Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
untenable and that it is possible to demonstrate that there are identifiable
continuities that have a systemic reach.
But, before we proceed to these more substantial arguments, there is another
reason to suspect the idea of a new ‘post-industrial’ era emerging. This may be
explored by examining the reasons Bell offers by way of explanation of the transition
from the old to the new regime. When we ask why these changes occur,
Bell appeals to arguments that are remarkably familiar in social science. Such is
this intellectual conservatism that we have grounds to be sceptical about the
validity of his claim that a radically new system is emerging.
Let me clarify this. As we have seen, the reason for change according to Bell
is that increases in productivity allow employees to shift from agriculture and
industry to services. Productivity increases come from technological innovations
that gave us more food from fewer farmers and more goods from factories with
fewer workers. As Bell says: ‘[T]echnology . . . is the basis of increased productivity,
and productivity has been the transforming fact of economic life’ (1973,
p. 191). It is this productivity that lays the basis for PIS since its beneficence
pays for all those service occupations.
What is particularly noticeable about this is that it is a very familiar form of
sociological reasoning and, being an expression of technological determinism, one
which is deeply suspect in social science. It carries two especially dubious implications:
one, that technologies are the decisive agents of social change; two, that
technologies are themselves aloof from the social world, though they have
enormous social effects. Where, critics ask, are people, capital, politics, classes,
interests in all of this (Webster and Robins, 1986, ch. 2)? Can it be seriously
suggested that technologies are at once the motor of change and simultaneously
untouched by social relations? Whatever happened to the values and powers that
determine R&D budgets? To corporate priorities in investing in innovation? To
government preferences for this project rather than for that one?
More important than details of the objection to technological determinism
here is the need to appreciate fully the more general character of Bell’s intellectual
conservatism. This old proposition, that technology is the driving force of
change (traceable through a lineage at least to Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste
Comte writing during the early stages of industrialisation in the closing years of
the eighteenth century), is heavily criticised in virtually every sociology primer.
Its deep-rootedness in the history of social thought really must lead one to query
Bell’s assertion of the novelty of ‘post-industrialism’.
Moreover, another source of his views reinforces this suspicion. This is
Bell’s indebtedness to Max Weber – a major founder of classical sociology who
wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the industrial changes
taking place around him – and in particular his interpretation of Weber as the
major thinker on ‘rationalisation’. Bell tells us that Weber thought ‘the master
key of Western society was rationalisation’ (Bell, 1973, p. 67), which, in Bell’s
terms, means the growth of an ethos of ‘more for less’ or, less prosaically, ‘the
spread through law of a spirit of functional efficiency and measurement, of an
“economising” attitude (maximisation, optimisation, least cost) towards not only
material resources but all life’ (p. 67). Put otherwise, the increase in productivity,
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