De-Industrialization

4. Through processes of globalization and automation, the value and importance to
the economy of blue-collar, unionized work, including manual labor (e.g.,
assembly-line work) decline, and those of professional workers (e.g., scientists,
creative-industry professionals, and IT professionals) grow in value and
prevalence.
5. Behavioral and information sciences and technologies are developed and
implemented (e.g., behavioral economics, information architecture, cybernetics,
game theory and information theory.)
Origins
Daniel Bell popularized the term through his 1974 work The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society. Although some have credited Bell with coining the term, French
sociologist Alain Touraine published in 1969 the first major work on the post-industrial
society. The term was also used extensively by social philosopher Ivan Illich in his 1973
paper Tools for Conviviality. and appears occasionally in Leftist texts throughout the
mid-to-late 1960s.
The term has grown and changed as it became mainstream. The term is now used by
admen such as Seth Godin, public policy PhD's such as Keith Boeckelman, and
sociologists such as Neil Fligstein and Ofer Sharone. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton
even used the term to describe Chinese growth in a round-table discussion in Shanghai
in 1998.
Valuation of Knowledge
The post-industrialized society is marked by an increased valuation of knowledge. This
itself is unsurprising, having been foreshadowed in Daniel Bell’s presumption as to how
economic employment patterns will evolve in such societies. He asserts employment
will grow faster in the tertiary (and quaternary) sector relative to employment in the
primary and secondary sector and that the tertiary (and quaternary) sectors will take
precedence in the economy. This will continue to occur such that the “impact of the
expert” will expand and power will be monopolized by knowledge.
As tertiary and quaternary sector positions are essentially knowledge-oriented, this will
result in a restructuring of education, at least in its nuances. The “new power… of the
expert” consequently gives rise to the growing role of universities and research
institutes in post-industrial societies. Post-industrial societies themselves become
oriented around these places of knowledge production and production of experts as
their new foci. Consequently, the greatest beneficiaries in the post-industrial society are
young urban professionals. As a new, educated, and politicized generation more
impassioned by liberalism, social justice, and environmentalism the shift of power into
their hands, as a result of their knowledge endowments, is often cited as a good thing.
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