Nature of post-industrial society A post-industrial society is a society in which an economic transition has occurred from a manufacturing based economy to a service based economy, a diffusion of national and global capital, and mass privatization. The prerequisites to this economic shift are the processes of industrialization and liberalization. This economic transition spurs a restructuring in society as a whole. Social and economic attributes of the post-industrial society The University of Maryland's George Ritzerprovides six changes in social structure associated with the transition to a post-industrial society: Within the economy, there is a transition from goods production to the provision of services. Production of such goods as clothing and steel declines and services such as selling hamburgers and offering advice on investments increase. Although services predominate in a wide range of sectors, health, education, research, and government services are the most decisive for a post-industrial society. The importance of blue-collar, manual work (e.g., assembly line workers) declines and professional (lawyers) and technical work (computer programmers) come to predominate. Of special importance is the rise of scientists (e.g., specialized engineers, such as genetic or electric). Many mining towns and similar settlements face large scale unemployment as a result of the increasing importance of both theoretical knowledge with a simultaneous decline in manufacturing and increasing importance of environmentalism. Many industrial towns residents are on benefits, such as the dole. Instead of practical know-how, theoretical knowledge is increasingly essential in a post-industrial society. Such knowledge is seen as the basic source of innovation (e.g., the knowledge created by those scientists involved in the Human Genome Project is leading to new ways of treating many diseases). Advances in knowledge also lead to the need for other innovations such as ways of dealing with ethical questions raised by advances in cloning technology. All of this involved an emphasis on theoretical rather than empirical knowledge and on the codification of knowledge. The exponential growth of theoretical and codified knowledge, in all its varieties, is central to emergence of the post-industrial society. Post-industrial society seeks to assess the impacts of the new technologies and, where necessary, to exercise control over them. The hope is, for example, to better monitor things like nuclear power plants and to improve them so that accidents like that at Three-Mile Island or Chernobyl can be prevented in the future. The goal is a surer and more secure technological world. The doctrine of the precautionary principle is sometimes used in preventing the worst aspects of new technologies, such as cloning and genetic engineering, when there is no evidence of their negative impact. To handle such assessment and control, and more generally the sheer complexity of post-industrial society, new intellectual technologies are developed and implemented. They include cybernetics, Game theory and Information theory. A new relationship is forged in the post-industrial society between scientists and the new technologies they create, as well as systematic technological growth, lies at the base of post-industrial society. This leads to the need for more universities and university-based student. In fact, the university is crucial to post-industrial society. The university produced the experts who can create, guide, and control the new and dramatically changing technologies.[1] Daniel Bell develops the idea of "Post-Industrial Society" Daniel Bell primarily established the idea of the post-industrial society through his 1973 work The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Within this work he describes the U.S.S.R. And the United States as the only two industrialized nations. The dichotomy between the two was the capitalist and the collectivist mindsets. He correctly predicted the attributes of the post-industrial capitalist society, such as the global diffusion of capital, the imbalance of international trade, and the decline of the manufacturing sector on the U.S. Domestic front.
