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’.
Some of the characteristics of the post-industrial society.
i. People work with other people to deliver a service. Gone is the industrial society where the workers toiled on machines day in and day out – one shift after the other. Now, there is growth of service sector where there is very little of manual labour in which there is some degree of creativity and sociability. In the post-industrialism, the workers do not work upon things; they work with other people to deliver a service. This provides a more rewarding and interesting form of work.
ii. Transformation of working class to professional middle class. The post-industrialism creates a new professional class in place of labour class. In the industrial society, the labour was required to put its physical dexterity. Now that has gone. In the new society, the working class does not exist. It is because of this that Andre Gorz (1982) says that in the post-industrial society there is farewell to the working class.
iii. Emergence of knowledge elites. The emphasis in post-industrial society is on knowledge as the source of societal change. But, the question is: who controls the sources of knowledge? Bell argues that it is the group of knowledge elites which controls. The knowledge, that is, information processing, comes from the new technical elites in the universities, government institutions and economic enterprises.
Moreover, as intellectual work becomes more specialized, elite technocrat sees the emergence of new hierarchies of technical elites alongside the increased professionalization of work and a shift towards the bureaucratization of technical work within the advanced western economies. Touraine’s analysis of post-industrial society much talks about the formation of a new social divide between, on the one hand technocrats and bureaucrats, and on the other, a range of social groupings, including workers as well as students and consumers.
iv. Growth of multiple networks. In the post-industrial society there are combined advances in communication technologies, systems of management and technologies of production. These advances retain their links with markets and production complexes. As a result of this, there is growth of multiple networks between corporations./These networks enable firms to develop products jointly or to serve specific markets and thus represent a different economic strategy from the establishment of multinational empires. The focus of the coming society on knowledge and information as the driving forces brings multinational corporations together for economic growth.
v. Divide in society. The debate on the future state of post-industrial society also deals with the problem of the structure of such a society. To recapitulate the transformation of industrial society into post-industrial society, we would say that during the Fordian period there was mass production of goods on standardized scale for market. Now, there was no decline m the production but it had become flexible, i.e., according to the varying needs of the consumers. There appeared a vast change in the kinds of work: the occupational structure witnessed professional change and manual labour gave way to service class sector.
White-collar workers replaced labour class workers and technology and information processing occupied a central place in the growth of industry. The source of knowledge-information and technology became a field of control by the government, universities and multi-national corporations. Technology, by the process of collaboration, brought different business organizations within a fold. The end-result of these processes created a sharp division in the society. Gorz has developed a set of arguments concerning the changing role of work in post-industrial economies.
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