Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
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indeed of the application of new technologies themselves, is at root all a matter
of ‘rationalisation’. To Professor Bell ‘the axial principle of the social structure
is economising – a way of allocating resources according to principles of least
cost, substitutability, optimisation, maximisation, and the like’ (p. 12, original
emphasis).
Again, what we see here is Bell offering a remarkably familiar – and vigorously
contested – account of change (cf. Janowitz, 1974). And it is one that lies
further behind his argument that productivity comes from technological innovation.
Bell explicitly refuses the charge of technological determinism. But he can
claim this only because there is a cause of change still more foundational and
determining – rationalisation, the hidden dynamic of ‘more for less’ that drives
technology itself. As Bell’s foremost critic, Krishan Kumar, appositely observes:
‘Almost every feature of Bell’s post-industrial society can be seen as an extension
and a distillation of Weber’s account of the relentless process of “rationalisation”
in western industrial societies’ (Kumar, 1978, p. 235). It might be objected that it
is possible to be intellectually conservative while still satisfactorily explaining
radical social change to a new type of society. And this may be so, but not, I
think, in Bell’s scenario. This is because, in his derivation from Weber, what
we are alerted to in his writing is restatement of arguments which themselves
emphasise not breaks with the past, but rather continuities.
Bell’s dependence on themes central to nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury
social scientists whose concern was to explore the emergence and
direction of industrialism undermines his case for PIS being novel. After all, it is
odd, to say the least, to borrow arguments from classical social theorists that
were developed to understand the development of industrialism, only to assert
that they actually account for the emergence of a new, post-industrial society.
Krishan Kumar again comments tellingly:
post-industrial theorists do not seem to realise the significance of acknowledging
their intellectual mentors. They do not apparently see that to be
drawing so heavily and so centrally on the classic analyses of industrialism
makes it highly implausible that they can be describing the transition to a
new order of society. In what can the novelty of that order consist, if the
society continues to be dominated by the persistence of the central and, so
to speak, defining process of classic industrialism?
(Kumar, 1978, p. 237)
The emphasis on the role of ‘rationalisation’ leads Bell down a number of
well-trodden paths, each of which carries warning signs from fellow social scientists.
Prominent among these is that, from his argument that all industrial societies
‘are organised around a principle of functional efficiency whose desideratum
is to get “more for less” and to choose the more “rational” course of action’ (Bell,
1973, pp. 75–6), he is inevitably endorsing a convergence theory of development
which ignores, or at least makes subordinate to this ‘rationalisation’, differences
of politics, culture and history (Kleinberg, 1973). Insisting that there are ‘common
characteristics for all industrial societies: the technology is everywhere the same;
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