The post-industrial society: from utopia to ideology

Abstract

Theories of post-industrial society have since their earliest formulations had a questionable relation to actual processes of social change. This article explores why they nonetheless continue to hold influence. Drawing on Mannheim, it argues that theories of post-industrial society were originally formulated as utopia – hopeful speculations about the future. When their core concepts are used to describe present conditions, however, they take on the role of ideology, in Mannheim’s sense of this term. The ideology of post-industrial society represents a specific world view in relation to work, knowledge and education. It elevates and celebrates ‘knowledge work’ and renders invisible existing forms of industry and workers’ knowledge necessary for practical work. When the present is viewed through the lens of these theories, practical work is cast as the work of yesterday and the people who do it as yesterday’s people.

Keywords

ideology knowledge society knowledge work Mannheim post-industrial society practical work utopia

Introduction

Over the last half a century different forms of ‘offshoring’ have caused a substantial decrease in industrial production in Western countries (Urry, 2014). The corresponding decline of employment in manufacturing has been accompanied by an upsurge of professional and managerial jobs. Efforts to grasp the far-reaching implications of these developments have often made use of concepts taken from theories of post-industrial society. Concepts originating in these theories, such as ‘knowledge society’, ‘knowledge workers’, ‘knowledge based economy’, ‘the new economy’, ‘information society’ and ‘network society’, have considerable influence on the public debate and government policy (Barney, 2013; Brown and Lauder, 2012; Bryson, 2010; Hislop, 2013; James et al., 2013; Warhurst and Thompson, 2012). In academia, in contrast, theories of post-industrial society have been criticized ever since their earliest formulations for presenting a seriously misleading understanding of social change (Cohen and Zysman, 1987; Doogan, 2009; Gershuny, 1978; Kumar, 1978, 2005; Livingstone, 2012; Thompson et al., 2001; Webster, 1995).

By making use of Mannheim’s (1936) distinction between utopia and ideology, this article explores how theories of post-industrial society continue to be of influence in spite of sustained scholarly criticism. Mannheim has long been considered a key theorist in discussions of the social and historical foundations of knowledge and beliefs (Kumar, 2006; Turner, 1995).¹ According to Mannheim, when an idea ‘departs from the real’ it is either a utopia, or an ideology (Mannheim, 1936: 173). Utopias describe a situation which is not the present situation, but one which could be hoped for, or presumed to follow, sometime in the future. In contrast, ideologies depart from the real by providing inaccurate descriptions of present conditions. An ideology is thus a description which serves to idealize and highlight certain features of the present and to overlook or obscure others.²

Taking this conceptual framework as a point of departure, it is argued here that theories of post-industrial society have their origin in different forms of utopian thought. Over time, however, insofar as they have become accepted as valid descriptions of present conditions, a transformation from utopia to ideology takes place. This is problematic because of the specific view of different types of work and knowledge that theories of post-industrial society convey. When these theories highlight and celebrate some types of work and knowledge, while obscuring and demoting others, this can have a powerful societal impact. The ideology of post-industrial society can, it is argued, serve to render invisible the industry which still exists and to legitimate the view that practical work is the work of yesterday, requiring little, if any, knowledge.

The broader significance of the decline in industry and the increase in services

Daniel Bell (1973, 1980),³ the most cited theorist of post-industrial society, expected this society to come about through two related developments; first, a decrease in industrial manufacturing; and second, an increase in service work. Most Western countries meet these criteria (OECD, 2011). However, upon closer inspection, it is not clear why meeting these criteria should be taken to constitute empirical grounds for a claim about a significant epochal shift. For instance, in 1971, 33 per cent of workers in the UK were classified as being employed in industry. In 2008, the share was 10.5 per cent (OECD, 2011). The implication of using this declining share of employment in manufacturing as a justification for a claim about an epochal shift is that somewhere between these percentages it is reasonable to draw a line between industrial and post-industrial society. However, the literature on post-industrial society includes little, if any, discussion of where to draw this line. Recent research indicating that manufacturing has now begun to return from low-cost countries – a process termed ‘onshoring’ or ‘reshoring’ (Bryson et al., 2013: 4) – also complicates the impression of a uniform decline.

Furthermore, changes in the way work is organized may have contributed to exaggerate the decline of manufacturing. In the 1970s, people working within transport, cleaning, accounting, catering and maintenance related to manufacturing would most likely have been employed directly by the industrial companies. Today, a greater share of these jobs will have been outsourced to service companies that specialize in these areas. Thus, a decline in industrial employment does not necessarily mean that jobs associated with industry have been ‘offshored’, or otherwise disappeared. They may also have been restructured and subsequently classified as ‘service work’.

