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Postindustrial society

Book · June 2013

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Postindustrial Society

Post-industrial social thought was grounded in the institutional analysis of social structure and
hopes that emergent institutional properties would result in gradual social transformation. It can
also be thought of as part of an intellectual trend in the 1960s and 1970s to describe an epochal
shift in the organization of society, the economy, and culture. From this perspective it is loosely
related to postmodernist analyses and analyses of “late capitalism” and post-fordism. At the same
time, post-industrial thought was the culmination of a line of “post-capitalist” thinking that
stretched back to the turn of the twentieth century.

As ably-described by the intellectual historian Howard Brick, post-capitalist thought was

characterized by efforts to imagine an alternative to capitalism emerging peacefully out of slow
transformations in institutional logics. Prominent among left-liberals who were influenced by
institutional economics, cultural anthropology, and mid-century social theory, post-capitalist
thought was underpinned by a few premises. In terms of institutionalist economics, the thesis of
Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’ The Modern Corporation and Private Property was widely
influential. For Berle and Means “capitalism” was becoming an anachronistic term. Corporations
were no longer owned by individual heroic capitalists but by diffuse shareholders who had little
say in the day-to-day management of organizations. Instead, the corporation gave rise to
technical managers who were less committed to the purely instrumental and individual goal of
profit. Private property, then, was decreasingly significant as an organizer of economic action.
Cultural anthropologists Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Bronislaw Malinowski, Robert
Redfield, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown all contributed important analyses of other cultures that
demonstrated that homo economicus is probably a culturally- and historically-specific habitus,
undermining one of the core bases for the legitimacy of classical economic theory. At the same
time, they pointed towards the idea that our values and motivations can be organized by different
institutional and cultural arrangements. Talcott Parsons carried this idea forward by arguing that
society as a whole was not governed by a single overarching set of norms, values and logics.
Civil society, for example, could sustain a variety of institutions and non-instrumental social
relations that could incubate a broader social transformation. These shifts held out the possibility
that new norms and social relations could evolve within existing society enabling social
transformation without violent social revolution.

The apogee of post-industrialist thinking was Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society-A Venture in Social Forecasting, which was published in 1973. Bell’s seminal book both
encapsulated, updated, and demonstrated the promise of post-capitalist thought for social
analysis. The ground Bell chose for his own theoretical ground clearing was the Marxist analysis
of capitalism. Bell, along with Raymond Aron and others, argued that a key point of theoretical
confusion in Marxist analysis was the unvarying link between the forces of production and the
social relations of production, a link which sustains the concept of mode of production.
However, Bell argued that the analysis of societal trajectories is made much easier by
disconnecting forces from social relations of production. It may well have been the case that the
two were closely linked when Marx was writing, but since then the forces and social relations of
production have had somewhat independent trajectories.

The most obvious demonstration of this was the contrast between the Soviet Union and the
United States. As many on the Left abandoned the defense of the Soviet Union in the wake of
Stalinist dictatorship, the idea that the United States and the Soviet Union had much in common
became increasingly prominent. So, Bell argued, the Soviet Union and the United States had
differing social relations of production (one based on private property and the other on collective
ownership) yet they relied upon very similar forces of production (industrialism). At the same
time, the growing role of knowledge workers was something that had greatly accelerated since
Berle and Means wrote. Increasingly complex social and technical systems, the Cold War, and
the narrowing of spatial and temporal distances were contributing to the growing centrality of
scientists and technicians, not to mention the growing importance of theoretical knowledge and
an economy based on services rather than the production of goods. In making this argument Bell
was not alone. Most importantly, a prominent Czech philosopher and intellectual leader of the
“Prague Spring”, Radovan Richta, was exploring the implications of a new scientific and
technological revolution and coming to conclusions not radically different from Bell’s. Richta’s
intervention demonstrated Bell’s point about the concept of the mode of production and
supported his claim about a general social transformation rather than one that was specific to the
United States or the West. For many post-capitalists this shift pointed to a post-scarcity
economy. Bell presciently argued that, to the contrary, a service economy is much more likely to
produce inflation than the accumulation of wealth. Moreover, new scarcities of time and
information would emerge.

In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Bell’s core argument was that new “axial structures”
were fundamentally altering the nature of modern society. Bell used the term “axial structure” in
a variety of ways but primarily he uses the term to describe the central organizing principles that
drive the direction of institutional evolution. In the case of the transition to a “post-industrial
society” the axial principle is the “centrality of theoretical knowledge,” or “the primacy of theory
over empiricism and the codification of knowledge into abstract systems of symbols” (20). Once
this axial principle is understood, it becomes possible to link together a variety of disparate
emerging trends that had been identified by people like Richta, David Riesman, W.W. Rostow,
Ralf Dahrendorf, and others, into an overarching account of post-industrialism. In Bell’s account
the rise of new science-based industries, the creation of new intellectual technologies for making
judgments about complex systems, the rise of a professional and technical class, the shift in the
content of work from producing goods to producing services, the rise of work based on
interaction with other humans rather than machines, the movement of women into the workplace,
the central role of science in governance, the breakdown of class as a basis of political
attachment, the rise of meritocracy, the emergence of new scarcities of time and information, and
the emergence of a new economics of information were all linked. This was the key theoretical
insight for Bell and the one that places him at the forefront of a host of post-capitalist and post-
industrialist thinkers.

