Coming of Post-Industrial Society

A 1976 forecast that predicts a radically altered social structure, within thirty to fifty years, by which a more sophisticated technology is employed to harness science toward more instrumental purposes.. Published originally in 1973, Daniel Bells The Coming of Post-Industrial Society was the first book to identify the structural changes in American society leading to the Information Age. The book was widely praised for its major contribution to social theory and translated into French, German, Japanese, Italian, Spanish (and a Russian translation restricted to limited circulation among the ideological elite.)Decades later, the term, the idea and the concept of the post-industrial society have assimilated into common usage, employed by the Unabomber, Margaret Thatcher and President Clinton. Yet the concept and its ramifications have often been misunderstood and in this anniversary re-issue of the original book, Professor Bell has added a new 30,000-word Foreword exploring the future developments of post-industrial society. }In 1976, Daniel Bells historical work predicted a vastly different society developingone that will rely on the economics of information rather than the economics of goods. Bell argued that the new society would not displace the older one but rather overlie some of the previous layers just as the industrial society did not completely eradicate the agrarian sectors of our society. The post-industrial societys dimensions would include the spread of a knowledge class, the change from goods to services and the role of women. All of these would be dependent on the expansion of services in the economic sector and an increasing dependence on science as the means of innovating and organizing technological change.Bell prophetically stated in The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society that we should expect new premises and new powers, new constraints and new questionswith the difference that these are now on a scale that had never been previously imagined in world history. }