The Third Technological Revolution
Bell, Daniel
We are today on the rising slope of a third technological revolution. It is a rising slope, for we have passed from the plus-minus stage of invention and innovation into the crucial period...
...To couple the two terms is to distort social analysis...
...and, given our values, we try to enact policies that will create different social matrices to encapsulate these changes and deal with the transitions they provoke.' What I hope to do in this article is to identify the salient aspects of the "third technological revolution," sketch a number of social frameworks that may allow us to see how this technological revolution may proceed in the reorganization of basic structures, and describe the choices we may have...
...On the axis of technology, both the United States and the Soviet Union are industrial societies, as against, say, Indonesia and China, which are preindustrial...
...technology provides instrumentalities and potentialities...
...None of the social forms is complete or is a "total" description of a society...
...The distinction refers to the usefulness of knowledge in producing either more knowledge or more goods...
...Steam provided a quantum jump in our ability to apply energy to machines...
...If one thinks this is small, consider the fact that fewer than 4 percent of the labor force are farmers, producing a glut of food for the United States—as against 50 percent in 1900...
...He could think of human muscle power, draft animal power, natural wind power, but these were insufficient...
...In preindustrial society, it is primarily domestic or personal service...
...it is a new principle of social-technical organization and ways of life, just as the industrial system (e.g., factories) replaced an agrarian way of life...
...Everywhere...
...This paper met with extraordinary resistance among experimental physicists, was not vindicated experimentally until a decade later, and was finally resolved theoretically by the complementary principle of wave-particle dualism...
...Yet one cannot underestimate the extraordinary nature of that simple idea...
...Let me take three instances for dramatic effect: In 1905 Albert Einstein, at age twenty-eight, wrote three papers for Annalen der Physik SPRING • 1989 169 Tedmological Revolution (plus his Ph.D...
...The national state, with its political policies, is increasingly ineffective in dealing with the tidal waves of the international economy (coordination through economic summitry is only a charade) and too big, when political decisions are concentrated in a bureaucratic center, for the diversity and initiative of the varied local and regional units under its control...
...This is still the lot of most of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, where 60 percent or more of the labor force is engaged in these activities...
...And the important fact is that the expansion of a postindustrial sector of a society requires the expansion of higher education and the education of many more in the population in abstract conceptual, technical, and alphanumeric skills In the United States today more than 30 percent of the labor force (of more than one hundred million persons) is professional, technical, and managerial, an amazing figure in social history...
...But the technologies of wind and steam are compatible with many different kinds of social formation...
...Software, an independent program, frees the user to do various tasks quickly...
...But the creation of large-scale, mass-produced, identical goods made vertical integration a functional necessity...
...There were of course other forebears, and there were European counterparts: Siemens, Bedeaux, Renault, etc...
...With the creation of alphabets we could take a few ideographic scratches and combine these into thousands of words that could be written in stylized forms, to be learned and read by others...
...The paper postulated, hypothetically, that light was a quanta, or a stream of discontinuous particles...
...One can take, as a contrast, the visions of Leonardo da Vinci, who was not only a great painter but, as we know, a civil engineer, a 164 • DISSENT Tedmologicd Revolution military engineer, and a gifted inventor...
...Communication begins to replace transportation as the major node of connection between people and as the mode of transaction...
...I must confess that I do not understand what this actually means...
...In 1950 the "typical" picture for 70 percent of the labor force was a husband at work and his wife and two children at home...
...There will always be innovations and changes in "things" that will create new products...
...They often coexist, as a palimpsest, on top of the others, thickening the complexity of society and the nature of social structure...
...it was cheaper to shuttle the freight car onto different lines...
...That has been the promise of the new methods of production...
...In effect, the world of the postindustrial society requires new modes of social organization, and these are only now being fashioned by the new entrepreneurs of the new technology...
...One of the great success stories in this respect is Italy, in such an "old-fashioned" industry as textiles...
...165 Tschnolollical Revolution sought to add these up), and even picoseconds, or one-trillionth (10 -12) of a second, permitting "lightning" calculation of problems...
...In Japan we see a major effort now under way, the Technopolis project, to create large, far-flung regional centers for the new computer and telecommunications industries...
...Perhaps no longer...
...4. The character of "work...
...In the previous system, one of merchant capitalism, production was in the hands of independent artisans or small-business companies, and all of this was funneled through the matrix of the merchant capitalist, who ordered the goods he needed, or contracted production to the small workshop, and sold finished products to the customers...
...It is a rising slope, for we have passed from the plus-minus stage of invention and innovation into the crucial period of diffusion...
...The changes mean a reduction in the large number of parts, and an incredible increase in the speed of transmission...
