Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
views on information that deserve attention. Describing post-industrial society,
Bell sees not only an expansion in information as a result of more service sector
employees. There is another, more qualitatively distinct feature of information
in PIS. This is Bell’s identification of what he calls ‘theoretical knowledge’. Now,
while an expansion of professionals will certainly increase the number of people
using and contributing to ‘theoretical knowledge’, we are not considering here a
mere quantitative – and hence relatively easily measured (numbers of lawyers,
scientists and so forth) – phenomenon. It is, rather, a feature of PIS which distinctively
marks it off from all other regimes and which has profound consequences.
It is not even altogether clear how it fits with much of Bell’s other descriptions
of PIS (occupational changes, sectoral shifts and the like), since ‘theoretical knowledge’s’
centrality to PIS does not, in principle at least, require major changes in
jobs or, indeed, the nature of work.
It does, however, have enormously significant effects on all aspects of life.
Bell’s argument is that ‘what is radically new today is the codification of theoretical
knowledge and its centrality for innovation, both of new knowledge and
for economic goods and services’ (Bell, 1989, p. 169). This feature allows Bell to
depict
[t]he post-industrial society [as] a knowledge society [because] the sources
of innovation are increasingly derivative from research and development
(and more directly, there is a new relation between science and technology
because of the centrality of theoretical [sic] knowledge).
(Bell, 1973, p. 212)
The constituents of ‘theoretical knowledge’ can be better understood by
contrasting PIS with ‘industrial’ society. In the past innovations were made, on
the whole, by ‘talented amateurs’ who, encountering a practical problem, worked
in an empirical and trial-and-error way towards a solution. One thinks, for
example, of George Stephenson developing the railway engine: he was faced by
the practical difficulty of transporting coal from easily accessible collieries situated
a distance from rivers and in response he invented the train which ran on
tracks and was powered by steam. Stephenson accomplished this without benefit
of advanced level education and knowledge of scientific principles of steam
power or traction. Or, again, we have James Watt’s steam engine, developed
from his attempts to improve the functioning of Thomas Newcomen’s earlier
model. And in the early twentieth century we have Henry Ford, a talented
tinkerer who pioneered the automobile without benefit of formal schooling in
engineering, but with an insatiable curiosity and an enviably practical dexterity.
In contrast, PIS is characterised by ‘the primacy of theory over empiricism
and the codification of knowledge into abstract systems of symbols that . . . can
be used to illuminate many different and varied areas of experience’ (Bell, 1973,
p. 20). This means that innovation nowadays is premised on known theoretical
principles – for example, computer science takes off from Alan Turing’s seminal
paper ‘On Computable Numbers’ which set out principles of binary mathematics,
and the extraordinary miniaturisation of integrated circuits that has allowed the
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