Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

CHAPTER THREE
Post-industrial society: Daniel Bell
Among those thinkers who subscribe to the notion that a new sort of society is
emerging, the best-known characterisation of the ‘information society’ is Daniel
Bell’s theory of post-industrialism. The terms are generally used synonymously.
It might be added that, though Bell coined the term ‘post-industrial society’ (PIS)
as long ago as the late 1950s, he took to substituting the words ‘information’ and
‘knowledge’ for the prefix ‘post-industrial’ round about 1980 when a resurgent
interest in futurology was swelled by interest in developments in computer and
communications technologies.
Nonetheless, Daniel Bell (b.1919) had from the outset of his interest in
PIS underlined the central role of information/knowledge. 1 The Coming of Post-
Industrial Society, a sophisticated sociological portrait of an embryonic future
which was first published as a book in 1973, though it had appeared in essay
form much earlier, fitted well with the explosive technological changes experienced
by advanced societies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Faced with the
sudden arrival of new technologies which rapidly permeated into offices, industrial
processes, schools and the home – computers soon seemed everywhere –
there was an understandable and urgent search to discover where all these
changes were leading. With, as it were, a ready-made model available in Daniel
Bell’s weighty The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), we should perhaps not
be surprised that many commentators took it straight from the shelf. It did not
matter much that Bell offered ‘the concept of a post-industrial society [as] an
analytical construct, not a picture of a specific or concrete society’ (Bell, 1973,
p. 483). PIS just seemed, especially to journalists and paperback writers, to be
right as a description of the coming world. Bell appeared to have foreseen the
turmoil that computer communications technologies especially were bringing into
being. Indeed, he had written earlier of the need for a massive expansion of these
information technologies, and here they were, apparently fulfilling his prognosis.
Understandably, then, he got the credit. In such circumstances, Bell began to
adopt the fashionable language of the ‘information revolution’.
Moreover, while excitement about the ‘mighty micro’ diminished in the late
1980s, and with this came a waning interest in futurology, the development of the
Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s encouraged a revival of interest
in forecasting the future. With this upsurge came further acknowledgement of the
pivotal role of Daniel Bell in foreseeing and accounting for post-industrialism.
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