Post-industrial society describes a social formation in which the production of services displaces the production of goods as the principal economic activity, and in which the strategic resource is no longer capital or raw material but codified knowledge. The term is associated above all with Daniel Bell, whose 1973 study treated the shift as a change in the axial principle of social organisation rather than merely a change in the mix of jobs.
How it works
Bell distinguished pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial societies by the kind of work performed and the resource contested. Pre-industrial work is a game against nature in agriculture and extraction; industrial work is a game against fabricated nature, organised around machinery and energy; post-industrial work is a game between persons, in health, education, research, government, finance and leisure. Four features follow: the growth of the service sector; the pre-eminence of the professional and technical class; the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation, so that invention proceeds from science rather than from tinkering; and the rise of intellectual technology — modelling, simulation, systems analysis — in decision-making. Bell also expected control over scientific institutions and the universities to become a central political question.
Points of debate
Critics reply that services have not escaped capitalist relations. Braverman's argument on deskilling applies to clerical and service work as much as to the factory, and much service employment is low-paid and routinised rather than professional. Manufacturing did not disappear but relocated, so post-industrialism in one region rests on industrialism in another. Castells recast the thesis as an informational mode of development to keep the technological insight without Bell's consensual politics.
The fit for India is uneven. India shows an early expansion of services alongside a manufacturing sector that never absorbed the workforce, giving a service economy whose lower reaches are informal and insecure rather than knowledge-intensive. Both software professionals and the delivery worker inhabit the service sector.
For the UPSC answer
Attribute the thesis to Bell with the shift in axial principle and the four features. Then qualify it — Braverman on deskilling, and India's leap from agriculture to services without full industrialisation, which produces post-industrial occupations coexisting with mass informal labour.
References & further reading
- Bell, D. (1973). The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. Basic Books.
- Touraine, A. (1971). The Post-Industrial Society. Random House.
- Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell.