, marketing, advertising, legal, lobbying] and the expansion of producer services for corporations [financial. computer, etc.]); Kathryn Marie Dudley, The End of the Line: LOST Jobs, New Lives in Post-Industrial America (University of Chicago Press, 1994) (a case study ol automobile shutdowns and the larger problem of job security amid technological change); Terry Nichols Clark and Michael Rempel, Citizen Polities in Post-Industrial Societies: Interest Groups Transformed (Westview Press, 1997) (an ambitious effort to define new political developments cutting across the older left-right distinctions and focusing on new single-issue social movements. The authors codify a dozen empirical generalizations into formal propositions on the decline of class politics); Larry Hirschhorn, Beyond Mechanization: Work and Technology in a Post-Industrial Age (MIT Press, 1984).

  8 Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman, A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 58-59, 22-23, 64, 174.

  9 I am indebted for these citations from the New Left to Howard Brick, whose book Age of Contra diet ion (Twayne, 1998) is a valuable study of the 1960s, especially its thought and culture. See the section “The Idea of Post-industrial Development,” pp. 54-57. The New Left discussions of post-industrial society were based on an essay by David Riesman, “Leisure and Work in Post-Industrial Society” (1958) in Mass Leisure, edited by Eric Larrabee and Rolf Meyersohn (The Free Press of Glencoe, Illinois, 1958)., and some of my early writings, in particular, “The Post-Industrial Society,” in Technology and Social Change, ed. Eli Ginzberg (Columbia University Press, 1964), and my preface to Sir Leon Bagrit, The Age of Automation (New York, New American Library, 1965).

  10 Simon Nora and Hilary Mine, The Computerization of Society, with an introduction by Daniel Bell (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1980). In France, the administrative structure is staffed by the so-called Enarchs. the graduates of the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration, the highest ranking of whom are the Inspecteurs de Finance, They are called upon to assess public enterprises and propose new policies for social and economic problems. Simon Nora, who had served in several French cabinets and was the Inspecteur-general in the Ministry of Finance, was asked by President Giscard D’Estaing to write on the impact of the new communications technology on France. Hilary Mine was then a younger Inspecteur de Finance. The report, which appeared in 1978, was a best-seller in France.

  11Work and Its Discontents was published by Beacon Press, 1956. Major sections of that essay, plus portions of a previous essay, “Adjusting Men to Machines,” Commentary (January 1947), were reprinted in The End of Ideology (Free Press, 1960; re-issued with a new afterword, Harvard University Press, 1988).

  12 Charles F. Sabel, Work and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Michael J. Piore and Charles E Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (New York, Basic Books, 1984).

  13 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press, 1991). See especially chapter six, “Global Cities: Post-industrial Production Sites.”

  14 As John Lloyd remarks in an interview with Castells in the English New Statesman (June 5, 1998), “Castells is a big thinker. Enthusiasts for his work compare him with Karl Marx and Max Weber because they see in him the same ability of these early sociologists to read the underlying trends in contemporary society. He is certainly in the tradition of Daniel Bell (The Coming of Post-Industrial Society) and Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media), who put down markers for seismic shifts in social organization in the sixties and seventies.”

  15 I have taken the quotations from Castells’s The Rise of Network Society, vol. I (Oxford, Black-well, 1996), pp. 31, 204. All emphases are in the original.

