Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
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services. People must be spending more on services, argues Bell, since there are
so many more service employees around now. Initially this does appear plausible.
However, it is mistaken, and it is a mistake which stems from Bell’s failure
to look at what service workers actually do. As we have seen already, a great deal
of service work can be accounted for by differentiation in the division of labour
aimed at making more effective the production of goods.
Another major problem with Bell’s account is his failure to consider that
people might satisfy their service requirements by investing in goods rather than
in employing service workers to do it for them. Gershuny and Miles come to this
proposition by reversing Engel’s theorem, wondering whether the case has not
been that, rather than increased riches leading to extra expenditure on personal
services to satisfy needs, a relative increase in the cost of service workers, along
with cheapened service products becoming available, might have led to the satisfaction
of service requirements through the purchase of goods rather than through
the employment of people. Put more directly: people want services as their
standard of living increases (Engel’s theorem conceded), but they are not
prepared to pay the price of people doing the services for them when there are
service products available on the market that they can buy and use to do the
service for themselves – for example, people want a convenient way of cleaning
their homes, but because they are not prepared to pay wages to a cleaner they
get a vacuum cleaner and do it for themselves; or they would like their home
decorated regularly, but because they will not pay for commercial painters they
invest in the do-it-yourself (DIY) equipment and get on with it themselves.
Gershuny and Miles agree that Engel’s theorem still holds, and people do
indeed want services, but the cost of having that service performed by another
person becomes unattractive when set against the price of buying a machine to
do it. In turn, this consumer demand for services in the form of goods ‘can . . .
produce pressure for innovation in service provision’ (Gershuny and Miles,
1983, p. 42), which means that service requirements impact on manufacture itself.
Instances such as the automobile industry and consumer electronics are pointers
to the trend of fulfilment of service needs by goods rather than through employment
of service workers. Gershuny himself claims, with impressive empirical
documentation, that the spread of service products signifies the growth of a ‘selfservice
economy’ – almost the antithesis of Bell’s ‘post-industrial service society’
(Gershuny, 1978, p. 81) – which is likely to continue to intrude into both service
sector and service-occupation employment. As he puts it:
careful examination of changes in employment and consumption patterns
. . . reveals, not the gradual emergence of a ‘service economy’, but its precise
opposite. Where we would expect, according to . . . [Bell’s] dogma, to find a
considerable rise in the consumption of services, we find instead a remarkable
fall in service consumption as a proportion of the total. Instead of
buying services, households seem increasingly to be buying – in effect
investing in – durable goods which allow final consumers to produce services
for themselves.
(Gershuny, 1978, p. 8)
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