Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
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conduct of life in contemporary societies. Nonetheless, what cannot be seen is
any convincing evidence or argument for the view that all this signals a new
type of society, ‘post-industrialism’, which distinguishes the present sharply from
the past. To the extent that this criticism is valid, all talk of developments in the
informational domain representing the coming of ‘post-industrial society’ must
be refused.
It has been demonstrated that Daniel Bell’s division of society into separate
realms, and his further division of the economy into distinct employment sectors
– a principle that is essential to support the entire structure of his post-industrial
model – collapses on closer examination. Services, white-collar work, even professional
occupations have all grown, and they have all manifested greater
concern with handling, storing and processing information, but, as we saw, there
is no reason here for interpreting their expansion as consequent upon more
wealth flowing from a ‘goods-producing’ sector to a separate realm of consumption.
On the contrary, services have expanded to perpetuate and secure an
established, interconnected economy (and, indeed, wider political and cultural
relations). There is no novel, ‘post-industrial’ society: the growth of service occupations
and associated developments highlight the continuities of the present with the past.
For the same reasons, more information and more information employees,
a starting point for so many enthusiasts struck by the differences between the
present and earlier periods, cannot be taken to signal a new social system. As
Krishan Kumar (1992) bluntly has it, ‘the acceptance of the growing importance
of information technology, even an information revolution, is one thing; the
acceptance of the idea of a new Industrial Revolution, a new kind of society, a
new age, is quite another’ (p. 52).
Bell’s emphasis on ‘theoretical knowledge’, analytically if not substantively
separable from the more quantitative changes referred to above, has greater
appeal than his ‘from manufacture to service’ theme of post-industrialism. Being
a qualitative change, with profound consequences for planning and control of
social affairs, it is an arresting thought for anyone interested in social change and
the possible significance of information/knowledge in the contemporary world.
Intuitively it is persuasive, though it is underdeveloped in the writing of Bell and
distinctively secondary to his emphasis on occupational change. In the writing of
Bell it is either too vague to be readily applicable or, where made more precise,
serious doubts may be cast on its novelty and weight. Nonetheless, it is in my
view the most interesting and persuasive argument for our inhabiting an ‘information
society’ today and the reason why I return to it later in this book.
We remain with the fact of living in a world in which information and informational
activity forms an essential part of daily organisation and of much labour.
On any measure the scale and scope of information has accelerated dramatically.
Understandably, social scientists yearn to explain and account for this development.
Our conclusion here is that it cannot be interpreted in Bell’s ‘post-industrial’
terminology. Bell’s ambition to impose the title ‘post-industrialism’ on the ‘information
society’ simply will not do. If we want to understand the spread and
significance of information in the present age, we must look elsewhere.
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