  16 In 1988, I went to Prague, which was still under Communist rule, to lecture at a number of scholarly institutions. I dedicated the one I gave at the Czech Academy of Science to the memory of Radovan Richta. A report of that visit appeared in the émigré magazine Listy, published in London by jiri Pelikán, in the issue of November 2, 1988. The “Letter from Home” said, in part: “A patent example of confusion was the reaction of the press to a visit to Prague by Daniel Bell, a renowned Harvard don. He had talked to officials of three scientific institutes, in the presence of all sorts of people. I, too, was able to listen to what he had to say. He was really good and in many cases he expressed our inmost thoughts. His attitude towards Marxism is objective and incontestable.... But he also sees the flaws of Marxism as well as the flaws of other schemes, theories and schools’. Svet v obrazech carried a long, uncensored interview with him. Bell drew an absolutely accurate distinction between Marxism and Stalinism. He concluded by saying: ‘I believe that once the influence of Stalinism disappears from the economy, politics, science and culture there will be scope for the creative elements of Marxism. Only then will an open dialogue be possible.’ Those hardest hit raised their voice. One of them, Jaroslav Tuma, a scientific nobody from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, perhaps to balance the impact of the interview with Bell, admonished the professor in the same magazine for having said nothing new, and claimed that his arguments amounted to the end of Marxism! Tuma su
mmed up not Bell’s views but his own suppressed tears. The scientific community found his article a great joke, especially when he granted Bell his absolution with the words: ‘I don’t want to say that Bell’s lectures were uninteresting. If we leave aside his blatant disparagement and repudiation of Marxism, which is the main propaganda substance of his lectures, one can find a certain number of points of contact which reveal that not even a bourgeois ideologist can afford a false perception of the world within the limits created for him by the interests of the bourgeois society.’ This is just to show you what idiots we have among our senior science scholars, and how much arrogance is hidden within them when they take the floor at a time when over-ideologised visions are fading and people are looking for genuine points of contact and a little bit of objective truth.”

  17 The further point is that there are no “general laws” for the movement of one mode of production or social formation to another; nor is there any indication, as Eric Hobsbawm has admitted, of Marx’s own views on such changes. I have examined this question at length in my essay “The Misreading of Ideology: The Social Determination of Ideas in Marx’s Work,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 35 (1990). Hobsbawm’s statement can he found in his edition of Karl Marx: Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1964), p. 61.

  18 The two papers are Robert M. Solow, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (February 1956), pp. 65-74; and “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function,” Review of Economics and Statistics (August 1957), pp. 312-320.

  19 Later work by Edward Denison, for the period of 1929 to 1982, sought Co specify particular factors contributing to the average economic growth rate of 3.1 percent for this period. Thus 16 percent is credited to the increased educational qualifications of the average worker, 11 percent to improved allocation of resources, the growth of capital for 12 percent of the increased output, and 34 percent to “the growth of knowledge” or technological progress in the narrow sense. Edward Denison, Trends in American Economic Growth, 1929-1982, Brookings Institution, 1985 cited by Robert M. Solow, Growth Theory: An Exposition, (Oxford University Press, 1988) page xxi.

  20 In the 1980s, a “new growth theory” centered on the work of Robert Lucas and Paul Romer arose in economics. The Solow model had treated technology as exogenous to neo-classical theory. Lucas (in his theoretical work) following Romer sought to make technology endogenous to theory, and thus integrate it with market conceptions, rather than treating technology as a force stimulated, most often, by government. Romer tried to define knowledge, empirically using patent data and levels of education as surrogates for technology. Many of the issues are summarized in a special symposium of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 8, no. 7 (Winter 1994), especially the contributions of Romer and Solow.

  For two different perspectives on growth theory differing from general equilibrium theory, see Giovanni Dosi, Christopher Freeman, Richard Nelson, Gerald Silverberg, and Luc Soete, eds., Technical Change and Economic Theory (Pinter, 1998), which emphasizes the centrality of innovations; and Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Harvard University Press, 1982).

  21 A simple methodological point: Most discussions of technological change have focused on a single, major item and then sought to trace the social effects. Thus we have had many studies of the “social effects of the railroad,” of radio, of the automobile, of aviation, etc. The problem with such a strategy is that it is increasingly difficult to understand technological change in terms of single, major innovations, and it is even more difficult to trace the multiple effects. It is clearly quite different to trace the effects, say, of the plough on medieval agriculture or the stirrup on war than the interacting ways that automobiles, trucks, railroads, ships, and airplanes change a transportation system. For this reason, I begin with social matrices and try to see how they may change with die introduction of the new technologies. This is discussed more fully in my unpublished papers cited in footnotes on p. xiii. For a contrast with the older modes of analysis and the hazards of their contemporary use, see Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962); and W. F. Ogburn, The Social Effects of Aviation (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1946).

  22 One can see the magnitudes in changing software coding in the so-called Y2K (The Year 2000) problem. Almost all computer operating programs have as their base the year 1900. But as the year changes to 2000, the computer would simply flip back to 1900, creating havoc for banks, airline reservations and thousands of businesses. In January 1999, the U.S. social security system announced that they had retrofitted their computers by rewriting 30 million lines of code in their instruction manual.

