Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
industrial-earned wealth create employment opportunities in services, occupations
aimed at satisfying new needs that have emerged, and have become
affordable, courtesy of industrial society’s bounty. The more wealth industry
manages to create, and the fewer workers it needs to do this thanks to technical
innovations (the familiar motor of ‘more for less’), the more services can be
afforded and the more people can be released from industry to find employment
in services.
So long as this process continues – and Bell insists that it is ongoing as we
enter PIS – we are assured of:
• a decline in the number of workers employed in industry, ultimately reducing
to a situation where very few people find work there (the era of ‘robotic
factories’, ‘total automation’, etc.)
• accompanying this decline in industrial employment, continuing and sustained
increases in industrial output because of unrelenting rationalisation
• continued increases of wealth, translated from industry’s output, which may
be spent on new needs people may feel disposed to originate and fulfil
(anything from hospital facilities to masseurs)
• continuous release of people from employment in industrial occupations
• creation of a never-ending supply of new job opportunities in services aimed
at fulfilling the new needs that more wealth generates (i.e. as people get richer
they discover new things to spend their money on and these require service
workers)
Bell’s identification of post-industrialism draws on familiar empirical social
science. It is undeniably the case, one detailed as long ago as 1940 by Colin Clark
and quantified later by, among others, Victor Fuchs (1968), that there has been
a marked decline of primary (broadly agricultural and extractive industries) and
secondary (manufacturing) sector employment and a counterbalancing expansion
of tertiary, or service sector, jobs. For Bell, as we shall see in a moment, a ‘service
society’ is a post-industrial one, too.
However, prior to elaborating that, we must emphasise that service sector
employment is, in a very real sense, the end of a long history of transfers of
employment from one sector to another. The reasoning behind this is straightforward:
the ethos of ‘more for less’ impels automation of first agriculture and
later industry, thereby getting rid of the farm hand and later the industrial
working class while simultaneously ensuring increased wealth. To thinkers like
Bell these redundancies are a positive development since, towards the end of
the ‘industrial society’ era, it at once gets rid of unpleasant manual labour and,
simultaneously, it abolishes radical politics – or, more accurately, Marxist political
agitation, since, asks Bell pointedly, how can the proletarian struggle be
waged when the proletariat is disappearing? At the same time, while automation
abolishes the working class, it still leaves the wider society in receipt of continually
expanding wealth. And society, receiving these additional resources, acts
according to Christian Engel’s theorem to develop novel needs that use up these
additional resources. 3 As has been said earlier, this is what leads to an expansion
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