The Coming Of Post-Industrial Society [Paperback]

In 1976, Daniel Bell's historical work predicted a vastly different society developing—one 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 questions—with the difference that these are now on a scale that had never been previously imagined in world history.”

Daniel Bellis 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 IdeologyandThe Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,were listed among the 100 Most Influential Books since the Second World War (TLS, October 1995).