With all the popular rhetoric floating around about the "new information age" these days, I thought it might be interesting and useful to look back at Daniel Bell's works from the 60s and 70s. His Brave New World-ish scenario of dominance by a technocratic policy elite is in many ways eerily familiar...and at the risk of being charged with dragging in the "old hat" again, thought I'd serve up a few major points for your consideration... In his pathbreaking 1973 study "The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting," Bell argued that there would soon emerge a society "organized around knowledge for the purpose of social control" and the directing of innovation and change; that the West was on the brink of a new kind of information-led, service-oriented society which would replace the industrial-based model that had been dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He specifies five main dimensions, or components, of the term "post- industrial", and to my mind, really seems to have nailed it before anyone else: Economic Sector: change from goods-producing to a service-oriented economy Occupational distribution: pre-eminence of the professional and technical class Axial principle: the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation and of policy formulation of the society Future orientation: the control of technology and technical assessment Decision-making: the creation of a new "intellectual technology" The transition from industrial to post-industrial society (PIS) occurs through the extension of technical rationality, the advance of scientific rationality into the economic, social and political spheres. Where once the industrialist was dominant, now the technocrat, planners and scientists dominate. According to Bell, the government becomes increasingly instrumental in the management of the economy and less is left to market forces. Instead of relying on the invisible hand, the post-industrial society will work toward directing and engineering society. This is an extension of the thought of Weber (rationalization) Durkheim and Saint-Simon (the father of technocracy) and Taylor (scientific management school). The "birth years" of the post-industrial society were the post WWII years which saw great technological developments such as: transformation of matter into energy - atom bomb and the first digital computer. What is characteristic of post-industrial society is not just the shift from property or political criteria to knowledge as the base of power, but the character of knowledge itself. Theoretical knowledge it has become central, it is the "matrix of innovation". Bell anticipates that the key organization of the future will be the university (replacing the business firm). Prestige and status will be rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities. In the PIS, technocrats exercise authority by virtue of technical competence. Their emergence as power holders signals the emergence of efficiency, instrumentalism, and pragmatic problem solving. This manifests Weber's warning that we are becoming "specialists without heart". "It is in this conception of rationality as functional, as rationalization rather than reason, that one confronts the overriding crisis of the technocratic mode." In this mode statistics take the place of history in an attempt to understand society. "The virtue of belief in history was that some law of reason was operative: History either had a teleology as defined by revelation, or some powers of emergence or transcendence that were implicit in man's creativity (Hegel's spirit)." Here are some excellent quotes from the preface: "Finally, the deepest tensions are those between the culture, whose axial direction is anti-institutional and antinomian, and the social structure which is ruled by an economizing and technocratic mode. It is this tension which is ultimately the most fundamental problem of the post-industrial society." "What I am arguing in this book is that the major source of structural change in this society--the change in the mode of innovation in the relation of science to technology and in public policy-- is the change in the character of of knowledge: the exponential growth and branching of science, the rise of a new intellectual technology, the creation of systematic research through R&D budgets, and as the calyx of all this, the codification of theoretical knowledge." Any thoughts? Also, I'd be interested in any other authors (and recommended works)you find useful re. these issues... thanks! ~Faustine.