Bell was careful to specify the epistemic status of his analysis in his use of what he called “social
forecasting.” Based on an analysis of empirical changes in the social structure of society he was
identifying related tendencies that opened up new possibilities, but at the same time created new
dilemmas, sites of conflict, problems of political management, and redefinitions of cultural
meaning. For example, with the rise of theoretical knowledge “teachers” become the new
intelligentsia and the central institution is no longer the corporation but the university. As this
occurs, Bell speculates that hierarchies will slowly be supplanted by meritocracy and more
collective modes of decision making. At the same time new logics of distinction, solidarity, and
stratification will emerge around “situses,” or vertical orders based on function and institutional
setting, rather than the horizontal orders of class and status. The expansion in scientific
knowledge, data, and technical capacity to analyze complex systems and relationships would not
merely result in alterations to the occupational structure of society, but would fundamentally
alter its institutional shape. Social justice would no longer be defined normatively, but
objectively. Scientists would supplant markets as the arbiter of the good and allocators of
resources. Corporations would increasingly solve problems less in the name of private profit than
more communal concerns.

In terms of emerging dilemmas, the rising authority of science was very likely to produce a
populist backlash in Bell’s view and, indeed, a key question in post-industrial society would be
whether scientists would be subordinated to politicians or vice versa. A different but also central
question was whether the increasing centrality of theoretical knowledge would lead to the
instrumentalization of science. While scientists had communal sensibilities and valued the
production of knowledge, the newfound centrality of science meant that parochial interests
would try to colonize science, play a bigger role in the allocation of scientific resources, and
direct research in ways that might not benefit the general social welfare.

Bell’s Post-industrial Society was both the culmination and crystallization of a long tradition of
“post-capitalist” thought. However, that tradition also practically died in the year of the book’s
publication. The economic crisis that began in 1973 and would persist until Ronald Reagan was
president unleashed a series of institutional transformations that not only dashed many of Bell’s
more optimistic forecasts but proved to be the deathblow to post-capitalist thought in general.
Authors like Robert Reich, Fred Block, and Amitai Etzioni would continue in the tradition for a
time, but the optimism of the forecasts diminished and, more importantly, hopes for a broad
institutional transformation that would incubate new modes of solidarity and decision-making
have mostly disappeared. Instead, much institutional speculation shifted to the analysis of the
resubordination of politics and society to markets in a revanchist neoliberalism.

Nonetheless, emphasizing this failure of forecasting is unjust. Indeed, in a forward to a new

edition of Post-industrial Society published in 1999, Bell was able to identify plenty about his
analysis that was prescient. Bell’s account anticipated changes in occupational structure, the shift
from a goods-producing economy to a service economy, the shift to work that relies on
interpersonal effectiveness, the declining salience of class, the growing autonomy of culture,
politics, and the economy from one another, the rise of a populist backlash against the authority
of science and technocracy, and the declining autonomy of science. While not all of these were
specifically predicted by Bell in 1973, he certainly saw how the change in the axial structures of
society might lead to these outcomes. For the most part what has emerged is the least optimistic
outcome Bell imagined, but for all that, it is an outcome that reflects positively on the analysis of
the forecaster.

Of course, Bell’s book should not merely be assessed in terms of the accuracy of its forecast. It is
far too sophisticated to be reduced to that singular criterion. A key question also has to be
whether Post-industrial Society was generative of other social scientific insights and produced
further theoretical development. Certainly many of his arguments about the changing
occupational structure and the nature of work are now broadly accepted. Perhaps less obvious is
his influence on areas like social psychology, urban sociology, and economic geography. Indeed,
in his forward to the 1999 edition Bell was able to look back on an impressive lineup of scholars
who had picked up on themes he emphasized. He notes Richard Sennett’s work on the social
psychological impact of the changing nature and organization of work, Charles Sabel’s and
Michael Piore’s work on the shift to more specialized consumer products and the regional
agglomerations of skilled workers who produce them, Saskia Sassen’s analysis of the very
different geography of services and how they produce “global cities,” and Manuel Castells’ work
on the “information society.” Many of these lines of investigation have spawned extensive new
scholarly literatures that have influenced popular as well as scholarly understandings of
contemporary society.

Michael McQuarrie, University of California, Davis

SEE ALSO: Daniel Bell, Fordism and post-Fordism, knowledge workers, white collar

References

Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York:
Basic Books, 1999 [1973].

Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New York:
Brace and World, 1967 [1932].

Fred Block, Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse. Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1990.

Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American

Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
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