Post-industrial society

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term post-industrial society was coined by the French sociologist Alain Touraine and further theoretically developed by the American sociologist Daniel Bell (here also post-industrial society ). The post-industrial society is the society that follows the industrial society . In it, labor and capital resources are replaced by knowledge and information as the main sources of economic value creation . Technological progress enables the post-industrial society to focus onManufacturing industry transfers to the service industry (see also service society ).

background

In his 1969 book, a revised collection of essays, Touraine vacillates between the attributes of “post-industrial”, “technocratic” and “programmed” society.

“A new type of society is emerging before our eyes. They will be called post-industrial societies if one wishes to mark the distance that separates them from the industrial societies that preceded them [...]. They will be called technocratic societies if one is to give them the name of the power that rules them. They will be called programmed societies if one tries to define them first by the nature of their mode of production and their economic organization. "

- Alain Touraine : The post-industrial society

In his basic work The Coming of Post Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (German title: Die nachindustrielle Gesellschaft ), Bell emphasized above all the importance of the change in the social structure of society . In order to take into account a large number of different components of social change, he analyzes so-called axial structures in order to clarify the question of the central principle, “the central axis around which society revolves”.

"The concept of the 'post-industrial society' emphasizes the central position of theoretical knowledge as the axis around which new technologies, economic growth and the stratification of society are organized."

- Daniel Bell : The post-industrial society

features

For Touraine, the post-industrial society is also motivated by economic growth. In contrast to the capitalist industrial society, however, social conflicts are no longer defined within a fundamental economic mechanism. Rather, the totality of social and cultural activities is more or less directly involved in social conflicts. For Touraine, the lines of conflict run less between capital and labor than between economic-political “apparatuses” and dependence. Economic progress is no longer characterized by the vague accumulation of capital and the organization of wage labor, but also increasingly by scientific and technical research, vocational training and retraining as well as by the "mobility of information and production factors". The major social conflicts therefore point beyond the company and the production area.

For Bell, there are two main characteristics that characterize post-industrial society: "[...] the central position of theoretical knowledge and the increasing preponderance of the service economy over the manufacturing economy" ( Daniel Bell ). For Bell, the central position of theoretical knowledge exists when there is an increasing dependence on science as a means of innovation and as an organizational principle of technological change. He also characterizes the services of post-industrial society as primarily human and academic services. While in capitalist society the axial mechanism was private property, so Bell, in post-industrial society this will be theoretical knowledge.

Information society

Bell also uses the term information society for the post-industrial society . "If the industrial society was a goods-producing society, the post-industrial society is an information society", in which production is more dependent on information than on raw materials.

Bell describes the post-industrial society not only as an information society, but also as a knowledge society, since in his view, on the one hand, innovations are increasingly being driven by research and development and, on the other hand, society is placing increasing emphasis on knowledge. As evidence he leads u. a. the increasing share of employees in this area. Because of the central meaning that the term knowledge has in his concept, he is often classified as a representative of the knowledge society .

Bell defines the term knowledge from a science-centered perspective: "For me, knowledge means: new judgments (from research and science) or new presentation of older views (in textbooks or in the classroom)". Bell's society is therefore above all an academic and scientifically based society, knowledge is regarded as scientific knowledge.

Division into classes

According to Bell, the following three classes are establishing themselves in post-industrial society:

  1. Technical-academic class with a majority of scientists
  2. Class of engineers and professors
  3. Class of the "academic mid-level staff", technicians, assistants, etc.

Advancement to higher classes is possible through academic education.

Further development

The development from industrial to post-industrial society has been taken up several times, with the new form of society being named and viewed differently. The futurologist Alvin Toffler understands it as a prerequisite for what he describes in 1970 in his work of the same name with Future Shock : the sickness of those structural social changes that flood people with stimuli, overwhelm people with information, overwhelm them with decision-making stress and with consumer-oriented behavior Throwaway society overrun. A decade later, Toffler came up with the term “Third Wave” (1980) for this phase that followed the agricultural and industrial wave.

See also

literature

Footnotes

  1. ↑ p. 7
  2. ^ Already in 1971 Daniel Bell published an article entitled The Post-Industrial Society: the Evolution of an Idea in the journal Survey ( Issue 17, Issue No. 2, March 1971, pp. 102-168 ).
  3. ↑ p. 112
  4. ^ Alain Touraine: The Post-Industrial Society. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 9 ff., ISBN 3-518-06370-7 .
  5. ^ Alain Touraine: The Post-Industrial Society. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 173, ISBN 3-518-06370-7 .
  6. ↑ Alvin Toffler: The third wave - future opportunity. Goldmann, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-442-11350-4 .