Post industrial society(PIS) literally means the society following industrialial society. Scholars believe that industrial revolution created a need for services , and the advent of service sector forms the post industrial society. Daniel bell is one of its advocate. He, in his work " The coming of post industrial society " expounds that post industrial society is characterized by change in the erstwhile social structure and the economy, which now is inclined more towards science and technology. He believes that information/ intellectual society is implict in and integral to post industrial society. To get insights into the nature of pis, we will discuss his work, supplemented with krishna kumar’s work on information society.
Aspects of pis-
Bell suggests that, primarily the change in the the in the the
change in the the in the the social structure is seen in post Industrial
Industrial post Industrial Industrial in post Industrial Industrial post
Industrial Industrial society. The change in economic structure is
intrinsic in the change in social structure. Other changes in political
and cultural dimensions occurred as a result of the change in the social
dimension.
The economy inclined more towards Science and Technology which changed
the social structure of society.
For instance- The increasing bureaucratization of science and the
increasing specialisation of intellectual work into minute parts are one
feature of post-industrial society for example.
Since the value of the technological component of information is growing
in post-industrial society, it forces the hierophants of the new society
(scientists, engineers and technocrats) either to contend with politicians or
to become their allies. This makes the relationship between the social system
and the political order one of the major power problems in a post-industrial
society. Thus, changing social structure resulted in a change in
political dimension.
Similarly, the new ways of life that rely heavily on the primacy of
cognitive and analytical awareness started questioning the impulses of culture
that seeks to strengthen self and become increasingly antinomian and
anti-institutional.
Thus, The concept of the postindustrial society is a large
generalization and its meaning can be more easily understood if one specifies
five dimensions or components of the term.
Economic sector: the change from a goods producing to a service
economy;
Occupational distribution: the pre-eminence of the professional and
technical class;
Axial principle: the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source
of innovation and of policy formulation for the society;
Future orientation: the control of technology and technological
assessment;
Decision making: the creation of new "intellectual
technology".
Bell provides certain features of the post industrial society.
Change in economy-
shift towards service sector
Colin Clark suggests that economies could be classified into 3
sector - primary, secondary and tertiary. Here, agriculture was the
primary principal, manufacturing or industrial was the secondary and services
were the tertiary.
He argues that there was an eventual trajectory when nations
became industrialized where a greater proportion of the labour force
would move into output due to sectoral productivity disparities and there
would be a higher demand for services and a resulting change in the slope as
national income rises.
The first and simplest feature of a
post-industrial society by this criterion is that most of the labour
force was no longer engaged in farming or manufacturing button services
that were early described as residue as trade, finance, transport,
health, leisure, science education, and government.
The Pre-eminence of the professional and technical class
Bell explains that the second feature
of post-industrial society is- shift in the distribution of jobs. The beginning
of industrialization created a new phenomenon where the semi-skilled
worker could be trained within a few weeks to perform the simple routine
operations needed in machine work and the semi-skilled worker was the single
largest group in the labour force within industrial societies. With its
focus on office work education and government, the globalisation of the
service sector has brought about a move to White collar occupations and
the most unexpected change has been the growth of skilled and technical
employment in jobs that some college education needs. The growth rate of
scientists and engineers has been triple that of the working population,
while the growth rate of the skilled and technical class as a whole has been
half that of the average labour force.
The primacy of theoretical knowledge
According to bell, the
post-industrial society is structured around information for the purpose
of social regulation and the path of innovation and transition, while the
industrial society is the coordination of machines and men for the production
of goods, which in turn gives rise to new social relationships and new
systems that have to be controlled politically. The change was seen
in the relationship between science and technology.
For instance- in a fundamentally
new way, modern war has connected science to technology. The symbolic
fusion of science and war of the atom bomb in World War II, which can be
seen as a demonstration that a sequence of operations beginning in a scientific
laboratory can lead to an event of the magnitude and suddenness of a
mythological event. Also, The term "research and
development" symbolises the convergence of science, technology and
economics in recent years (R&D).
