An axial principle is one that underlies or causes an axial change or period. You might find Daniel Bell's book, Concept of Post Industrial Society: Theory, Myth, and Ideology a helpful guide on this subject. Bell is a sociologist and professor at Harvard University who studied post-industrial society in depth before his death on January 25th, 2011. According to Wikipedia's entry on Bell, he "argued that post-industrialism would be information-led and service-oriented" and that "the post-industrial society would replace the industrial society as the dominant system". See the full article here for more information: en.wikipedia.org
A post-industrial society would be a society that has completed the process of industrialization. The foundation of such a society's economy is based in industrial businesses and transactions. Agriculture is certainly still important to any such society, but agriculture is not what drives the national economy. Certainly, local economies thrive on agriculture (consider the Pennsylvania Dutch), but a nation, when viewed as one large society, is more heavily dependent on industry. For example: During the American Civil War, a unique situation existed (this is somewhat oversimplified, but at least consider this for the sake of the analogy). You have, essentially, two different societies engaged in warfare. One is plainly near the tail-end of becoming fully industrialized. (Again, local economies still depend primarily on agriculture for their economic survival, but the large population centers depend on industry more greatly.) The other society is quite agrarian based. For industrialized goods, it must trade with more industrialized societies. However, its economy, and thence, its way of life is greatly dependant on the success of farms. After the Civil War, the South, which was already becoming industrialized, to a degree, completed the transformation. So, now you have a society that has fully made its transition. Since I've chosen to focus on the United States, let's look at it as a post-industrialized society. How many goods, that are consumed in large numbers (TVs, automobiles, children's toys, cellular phones, etc.) are manufactured in the U.S.? What drives the economy now? The U.S. Has moved from providing goods to providing services. Think of the number of banks and insurance companies, consulting firms, etc., that have sprung up. Then there are numerous retail outlets that sell goods manufactured by foreign countries. This epitomizes the post-industrial society.