...Postindus 168 • DISSENT Te m°logkal Revolution trial employments are open, in skills and capacities, to women...
...What Turing's innovation did was utilize binary numbers (Boolean algebra) with internal program storage, to allow for the development of an automatic electronic digital computer...
...But if not in Rotterdam, where...
...The crucial question is whether the older institutional structures are able to deal with this extraordinary volume of interactions...
...Steel, General Electric, and the like...
...The idea of a single system arose when Vail, seeking to build a telephone utility, beheld the railroad system in the United States, where railroad systems grew "higgledy-piggledy," without plan, and often for financial reasons, to sell inflated stock...
...A change in the scale of an institution is a change of form...
...Breaking the "bottleneck" of software programming is the key to the rapid spread of the personal computer into the small business and the home...
...When one speaks of the "convergence" of societies, one would have to ask, along which axis...
...Societal Geography and Infrastructures Historically every society has been tied together by three kinds of infrastructure: These have been the nodes and highways of trade and transactions, of the location of cities and the connections between peoples...
...But what is being measured...
...Electricity allows us to code messages on wires or to transform voice electric signals, so as to create telephone and radio...
...Our shifts in the conception of matter go back to the model of the hydrogen atom that Niels Bohr constructed 170 • DISSENT in 1912, with the idea of the nucleus and the orbits of electrons around the nucleus...
...Given the iron ore and coal, one has a steel industry and from it an automobile industry, a machine-tool industry, a rubber industry, and the like...
...2. The costs of transition...
...Computers are now indispensable in record-keeping, inventory, scheduling, and other aspects of management information systems in business, firms, hospitals, universities, and any organization...
...And this is true of all social organizations...
...The second technological revolution, only a hundred years or so ago, can be identified with two innovations: electricity and chemistry...
...Again, it is a place where roads crossed and rivers merged and individuals settled down to buy and sell their wares...
...Any social change is an intersection of cultural attitudes with the ability to institutionalize those attitudes in market terms...
...The first has been transportation: rivers, roads, canals, and, in modern times, railroads, highways, and airplanes...
...This is what my colleague Anthony Oettinger calls "compunications" and what Simon Nora and Hilary Minc, in their report to the president of France several years ago, called "tel6matique...
...In laboratory experiments, the AT&T Bell laboratories set a "distance record" by transmitting 420 million bits per second over 125 miles without amplification, and two billion bits per second over eighty miles without amplification...
...In the past two decades we have seen an exponential growth in components per chip, by a factor of one hundred per decade...
...and Henry Ford, who created the assembly line and mass production...
...In an industrial society services are those activities auxiliary to industry: utilities, transportation (including garages and repairs), finance, and real estate...
...Today we have a greater awareness of the forces of change and the possible outcomes...
...another was Theodore N. Vail, who fashioned the American Telephone and Telegraph Co...
...4 Michael J. Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (New York: Basic Books, 1984...
...Take the Rotterdam spot market for oil...
...For automobiles, appliances, tools, home computers and the like, microcomputers will operate with computing power of ten MIPS (millions of instructions per second) per computer...
...The textile district of Prato—the group of towns in Central Italy in the provinces of Florence and Pistoia— was able to survive and flourish because it could adapt...
...Franchises were obtained from corrupt legislatures or from congressional land grants, and the roads were built in sprawling ways...
...With steam pumps, the water could be expelled and coal dug out to create an iron and steel industry...
...and imposed the idea of a single uniform system...
...No one "voted in" the first industrial revolution—in the way that political revolutions, such as the French and the Russian Revolutions, were shaped by active minorities...
...Computers, linked to television screens, begin to change the way we communicate, make transactions, receive and apply information...
...The frameworks that I sketch below, therefore, indicate the "areas" within which relevant changes may occur...
...The circuitry on that chip, now made by printed boards, is equivalent to about ten years' work by a person soldering discrete components onto that printed wiring board...
...To say that "everything" changes is hardly illuminating...
...And, finally, an innovation of an entirely different sort, Alan Turing's mathematical paper in 1937, "On Computable Numbers," which is the fundamental basis for programming, storage, and the creation of the digital computer...
...The old distinctions in communication between telephone (voice), television (image), computer (data), and text (facsimile) have been broken down, physically interconnected by digital switching, and made compatible as a single unified set of teletransmissions...
...Our previous modes were vacuum tubes, each, as in the old-fashioned radios, about two or three inches high...
...The cultural attitudes regarding equal rights of women go back a hundred years...
...The rates of diffusion will vary, depending upon the economic conditions and political stabilities of societies...