The science-based industries that
increasingly dominate society's manufacturing sector have evolved from
this, providing the lead in product cycles for advanced industrial
societies, but these science-based industries and related industries that
originated in the nineteenth century are largely dependent on theoretical
work prior to development. Progress in this area is increasingly based
on the primacy of theoretical work and points the way to empirical
confirmation and in essence, theoretical knowledge is increasingly becoming the
strategic resource for the axial definition of a society and institutions
where theoretical knowledge is codified and interest becomes the evolving
society's axial structures.
The rise of new intellectual technology
The role of intellectual
technology and science in social change was the subject of Daniel Bell and
how they constitute an important feature of post-industrial society. The
British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead declared that the "invention
of the method of invention was the greatest invention of the 19th
century."
There was a convergence between
science and engineering in the second half of the 20th century, which
culminated in the transformation of the essence of technology. Management of
structured complexity was the methodological promise of this
time.
Warren Weaver presented
"organised complexity," meaning complexity of large organisations
and processes, as well as complexity of theory with a large number of
variables. It is the administration of large-scale structures with large
numbers of interacting factors that need to be organised to accomplish
clear objectives.
Daniel Bell called the new
development as “intellectual technology” for two reasons:
Firstly, technology is the use of
scientific information in a reproducible manner to determine ways of
doing things. The Algorithm Replacement is an Intellectual Science. In an
automated system or a computer programme or a series of instructions
based on some statistical or mathematical formula, 'Algorithms' are
embodied.
The second explanation is that
the modern mathematical instruments would have been mostly of
intellectual interests with very low resolving power without the computer. One
of the distinctive features of the new intellectual technology was that
rational acts were specified and the means of achieving them were
established.
The aim of intellectual
technology was to achieve the social ordering of mass society. There are
hundreds of choices we make, and without following a clear template, it is
often unpredictable. Decision theory has become clear and organised in
post-industrial society with the advent of computers.
"The End of Ideology"
was Daniel Bell's book in which he spoke about the role of technological
decision making in society. Professional decision-making may be perceived as
contrary to ideology. Technical decision making is about measuring and applying
an emotional and verbal ideology.
There are two silent revolution
in the relationship between power and social class:
The loss of hereditary power:
this suggests that a ruling class was no longer constituted by the social
upper class of affluent businessmen of their descendants. And the rise of
managers meant that the hands of a particular social group did not have
any continuity of influence.
Changes in the composition of the
labour force: there was a reduction in the number of manufacturing
workers relative to factory non-productive workers and a shift in the
disposition of skilled and specialised workers in the occasional
environment.
Technology is what Joseph
Schumpeter called the open sea. The argument here was that capitalist
society was able to regularise development as it discovered the means to
institutionalise the savings and credit systems that could later be turned
into investment.
In western society during
post-industrial era, there was a huge historical change, in which old
social relations and existing power structures got rapidly eroded.
Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener
in their work on post-industrial society, attached it entirely an
economic meaning.
Next, we are talking about a
"technetronic society" that refers to a society that, particularly in
the field of computers and communications, is culturally, mentally,
socially and economically influenced by the effect of technology and
electronics.
Criticisms:
Bell’s work- “the coming of post
industrial society”, has been criticized on many grounds. Etzioni
Amitai and Paul A Jargowsky, in their work- THE FALSE CHOICE BETWEEN HIGH TECHNOLOGY
AND BASIC INDUSTRY, criticize bell’s work and talk about the limitations of
high technology industry. According to them, basic industries are still playing
a significant role in generating jobs and to the economy. For them, it is wrong
to assume that blue collar workers will decrease when science and technology
increases. Even Non-skilled workers will still get employment instead of being unemployed.
They explain that, with the advent
of post industrial society (dominated by service sector), the basic industry
has not fully declined in other parts of the worlds and are still very much
relevant and in use. They simply point the significance of basic industries in
post industrial society, which is neglected by Daniel bell.
Conclusion:
Daniel Bell spoke of these key
causes of systemic change in society and of the change in the way science
and technology contribute to innovation and the emergence of new intellectual
technologies. With the aid of computers, many equations that can be solved
simultaneously have become simpler.
No comments:
Post a Comment