Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Three Lectures on Post-Industrial Society
    Three Lectures on Post-Industrial Society
    Three Lectures on Post-Industrial Society
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    Three Lectures on Post-Industrial Society

    By Daniel Cohen and William McCuaig

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A noted economist analyzes the upheavals caused by revolutions in technology, labor, culture, financial markets, and globalization.

    In this pithy and provocative book, noted economist Daniel Cohen offers his analysis of the global shift to a post-industrial era. If it was once natural to speak of industrial society, Cohen writes, it is more difficult to speak meaningfully of post-industrial “society.” The solidarity that once lay at the heart of industrial society no longer exists. The different levels of large industrial enterprises have been systematically disassembled: tasks considered nonessential are assigned to subcontractors; engineers are grouped together in research sites, apart from the workers. Employees are left exposed while shareholders act to protect themselves. Never has the awareness that we all live in the same world been so strong—and never have the social conditions of existence been so unequal. In these wide-ranging reflections, Cohen describes the transformations that signaled the break between the industrial and the post-industrial eras. He links the revolution in information technology to the trend toward flatter hierarchies of workers with multiple skills—and connects the latter to work practices growing out of the culture of the May 1968 protests. Subcontracting and outsourcing have also changed the nature of work, and Cohen succinctly analyzes the new international division of labor, the economic rise of China, India, and the former Soviet Union, and the economic effects of free trade on poor countries. Finally, Cohen examines the fate of the European social model—with its traditional compromise between social justice and economic productivity—in a post-industrial world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe MIT Press
    Release dateAug 29, 2008
    ISBN9780262266666
    Three Lectures on Post-Industrial Society
    Author

    Daniel Cohen

    Dr. Cohen has degrees in anthropology and biology, and his research focuses on the intersection of religious studies, neuropsychology, and neuroscience. He completed a Fulbright-Hays fellowship in India where he studied cultural interpretations and traditional religious resources used in treating mental health disorders (as understood by western standards), physical ailments, and social tensions. He has published numerous articles on the neuropsychology of spiritual experiences, including studies involving U.S. and South Asian populations.

    Read more from Daniel Cohen

    Related to Three Lectures on Post-Industrial Society

    Related ebooks

    Industries For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      The Power of Market-Creating Innovation

      Jan 1, 2021

      Everyone has been impacted by the global pandemic, but can you talk about the particular effects on emerging economies? To be sure, the entire world has been impacted by COVID-19, but emerging economies have been severely impacted in four ways. First

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Embedding The Economy–with Care

      Oct 15, 2020

      Embedding The Economy–with Care
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Imagination

      Sep 3, 2024

      Imagination
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Return Of The Crafts

      May 21, 2021

      economist.com The Arts and Crafts movement arose in the wake of the industrial revolution to oppose the replacement of craft work with more efficient production lines, says The Economist. The “small is beautiful” movement of the 1970s had similar a

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Living Well

      Oct 5, 2021

      Living Well
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Marx In The Anthropocene: Towards The Idea Of Degrowth Communism

      Dec 18, 2024

      By Kohei Saito New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiii, 276. $22.99 paperback. It isn’t often you read a book that advocates for arguably the two most evil, destructive ideas ever advocated: Marxist communism and economic degrowth. One w

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Worked Up

      Feb 14, 2024

      Worked Up
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Investment We Need To Make Capitalism Work For All

      Jun 19, 2020

      ‘Capitalism’ has been misunderstood since it was coined in the 19th century. The term was first used as a criticism of the rising income gap between factory workers and factory owners. But until the early 20th century, it was rarely used; Karl Marx o

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Narratives And Numbers

      May 15, 2020

      Narratives And Numbers
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Uber Drivers Of The World, Unite!