  23 The problem of food in countries that have suffered hunger is rarely (except in Bangladesh) a problem of agriculture. It is largely political or due to failures in distribution systems. Burma was a rice-exporting country but, following the political dictatorship of Ne Win, has had to import rice. The failures in Ethiopia were due to the disruption of a small trader system by the Marxist regime of Mengistu. And hunger in Somalia arose out of tribal conflicts that made the seeding of soils impossible. Russia has a wheat-growing area comparable in size to the wheat-growing areas in North America of North Dakota and Saskatchewan; yet because of failures in social organization, it produces less than a third of the North American amounts.

  24 The greatest forces for the “flattening” of cultures have been conquest—military, political and religious. The Roman empire instituted a legal code which was applied throughout the empire and became the basis for much of Western law. Local religions, however, were often tolerated. The most striking example we have of the power of cultural hegemony, as David A. Bell reminds me, is Islam. After the teaching of Mohammed in the seventh century, the creed spread with extraordinary rapidity, from Morocco to Indonesia, from Spain, the Balkans and Central Asia to Southern Africa. Everywhere that Islam went, it wiped out local cultures introducing a remarkably uniform set of beliefs and, in the Middle East, the Arabic language. In those instances, the sword not technology, was the instrument of submission. Technologies have more to do with the speed of change than with the character of the changes. What technology has allowed is the universal availability of culture and fashion to all parts of the globe.

  25 ISDN illustrates one of the problems in the innovation of a new system. When first created, it was hailed, with the usual hoopla, as “revolutionizing” communications. The difficulty was that each telephone company, such as Northern Telecom, which was the first in the field, and AT&T, adopted their own ISDN systems. And these were not compatible. It took more than ten years of negotiation, through governmental intervention, for common standards to be adopted for the industry.

  26 In 1996, Netscape’s Navigator Web browser software had a market share of 80 percent or more. Microsoft, which dominated the sale of PCs (personal computers), had been slow to recognize the growth of the Internet and found itself threatened by Netscape. Quickly, Microsoft created its own Internet Explorer, which it combined with its own Windows software, forcing anyone who used Windows to take that browser. Within two years, Netscape’s market share was roughly halved. This outcome is one of the bases of the anti-trust suit that the U.S. government initiated against Microsoft in October 1998.

  27 The telephone is usually a “circuit-switched” network with a direct physical path between two parties. The Internet uses “packet switching,” in which messages are broken into small packages labeled with different destination addresses yet carried along the network, just as a postal service truck contains different pieces of mail in the same truck. Thus packet switching enlarges the capacity of the network.

  28 In 1989 CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, developed the protocol http (hypertext transfer protocol) for exchanging text, graphics, and sound. By 1991, CERN had developed a Web server and browser for retrieving in
formation from files as well as for exchanging information on-line. The ability to embed URL (uniform resource locator) addresses in documents as hyperlinks meant that users can literally click from one source of information to another without typing in addresses or names of existing documents.

  29 A classics professor recently began searching the Internet for references to Plato, the famed Greek philosopher. Since the Internet is indiscriminate, he found 44,000 Web sites, including numerous references to a “suburb of Chicago” and the Spanish word for “plate.” His solution was to create a site called “The Fourth Tetralogy: Exploring Plato’s Middle Dialogues” (plato@evansville.edu) and three other sites on philosophical and legal themes. Not only is the site itself easy to find, since there is a keyword, “tetralogy,” but the material there is sorted, and only offerings deemed worthy for scholars are posted.

  30 In 1955, Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld of Columbia University published their pathbreaking book Personal Influence (The Free Press of Glencoe, Illinois), which sought to trace out the way public opinion and tastes were formed. Conventional views had emphasized the role of the mass media or of advertising and the like. But Lazarsfeld and Katz found that intervening between the mass media and the individual were people they called “gatekeepers.” Many persons, particularly young persons, were members of cliques or groups and exchanged opinions on movies, clothes, and other consumer products; the “gatekeepers” were those whose judgments usually counted most and who shaped the responses of their friends and followers. Identifying these gatekeepers became a crucial task for market researchers. But the Internet, by enlarging die circle of such “affinity” groups, even on a national or worldwide basis, changes enormously the patterns of personal influence.