Over the same period as employment in manufacturing has declined in Western countries, the share of the labour force employed in the ‘service sector’ has risen from around 60 per cent to around 80 per cent (OECD, 2011). This development is also in accordance with Bell’s (1973) predictions. He foresees a movement away from people working with things (‘handling of goods’) to people working with people (‘service work’). However, as critics have long noted, Bell operates with an unsatisfactory definition of ‘service work’. He never states directly what a ‘service’ is (Gershuny, 1978: 56) and in effect treats ‘service work’ as a residual category (Cohen and Zysman, 1987: 52; Hislop, 2013: 5). The result is not only a highly inclusive, but also a quite arbitrary classification. Many service occupations – design engineers, for instance – may just as well be classified as being engaged in the production of goods as of services (Gershuny, 1978: 59). The heterogeneity of service work makes generalized statements about its nature highly problematic. It has long been unclear what the increase in the category of ‘service’ actually tells us and even less clear how this should be taken to signify an epochal change at a very general societal level. In addition, recent research indicates that the distinction between manufacturing and service – at the heart of theories of post-industrial society – is becoming outdated, as manufacturing and services are increasingly blended together within the same companies. The question of ‘when does the manufacturing process stop and the service function start’ is becoming increasingly meaningless (Bryson and Daniels, 2010: 91).⁴

Another important point is that the content and organization of many jobs in the service sector bear great resemblance to industrial work (Beynon, 1992: 167). Consider for example work at a fast-food restaurant, where a hamburger is assembled piece by piece through a process that is very similar to an industrial production line. Brown et al. (2011) discuss a global tendency which they refer to as the ‘industrialization of knowledge work’. They warn that many knowledge workers are now subject to Taylorism; and this time around, it is ‘digital Taylorism’. For instance, assessments of bank loan applications are increasingly performed by software packages according to centrally specified criteria and consequently less dependent on the professional judgement and discretion of bank employees (Brown et al., 2011: 75). Thus, Kumar (2005: 51) may well be right in predicting, ‘In so far as Taylorism remains the master principle, information technology has a greater potential for proletarianization than for professionalization.’ A more positive perspective on this development is provided by Peter Drucker, one of the original prophets of post-industrial society and subsequently a prominent figure in the field of management literature. Drucker (2012: 116) anticipates that a principal task in the 21st century will be to apply Taylor’s principles of scientific management to knowledge work. Taylorism has also been one of the major intellectual sources of the ‘new public management’ movement and has thereby spread into the public sector over recent decades (Andrews, 2011; Hood, 1991).

In sum, the criteria for considering a society to be ‘post-industrial’ appear vague. It is not clear how statistics on a decrease in manufacturing and an increase in service work may warrant claims that we have entered into a new kind of society of a post-industrial kind. The epistemic problems long associated with the highly inclusive category of ‘service’, and the consideration of ‘service work’ as by definition non-industrial, appear only to have increased with recent labour market developments.

From utopia to ideology

The above raises the question: in what other ways than aiding in accurate description of gradual and complex transformations might the dichotomous theories of post-industrial society be useful? In addressing this complex question, Mannheim’s (1936) distinction between ideology and utopia is useful. Theories of post-industrial society were formulated as hopeful speculations about possible futures, and thus as utopia. This can be seen first in the writings of the theorist who coined the term ‘post-industrial society’ in 1917, the British architect and Guild socialist, Arthur Penty (Rose, 1992: 169). Inspired by Ruskin, Morris and others, Penty advocated institutional arrangements very different from those prevalent at the time (Kierman, 2008: 17). He argued for a model of work organization that was not industrial, but more akin to a medieval guild system. He used the term ‘post-industrial’ society to describe this hopeful view of the future. A similar utopian element is evident in the work of the first theorist to use the term ‘post-industrial society’ in the post-war context, the sociologist David Riesman (1958). His post-industrial society was a vision of a future leisure society, in which people would hardly have to work, thanks to technological progress.⁵

A similar utopianism is evident in the work of Bell. One of Bell’s first papers on the subject of post-industrial society (presented at a forum in 1962), states in its title that it contains ‘a speculative view’ of the future (see Bell, 1973: 36); and the subtitle to his most influential book (Bell, 1973) is A Venture in Social Forecasting. The central tenet of his forecast is one of hopefulness. At its core lies a sense of positive expectation that the future will bring continued social progress (see Kumar, 1978). For instance, post-industrial society will be a ‘just meritocracy’ (Bell, 1973: 451).