      Feb 25, 2019

      In the final weeks of 2018, a minor crisis was unfolding in a warehouse in West London. A shipment of convey or belt parts intended for the British Virgin Islands had not shown up. The van carrying the parts from a factory in Spain to London, via Fra

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Solar Jobs, Coal Jobs, and the Value of Jobs in General

      May 9, 2017

      Science isn’t done by guesswork or gut instinct. It requires expertise not only to conduct but to evaluate; in-depth research in a field outside of my own is often beyond my ability to critique. I don’t have the knowledge to review a paper on molecul

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Trump's High-Pressure Economy

      May 10, 2018

      Trump's High-Pressure Economy
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Don’t Blame Supply Chains

      May 7, 2020

      The author is a faculty member at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia Global supply chains—technically dubbed global value chains (GVCs)—have become weaponized in the economic battles of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19)

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Move Fast And Break Things

      Oct 28, 2019

      Move Fast And Break Things
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Word

      Jul 1, 2024

      Once again, we have an edition bursting with ideas – from an Australian scientific discovery that could save millions of lives around the world, to comprehensively rethinking our tax and energy systems. There has been a significant, if subtle, shift

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      We’re Not Ready For Utopia

      Apr 19, 2021

      We’re Not Ready For Utopia
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Why Socialism Won't Work.

      Jan 21, 2020

      Why Socialism Won't Work.
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Best Of The Financial Columnists

      Oct 28, 2022

      Editorial The Economist Until recently, owning a house meant “easy money”, says The Economist. But house prices are falling, and inflation and recession make a correction more likely. The pandemic property boom was due to “rate cuts, stimulus cash

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Humans Evolve?

      Dec 1, 2022

      Humans Evolve?
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      An Old Idea, Wrong As Ever

      May 21, 2019

      An Old Idea, Wrong As Ever
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Press On

      Nov 23, 2023

      Press On
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Three Lectures on Post-Industrial Society

    4/5

    8 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Thank You This Is Very Good, Maybe This Can Help You
      Download Full Ebook Very Detail Here :
      https://amzn.to/3XOf46C
      - You Can See Full Book/ebook Offline Any Time
      - You Can Read All Important Knowledge Here
      - You Can Become A Master In Your Business

    Book preview

    Three Lectures on Post-Industrial Society - Daniel Cohen

    Three Lectures on

    Post-Industrial

    Society

    Three Lectures on

    Post-Industrial

    Society

    Daniel Cohen

    translated by William McCuaig

    The MIT Press

    Cambridge, Massachusetts

    London, England

    © 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

    For information on quantity discounts, email special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu.

    Set in Palatino by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Cohen, Daniel, 1953–

    [Trois legons sur la sociiti post-industrielle. English]

    Three lectures on post-industrial society / Daniel Cohen; translated by William McCuaig.

    p. cm.

    Previously published in French as: Trois legons sur la sociiti post-industrielle.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-262-03383-1 (hbk.: alk. paper)

    1. Globalization—Economic aspects. 2. Globalization—Social aspects.

    3. Social history—21st century. 4. Europe—Social policy. I. McCuaig, William, 1949– II. Title.

    HF1359.C65213   2008

    330.9—dc22      2008017004

    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

    d_r0

    to the three Suzies

    Contents

    Acknowledgements    ix

    Introduction    1

    1 The Era of Ruptures    11

    2 The New World Economy   35

    3 Is There a European Social Model?   59

    Conclusion    87

    Notes   95

    Index   103

    Acknowledgements

    The three chapters in this book are adapted from three lectures given at the Collège de France in the Grand Angle-Altadis cycle. I thank Olivier Mongin for the invitation and Kemal Dervis, Mario Monti, Josep Ramoneda, and Pierre Rosanvallon for their stimulating commentary. Friendly thoughts as well for Perrine Simon-Nahum, the publisher of my previous books, and Isabelle Albaret, who organized the lectures.

    Introduction

    Marx thought that history moved through phases, and that capitalism was only one of them. Today we are discovering that capitalism itself has a history, that it manifests itself differently in the twentieth century than it did in the nineteenth, and that today it is unlike what it was yesterday.

    The capitalism of the twentieth century was constructed around a central figure: the industrial firm.¹ The firm established what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim might have called an organic solidarity among its members. The engineers concentrated on making the unskilled workers productive, and the managers were salary earners themselves, with the same ultimate goal as their employees: to shield the firm from the hazards of the economic environment. Huge conglomerates were created to reduce industry risk; for example, a firm that made bathing suits would attempt to acquire an umbrella maker as a hedge against climatic unpredictability, so that, whatever the weather, its workers would still have jobs. Mirroring feudal society, the industrial society of the twentieth century linked a mode of production to a mode of protection. It bonded the economic question to the social question.

