W.B.C.S. Main 2018 Question Answer – Sociology – Post Industrial Society – Major Dimensions.

1)What do you understand by post industrial society?Discuss its major dimensions.

In sociology, industrial society refers to a society driven by the use of technology to enable mass production, supporting a large population with a high capacity for division of labour. Such a structure developed in the west in the period of time following the Industrial Revolution, and replaced the agrarian societies of the Pre-modern, Pre-industrial age. Industrial societies are generally mass societies, and may be succeeded by an Information society. They are often contrasted to with the traditional societies. Industrial society is characterized by the use of external energy sources, such as fossil fuels, to increase the rate and scale of production. The production of food is shifted to large commercial farms where the products of industry, such as combine harvesters and fossil fuel based fertilizers, are used to decrease required human labor while increasing production. No longer needed for the production of food, excess labor is moved into these factories where mechanization is utilized to further increase efficiency. As populations grow, and mechanization is further refined, often to the level of automation, many workers shift to expanding service industries.Continue Reading W.B.C.S. Main 2018 Question Answer – Sociology – Post Industrial Society – Major Dimensions.
Industrial society makes urbanization desirable, in part so that workers can be closer to centers of production, and the service industry can provide labor to workers and those that benefit financially from them, in exchange for a piece of production profits with which they can buy goods. This leads to the rise of very large cities and surrounding suburban areas with a high rate of economic activity.
These urban centers require the input of external energy sources in order to overcome the diminishing returns of agricultural consolidation, due partially to the lack of nearby arable land, associated transportation and storage costs, and are otherwise unsustainable. This makes the reliable availability of the needed energy resources high priority in industrial government policies.
Some theoreticians—namely Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells — argue that we are located in the middle of a transformation or transition from industrial societies to post-modern societies. The triggering technology for the change from an agricultural to an industrial organization was steam power, allowing mass production and reducing the agricultural work necessary. Thus many industrial cities are built around rivers. Identified as catalyst or trigger for the transition to post-modern or informational society is global information technology.

Characteristics of Post-Industrial Society

The post-industrial society is largely due to the shift in the kinds of work and the processing of information technology. There is much emphasis on information processing and therefore, sometimes the emerging post-industrial society is also called ‘information society’.

Regarding the nature of the emergence of this new society, there has been a debate among sociologists. Bell, Castells, Gordon, Gorz, Porat and Touraine have been the major contributors to this debate. These theorists have developed the construct of information society or the post-industrial society with their own perspective.

Both Bell and Porat argue that information occupations or technologies would in the long run result in the development of post-industrial society. Castells, however, vehemently differs from Bell and Touraine and says that information-based society is more post-industrial than the industrial society which was post-agrarian.

It is important to Castells that the information society is not simply confused with a service society in which the manufacturing sector has all disappeared from view. Like Bell and Touraine, he identifies the dynamics of the coming society in which there is role of knowledge and the use of knowledge and not the predominance of any one particular sector of an economy.

We may refer to any thinker who has shown his concern for the post-industrial society, and emphasizes the prime role of knowledge and information in the development of this kind of society.

Post-industrial turn: Towards social and economic polarization

Gorz, Bell, Castell, Gordon, Harvey and other post-industrial society’s thinkers do not share in all their views. They differ largely on the strength of their emphasis. Despite their varying positions they can be singled on a number of economic and social fronts.

Above all, the writers seem to agree on one thing: there has indeed been a shift away from industrialism. In broad terms, this movement can be identified with a shift in the balance of the western economies from a manufacturing to a service base, primarily in terms of employment, although it is often extended to include the output of an economy.

However, on occupational class fronts, it becomes difficult to identify common post-industrial themes. At best, it could be said that Bell and Gorz focus upon different aspects of the same transition where Bell sees the growth of white-collar occupations and the formation of knowledge elites, Gorz emphasizes the irrelevance of work to the majority and the fate of a de-skilled working class forced to serve those elites.

Where one offers the prospect of an end to harsh manual labour, the other holds out for a better world outside of, rather than within, work. Even so, it is evident that both Gorz and Castells see social and economic polarization as part of the general direction of change.

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