The utopian origin of theories of post-industrial society is also evident in Drucker’s writings. Like Bell, Drucker (1969: 250) welcomes the rise of the ‘knowledge society’ and expects the demand for ‘knowledge workers’ in the future to be ‘insatiable’. In an equally optimistic tenor, he predicts that the capitalist power balance will be turned on its head, because the soon dominant knowledge workers will own the central means of production themselves, their own knowledge. A similarly hopeful view of the future is evident with the most important French theorist of post-industrial society, Alain Touraine. For instance, Touraine emphasizes that in post-industrial society, the student movement will come to provide a central and much needed oppositional force (Touraine, 1971: 68).

Thus, the original theorists of post-industrial society seem to have constructed their theories by carefully selecting certain elements from their contemporary historical conditions. They proceeded to highlight these features by arguing that they would be central in the future and that this development would represent social progress. Their theories were thereby utopian, in Mannheim’s sense of the term. According to Mannheim (1936: 36), utopian thinking is not intended to provide accurate descriptions of present conditions. Utopias are per definition ‘incapable of correctly diagnosing an existing condition of society’. On the other hand, a key function of an ideology is, by way of ‘partial’ description, to idealize certain aspects of the present situation and to obscure others. If their central concepts are used to describe present society, it can thus be argued that theories of post-industrial society have been transformed from utopia to ideology.

The ideology of post-industrial society

In accordance with Mannheim (1936: 105) one might ask: what are, then, the characteristic features of this ideology and what kind of world view (Weltanschauung) does it represent? The most obvious feature of the ideology of post-industrial society is that it can render invisible the manufacturing that remains. For instance, as Livesey (2012) points out, the fact that successive governments have used the term ‘post-industrial’ to describe contemporary society may have contributed to the current lack of long term faith in manufacturing. Similarly, labour market trends such as increasing productivity in manufacturing, or recent trends of ‘onshoring’ (Bryson et al., 2013), may be overlooked if society is perceived by default to be post-industrial. This world view may thereby potentially serve to deter both investments in, and recruitment to, industry.

Another central feature of the ideology of post-industrial society lies in the specific perspective on work, knowledge and education that it conveys. At the heart of post-industrial theory lies a dualism between knowledge work and practical work. For instance, Drucker (1969: 250), who coined the term ‘knowledge worker’, considers manual work to be the exact opposite of knowledge work. Bell too reserves the term ‘knowledge’ for scientific and theoretical knowledge and defines it as an ‘intellectual property’ (Bell, 1973: 176, 422). He predicts that in post-industrial society, ‘theoretical knowledge’ will be the most important knowledge (Bell, 1973: 212), its most central persons will be ‘scientists’ and the university will be its ‘central institution’ (Bell, 1973: 344). In his theory of the network society, Castells (1996: 17) explicitly takes Bell’s view on knowledge as a point of departure.⁶

This perspective on knowledge is not new in Western history. Its roots go far back, perhaps most notably to ancient Greece and to certain strands of Enlightenment thought (Dewey, 1929; Kumar, 1978; Rose, 2004; Sennett, 2008). As many scholars have noted, an ‘embrained’ view of knowledge has long enjoyed a privileged status within Western culture (Blackler et al., 1998). Consequently, ‘practical thinking’ is subordinated to ‘theoretical thinking’ (Scribner, 1986) and the contribution of practical work to society as a whole is regarded as being of little importance (Young and Willmott, 1956).⁷ If theories of post-industrial society are treated in a taken for granted way, as descriptions of present conditions, they can serve as an ideology which effectively continues to legitimate this perspective on knowledge. Using key concepts from these theories without critical assessment of their implications can contribute to legitimating the continued ‘elevation of thinking above making and doing’ (Dewey, 1929: 6).

Highlighting some aspects of society has the subtle side effect of obscuring others. For instance, the term ‘knowledge work’ implies that some forms of work require little or no knowledge. By highlighting knowledge work, its presumed contrast, practical work, is overlooked and rendered invisible. Knowledge work of the practical kind does not figure in theories of post-industrial society. When knowledge workers are celebrated as doing the work of the future, people who do practical work are cast as yesterday’s people – soon to be useless remnants from a past epoch – and practical work is cast as empty of worker knowledge, as ‘routine’ and as yesterday’s work. Workers in such work are thereby stripped of all competence except the very basic ability to establish habits.⁸

Recent studies demonstrate that, contrary to Bell’s expectations, the growth of service work has not only involved a uniform growth of high skill work but also a substantial growth in low skill, low pay service occupations (Hislop, 2013; Lloyd et al., 2013; Thompson et al., 2001). Indeed, Bozkurt and Grugulis (2011: 2) even argue that retail work may be considered ‘the new generic form of mass employment’. The assumption that a growth in the ‘service’ sector will necessarily involve a reduction in ‘manual work’ can also be questioned. Many jobs in the service sector involve practical and manual work tasks, not least in female dominated jobs such as cleaning and care work.

