The Coming Of Post-Industrial Society

by Bell, Daniel

• ISBN13: 9780465097135
• ISBN10: 0465097138
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1976-07-21
• Publisher: Basic Books

Summary

In 1976, Daniel Bell's 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 society's 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 inThe Coming of the Post-Industrial Societythat 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."

Author Biography

Daniel Bell is the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University and Scholar-in-Residence at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of editor of 17 books, two of which, The End of Ideology and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, were listed among the 100 Most Influential Books since the Second World War (TLS, October 1995).

Table of Contents

The Axial Age of Technology Foreword: 1999	ix
Foreword: 1976	lxxxvii
Preface	ci
Introduction	1	(46)
From Industrial to Post-Industrial Society: Theories of Social Development	47	(74)
From Goods to Services: The Changing Shape of the Economy	121	(44)
The Dimensions of Knowledge and Technology: The New Class Structure of Post-Industrial Society	165	(102)
The Subordination of the Corporation: The Tension between the Economizing and Sociologizing Modes	267	(32)
Social Choice and Social Planning: The Adequacy of Our Concepts and Tools	299	(40)
``Who Will Rule?'' Politicians and Technocrats in the Post-Industrial Society	339	(152)
CODA
An Agenda for the Future	369	(122)
1. How Social Systems Change	371	(7)
2. The Future of Science	378	(30)
3. Meritocracy and Equality	408	(48)
4. The End of Scarcity?	456	(19)
5. Culture and Consciousness	475	(16)
Name Index	491	(8)
Subject Index	499