Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
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emerges from changes only in the social structure. This includes the economy,
the occupational structure and the stratification system, but excludes politics and
cultural issues. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society is therefore an account of
changes taking place in one sector of society only – and one must not presume,
says Bell, that these are the most consequential parts.
Bell offers a typology of different societies that is dependent on the predominant
mode of employment at any one stage. In his view the type of work that
is most common becomes a defining feature of particular societies. Thus Bell
suggests that while in pre-industrial societies agricultural labour is pretty well
ubiquitous, and in industrial societies factory work is the norm, in post-industrial
societies it is service employment which predominates.
Why these changes should have happened is explained by Bell when he identifies
increases in productivity as the key to change. The critical factor in moving
one society to another is that it becomes possible to get ‘more for less’ from work
because of the application of the principle of ‘rationalisation’ (efficiency). In the
pre-industrial epoch everyone had to work the land just to eke out a subsistence
existence. However, as it becomes feasible to feed an entire population without
everyone working on the land (for example, through improved agricultural practices,
crop rotation and animal husbandry), so it becomes possible to release a
proportion of the people from farms so they may do other things while still being
assured of an adequate food supply. Accordingly, they drift to the towns and
villages to supply growing factories with labour while buying their food from the
excess produced in the country. As the process continues, thanks to increased
agricultural surpluses provided by an increasing minority of the population (the
more farming rationalises in techniques and technologies, the more it produces
with fewer workers), so it becomes possible to release most people from farming
to work in the burgeoning factory system. The process has never stopped in agriculture,
so that today tiny numbers are employed in farming, yet productivity is
enormous because of high technology such as combine harvesters, factory
farming and genetic engineering. Once just about everyone in Britain worked
the land out of necessity and simply to subsist; today less than 3 per cent of the
workforce supplies well over half of the entire nation’s food.
With the progression of this process, we enter the industrial era where factory
labour begins to predominate. And always the ‘more for less’ principle tells.
Hence industrial society thrives by applying more and more effective techniques
in the factories that in turn lead to sustained increases in productivity. Steam
power reduces the need for muscle power while increasing output; electricity
allows assembly lines to operate that produce on a mass scale goods that once
would have been luxuries; already now there are factories where scarcely any
workers are required because of sophisticated computers. The history of industrialisation
can be written as of the march of mechanisation and automation that
guaranteed spectacular increases in productivity. The indomitable logic is more
output from fewer and fewer workers.
As productivity soars, surpluses are produced from the factories that enable
expenditures to be made on things once unthinkable luxuries: for example,
teachers, hospitals, entertainment, even holidays. In turn, these expenditures of
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