In recent decades, problems relating to job quality at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy have been individualized around skill acquisition (Keep, 2012; Keep and Mayhew, 2010). A core idea has been that increasing skill levels will not only lift individuals out of low skill and low pay work, but cause such work to decline altogether. Apart from this strategy, which research has found to be of ‘limited effect’ (Keep and James, 2013: 240), there seems to be relatively little policy interest in improving job quality for workers at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy (Lloyd and Mayhew, 2010; Lloyd et al., 2013).

This is of great contemporary relevance because recent decades have seen tendencies toward labour market polarization and the creation of many new ‘bad jobs’ (Kalleberg, 2013). This polarization can be related to the loss of what were often unionized and relatively well paid jobs. The existence of ‘bad jobs’ is now often seen as being ‘inevitable’ (Warhurst et al., 2012). Such jobs tend to be held by people seen as having been ‘left behind’ as society has become post-industrial. The ideology of post-industrial society may thus give support to a certain way of talking about social issues. It may encourage what has been described as ‘a blaming of individuals for their failures to commit to gaining skills, a hand-washing of any social responsibility’ (Green, 2013: 184) and provide backing when ‘low aspirations’ are currently seen as causing a wide variety of social and economic ills (Roberts and Evans, 2012: 70). According to this ideology, the harbouring of low aspirations, or failing to commit to gaining skills, can be considered misdeeds against social progress – offences for which a bad job, or very low rates of benefits, may be considered a fitting price to pay.

If society is perceived as being post-industrial it follows that an ever increasing proportion of the population should pursue higher education in order to do what is considered ‘knowledge work’. In accordance with this vision, education and training policy has become a prime area of government activity over the last quarter of a century (Keep and Mayhew, 2010). For instance, the UK Government has been noted to consider an increased production of graduates as ‘a way of delivering its desired ideas-driven knowledge economy’ (James et al., 2013: 954). The global trend of expansion of university education has been based upon ‘myths of a knowledge society’ (Meyer et al., 2007: 205). In sum, it seems as if governments have not only accepted Drucker, Bell and Castells’s narrow definition of knowledge, but also taken on board their optimistic assessment that ‘the demand for knowledge workers in the future seems insatiable’ (Drucker, 1969: 250).

The ideology of post-industrial society thus appears to transcend both varieties of capitalism (Hall and Soskice, 2001) and welfare state regimes (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Its wide attraction may partly be explained by its congruence with human capital theory (Brown and Lauder, 2012). In recent decades, human capital theory has been effectively promoted by international organizations such as the OECD and the EU (Valiente, 2014). It has played a central part in persuading governments that any increase in the supply of highly skilled workers will increase competitiveness in the global competition between nation states (Brown and Lauder, 2012). The embrace of human capital theory may thereby have increased the appeal of the ideology of post-industrial society. In this light, being post-industrial can be seen to bear promise of economic prosperity.

Closing remarks

Theories of post-industrial society have long been contested in academia. Their central criteria have been found vague and their dichotomous epochal concepts have been found ill-fitting for the purpose of describing gradual social transformations. They have nonetheless gained significant influence, especially in policy contexts. This article has examined some of the complexities surrounding theories of post-industrial society by arguing that they originated as utopias, but have over time come to serve as ideology, in Mannheim’s (1936) sense of these terms. When core concepts from these theories, first used in hopeful speculations about the future, are used to describe the present, they provide a highly selective description of contemporary conditions. The resulting ‘world view’ can thus be termed an ideology, in Mannheim’s sense. This ideology is not produced and maintained by deliberate distortion or deception, but simply by taking for granted the continued usefulness of established concepts.

This transformation from utopia to ideology is problematic in several ways. The ideology of post-industrial society can serve to render invisible the industry which still exists as well as the people who do practical work. It may thus be described as ‘ethnocentric’, in the sense that it invites ‘the exclusion of others from view’ (Hughes and Hughes, 1952: 9). The ideology of post-industrial society can also legitimize the view that practical work is the work of yesterday, requiring little, if any, knowledge. If present society is seen through this lens, some people stand to be celebrated as knowledge workers, while others are cast as obstacles to continued social progress.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of WES for very useful comments.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Kristoffer Chelsom Vogt is postdoctoral at the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen, Norway. His research interests include education, work, class, life course, family, generations, youth and gender. His thesis (2013) was entitled ‘Approaches to work and education over the life course: a two-cohort study of men skilled in male-dominated manual occupations in Norway’ and was based on a postal survey and biographical interviews. He is currently working on a project on intergenerational transmission in the transition to adulthood (funded by the Norwegian Research Council, 2013–17).

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