Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
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of service sector employment. Society is richer? New needs are imagined? These
result in continually increasing services such as in hotels, tourism and psychiatry.
Indeed, it should be noted that needs are truly insatiable. Provided there is money
to spend, people will manage to generate additional needs such as masseurs,
participative sports and psychotherapists. Moreover, service employment has a
distinctive trait that makes it especially difficult to automate. Since it is personorientated
and usually intangible, productivity-increases courtesy of machines are
not really feasible. How does one begin to automate a social worker, a nurse or
a teacher?
In short, services will increase the more productivity/wealth is squeezed out
of agriculture and industry, but there is not much fear that jobs in services will
themselves be automated. Because of this, an evolutionary process that has told
decisively throughout the pre-industrial and industrial epochs loses its force as
we find ourselves in a mature PIS. With the coming of the post-industrial society
we reach an end of history as regards job displacement due to technical innovations.
As such, employment is secured.
The role of information
If one can accept that sustained increases in wealth result in service jobs predominating,
one may still wonder where information comes into the equation. Why
should Bell feel able to state boldly that ‘[t]he post-industrial society is an information
society’ (1973, p. 467) and that a ‘service economy’ indicates the arrival
of post-industrialism? It is not difficult to understand information’s place in the
theorisation; Bell explains with a number of connected observations. Crucially it
involves the character of life in different epochs. In pre-industrial society life is
‘a game against nature’ where ‘[o]ne works with raw muscle power’ (Bell, 1973,
p. 126); in the industrial era, where the ‘machine predominates’ in a ‘technical
and rationalised’ existence, life ‘is a game against fabricated nature’ (p. 126). In
contrast to both, life in a ‘post-industrial society [which] is based on services . . .
is a game between persons’ (p. 127). ‘[W]hat counts is not raw muscle power, or
energy, but information’ (p. 127).
In other words, where once one had struggled to eke a living from the
land and had to rely on brawn and traditional ways of doing things (preindustrialism),
and where later one was tied to the exigencies of machine production
(industrialism), with the emergence of a service/post-industrial society
the material of work for the majority is information. After all, a ‘game between
persons’ is necessarily one in which information is the basic resource. What do
bankers do but handle money transactions? What do therapists do but conduct
a dialogue with their clients? What do advertisers do but create and transmit
images and symbols? What do teachers do but communicate knowledge? Service
work is information work. Necessarily, then, the predominance of service employment
leads to greater quantities of information. To restate this in Bell’s later
terminology, it is possible to distinguish three types of work, namely ‘extractive’,
‘fabrication’ and ‘information activities’ (Bell, 1979, p. 178), the balance of which
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