The following points highlight the five main components of post-industrial society. The components are: 1. Economic Sector 2. Occupational Distribution 3. Axial Principle 4. Future Orientation 5. Decision-Making.
Component # 1. Economic Sector:
The Change from a Goods Producing to a Service Economy:
Bell explains the change thus – Many agrarian societies (India, for instance) have a high proportion of persons engaged in services of a personal sort (e.g. household servants) because labour is cheap and usually unemployed. In an industrial society different services tend to increase because of the need for auxiliary help for production, namely, transportation and distribution.
In a post-industrial society, however, the emphasis is on a different kind of service. Personal services (retail stores, hair-cutting saloons, laundries, garages, etc.,), business services (banking and finance, real estate, insurance), services related to transportation, communication and utilities are not distinctive features of this society.
What is unique for post-industrial society are services related to health, education, research, and government. This category represents the expansion of a new intelligentsia in the universities, research organisations, professions and government.
Component # 2. Occupational Distribution:
The Pre-Eminence of the Professional and Technical Class:
The post-industrial society is characterised by a change in occupational distributions— that is, not only where people work, but the kind of work they do. To a large extent, occupation is the most important determinant of class and stratification in the society.
Within industrial societies, the semi-skilled worker has been the single Largest category in the labour force. In a post-industrial society the expansion of the service economy has naturally brought about a shift to white-collar occupations.
By 1956 in the U.S.A. the number of white-collar workers, for the first time in the history of industrial civilization, out-numbered the blue-collar workers in the occupational structure. Since then, the ratio has been widening steadily. By 1970, the white-collar workers out-numbered the blue-collar by more than five to four.
The most startling change has been the growth of professional and technical employment—jobs that usually require some college education—at a rate twice that of the average. While the growth rate of the professional and technical class as a whole has been twice that of the average labour force, the growth rate of the scientists and engineers has been triple that of the working population.
Component # 3. Axial Principle:
The Centrality of Theoretical Knowledge as the Source of Innovation and of Policy Formulation for the Society:
Industrial society is concerned with the co-ordination of machines and men for the production of goods. Post-industrial society is organised around knowledge for the purpose of social control and the directing of innovation and change. This, in turn gives rise to new social relationships and new structures. Knowledge has, of course, been necessary in the functioning of any society.
What is distinctive about the post-industrial society is the change in the character of knowledge itself. What has become crucially important for the organisation of decisions and the direction of change is the emphasis on theoretical knowledge, as opposed to empirical knowledge and the codification of knowledge into abstract systems of symbols that can be used to illuminate many and varied areas of experience.
Every modern society now lives by innovation and social control of change, and tries to anticipate the future in order to plan ahead. The need for forecasting and planning makes theoretical knowledge so crucial.
Component # 4. Future Orientation:
The Control of Technology and Technological Assessment:
Modern industrial economies became possible when societies were able to create new institutional mechanisms to build up savings (through banks, insurance companies, equity capital through the stock market, and government levies, that is, borrowings and taxes), and to use this money for investment.
The ability consistently to re-invest annually at least 10 per cent of GNP became the basis of what W. W. Rostow called the ‘take-off stage for economic growth. But a modern society, in order to avoid stagnation or maturity has to open up new technological frontiers in order to maintain productivity and higher standards of living.
Marx argued that a capitalist economy has to expand or die. Later Marxists, such as Lenin or Rosa Luxemburg, assumed that such expansion necessarily has to be geographical. Hence the theory of imperialism. But, contrary to these assumptions, the greater measure of expansion has been technological which prevented an industrial society from stagnation. Without new technology, how can growth be maintained?
The development of new forecasting and “mapping techniques” makes possible a novel phase in economic history—the conscious, planned advance of technological change, and hence the reduction of uncertainty about the economic future.
Component # 5. Decision-Making:
The Creation of a New Intellectual Technology:
Whitehead wrote:
“The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. A new method entered into life. In order to understand our epoch, we can neglect all the details of change, such as railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning machines, syndetic dyes. We must concentrate on the method itself; that is the real novelty, which has broken up the foundations of the old civilization”.
One can say in the same spirit that the methodological promise of the second half of the 20th century is the management of organized complexity (the complexity of large organizations and systems, the complexity of theory with a large number of variables), the identification and implementation of strategies for rational choice in games against nature and games between persons, and the development of a new intellectual technology which, by the end of the 20th century, many be as important in human affairs as machine technology has been for the past century and a half.
What is distinctive about the new intellectual technology which, by the end of the 20th century, may be as important in human affairs as machine technology has been for the past century and a half. What is distinctive about the new intellectual technology is its effort to define rational action and to identify the means of achieving it.
All situations involve constraints and contrasting alternatives. And all action takes place under conditions of certainty, risk or uncertainty. Certainty exists when the constraints are fixed and known. Risk means that a set of possible outcomes is known and the probabilities for each outcome can be stated. Uncertainty is the case when the set of possible outcomes can be stipulated, but the probabilities are completely unknown.
Further, situations can be defined as ‘games against nature’ in which the constraints are environmental, or ‘games between persons in which each person’s course of action is necessarily shaped by the reciprocal judgments of the others intentions. In all these situations, the desirable action is a strategy that leads to the optimal or best solution, i.e. one which either maximizes the outcome or tries to minimise the losses.
The professional and technical classes enjoy a pre-eminence in the social hierarchy of the post-industrial society. ‘Knowledge’ is the new principle of stratification in such a society.