    Twenty-first-century capitalism is engaged in systematically dismantling that industrial society. The various levels of large industrial enterprises are being uncoupled from one another. Tasks not considered essential are now assigned to subcontractors. The engineers are grouped together in independent research bureaus, where they never come across workers. The employees in charge of the cleaning, of the cafeteria, and of the day-care facilities are recruited by specialized companies. The financial revolution of the 1980s changed the principles on which firms organize. From the shareholder’s point of view, there is no need for the same company to make bathing suits and umbrellas; the shareholder can spread his risk by owning a share of a company making each. In a Copernican-like reversal of the very foundations of the wage-earning class, workers are being exposed to rising uncertainty about their incomes while shareholders are shielding themselves against uncertainty.² The solidarity that was at the heart of the industrial firm has disappeared.

    The Service Society

    To speak of post-industrial society as a way of characterizing these transformations is to speak a bit loosely. It is to describe the world by what it no longer is (the industrial society) rather than by what is has become. If we want to define the current transformation more affirmatively, we have several options. One is to call this a shift to a service society, using the classification into primary (agriculture), secondary (industry), and tertiary (service) sectors. The British economist Colin Clark as early as 1939, and the French economist Jean Fourastié1946, heralded the coming of a service society. Fourastièaw the world of the future as one in which man would finally be set free from working the soil in rural societies, or raw materials in industrial societies.³ With the coming of a service society, the material worked by man is man himself. Whether a hairdresser or a doctor, the worker reconnects directly with other people. Economists have coined a term that reflects this notion: face to face (abbreviated F2F), meaning work that demands direct contact between the producer and the client.

    A lot of water has passed under the bridge since the publication of Fourastièsquo;s book. In terms of strict tabulation, there is no doubt that employment has shifted from industry to services, just as it shifted from agriculture into industry a century earlier. In October 2005 the British magazine The Economist published an article indicating that the proportion of industrial employment in the United States had fallen below 10 percent. Seeking as always to highlight paradoxical notions, The Economist added that this already low figure actually understated the reality of shrinkage. Within the industrial sector, an increasing share of the work involves conception and marketing. Industry itself is becoming a service-intensive sector. The number of workers carrying out strictly industrial tasks—tasks that consist of fabricating, by hand or with the help of a robot, a manufactured product—might even be less than half the stated figure. Soon such workers may be no more numerous than farmers.

    But there is a risk of misunderstanding here. The tertiarized economy has not in the least got rid of the world of objects. Objects certainly cost less to make, so the proportional value of production is shrinking, but they continue to increase in volume at the same rate as before. Objects are just as cumbersome as they ever were. They still have to be moved around and repaired. No matter what our vantage point, the great hope of work set free from the harshness of the physical world of objects has certainly not been realized, as is witnessed by the continuing increase in the number of wage earners suffering from physical pain and complaining about having to lift heavy weights.⁴

    But within this tertiarized world, factory workers in the classic, assembly-line sense have become a minority. Workers are now maintenance personnel or repairmen more than factory hands. They function in a setting that is, for the most part, more a workshop than an assembly line. White-collar employees are likewise a category undergoing rapid change. In the early 1980s, the majority of them held administrative jobs in firms or in the public sector. Today, the majority work in sales or in services to individuals. The client has become a central figure of their existence—the real order-giver as far as they are concerned, sometimes more so than the boss himself.

    The Information Society

    This first approach to analyzing the exit from industrial society does not, however, exhaust the question, even in the strict sense of a definition of the careers that are on offer. Researchers studying bacteria or improving the efficiency of microprocessors are also fully within post-industrial society. Jobs like these fall to some extent under the American sociologist Daniel Bell’s

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1
    pFad - Phonifier reborn

    Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

    Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


    Alternative Proxies:

    Alternative Proxy

    pFad Proxy

    pFad v3 Proxy

    pFad v4 Proxy