Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
1
1
1
2
1
1
workforce was in the ‘goods-producing’ sectors and 49 per cent in the service
sector; by 1980 this was projected to change to 32 per cent and 68 per cent
respectively (Bell, 1973, p. 132). This trajectory has been verified by the course
of events, with every data set subsequently produced demonstrating an expansion
of the service sector as a percentage of the total employment, with services
generally in excess of 70 per cent of the total labour force. Hence it does seem
plausible for Bell to perceive a new society, ‘post-industrialism’, being erected on
the basis of its predecessors.
It is important that we understand the reasoning being applied here. Bell is
dividing employment into three separate sectors – primary, secondary, tertiary
(broadly, agriculture, manufacture, services) – but he is also decisively linking
them in the following way. He is arguing that services are dependent on the
outputs from the other two sectors in so far as services consume resources while
agriculture and manufacturing generate them. Put in more vulgar terms, he is
assuming that the wealth-creating sectors of society must subsidise the wealthconsuming
realms. This is, of course, a very familiar nostrum: for example,
schools and hospitals must spend only what ‘we can afford’ from the wealth
created by industry.
A key point to be grasped is that Bell is not simply taking the classification
of employment into different sectors as indicative of the rise of a post-industrial
society. He is also operating with a theory of causation, which underpins the
statistical categories. This is frequently unstated, but it is ever present, and it is
the assumption that increased productivity in the primary and secondary sectors
is ‘the motor that drives the transformative process’ (Browning and Singelmann,
1978, p. 485) towards a service-dominated ‘post-industrial’ era. Unfortunately for
Bell, this presumption is false.
The first and, I think, lesser problem is that Bell’s ‘stages’ view of development
– from pre-industrial, to industrial, finally reaching post-industrialism as
wealth expands sufficiently to allow initially a majority in manufacturing and
later on most moving to service sector employment – is historically cavalier. Just
as the ‘over-tertiarisation’ of Third World countries, now regarded as a sign of
maladjustment, suggests there is no historical necessity that an industrial base be
founded for services, so, too – and here more tellingly against Bell – is there little
evidence to support the notion that advanced societies have progressed from a
situation of majority employment in industrial production to one in services. The
most spectacular change has not been one of transfer from factory to service
employment, but from agriculture to services. Moreover, even in Britain, historically
the most industrialised of countries, the proportion of the labour force occupied
in manufacture was remarkably stable at 45–50 per cent between 1840 and 1980,
and it was the collapse of manufacturing industry owing to recession and government
policies during the 1980s, combined with the feminisation of the workforce,
which dramatically reduced this proportion to less than one-third.
All this is to say that talk of evolutionary shifts from one sector to the next
is at the least dubious. Other than in England, nowhere has a majority of the
population at any time worked in industry, and even in England it is hard to
sustain the argument that employment has shifted in any sequential way. To be
47