...I will discuss three individuals who symbolize the three crucial structural changes: one was Walter Teagle, of Standard Oil of New Jersey, who created vertical integration...
...In modern computers, we have speeds of nanoseconds, or one-billionth (10 -9) of a second (or thirty years of seconds, if one SPRING • 1989...
...It is clearly quite different to trace the effects, say, of the plough on medieval agriculture or the stirrup on war, than the interacting ways that automobiles, trucks, railroads, ships, and airplanes change a transportation system...
...Today more than 50 percent of all wives are working outside the home...
...In 1928, the great German mathematician David Hilbert, at the World Congress of Mathematics, had laid down three questions in order to see whether a complete formulization of mathematics was possible...
...If we seek to use this concept analytically, we find a lack of boundary and meaning...
...Today, the telephone is entirely electronic...
...Sloan rationalized the company...
...Consider a map of the United States and look at the north-central area of the country...
...Frederick Taylor, who designed the measurement of work...
...We are today on the rising slope of a third technological revolution...
...Data-base and information-retrieval systems reshape analysis for decisions and intellectual work...
...The decisive change—what I call the axial principle of organization—is a change in the character of knowledge...
...The contemporary conceptions of solid-state physics play no role, and to some extent are unthinkable, within the purview of classical physics...
...In the case of telecommunications—to be brief—the breakdown of the old distinctions between telephone, computer, television, and facsimile (Xerox) means that new, highly differentiated systems—private branch exchanges, local area networks, "internal" communication networks between firms, international satellite communication—all emphasize diversity rather than uniformity, with many specialized systems rather than a single product such as the telephone...
...I repeat one caveat stated earlier: Technology does not determine social change...
...But increasingly what is happening is a mismatch of scale...
...Let me describe some of the lineaments of the postindustrial society...
...but the major managerial activities are now decentralized...
...The basic step forward was taken in 1927 with the picture of the lattice structure of matter, by Felix Bloch, in which one could show how electrons, in their spins, "jumped" from orbit to orbit as energy is given off...
...Yet, even with his astonishing imagination, da Vinci could not imagine the one necessary element to make these work: a source of continual and repeatable power strong enough to drive them...
...One was to have steam pumps...
...If one wished to ship a hog, or freight, it was not necessary to change trains...
...The third technological revolution involves the conversion of all previous systems into digital form...
...Yet surely education and health services contribute to the increased skills and strengths of a population, while professional services (such as linear programming in the organization of production, or new modes of layout of work and social interaction) contribute to the productivity of an enterprise and society...
...In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx remarks that the hand mill or windmill gives us feudalism and the steam mill capitalism...
...there was a concentration of brokers who would go around and make their deals...
...What vertical integration did, as Alfred Chandler has pointed out in his book The Visible Hand, was to destroy "producer markets" within the chain of production and impose uniform controls...
...His key innovation was a pricing system for the different lines of automobiles that would provide a 20 percent return on investment based on a stipulated capacity, a break-even point based on overhead and fixed costs, and a market share for the particular line of car...
...Today that is true of only 15 percent of the labor force...
...corporations, in the last decade or so, have moved their basic headquarters from New York to the suburban areas where land is cheaper, and transport to and from work easier: northeast to Fairfield County in Connecticut...
...In many respects, the latter paper has been of lesser importance in the arcane theoretical literature of physics (quoted less than the others), yet it has had the most extraordinary technological importance and, in 1922, was the basis for Einstein's Nobel Prize...
...by 1990 it will be about five million...
...To speak of "change" is in itself meaningless, for the question remains: change of what...
...It is striking to realize that almost every major city in the world, in the last millennia (leaving aside the fortified hill towns that arose during the breakdown of commerce and provided a means of protection against marauders) is located on water: Rome on the Tiber, Paris on the Seine, London on the Thames, not to mention the great cities located on the oceans, seas, and great lakes...
...Until the recent federal court decision which broke up the American Telephone and Telegraph Co., it was a unified, single system...
...Through digital switching a telephone becomes converted to the use of binary systems...
...These "pictures" of the structures of matter led to the discovery of the transistor at Bell Labs by Bardeen, Brittain, and Shockley in the late 1940s and to the revolution in solid-state technology that is the basis of modern-day electronics and the computer...
...In the United States today, more than 70 percent of the labor force is engaged in services...
...Four technological innovations underlie this new technological revolution, and I shall describe each briefly: (1) The change of all mechanical and electric and electromechanical systems to electronics...
...What the revolutions in communication are doing is changing the scale of human activities...
...However, one can gain a certain perspective about what is happening by thinking of the concept of scale...
...And the third paper was on the so-called "photo-electric effect...
...Today, with the increasing cheapness of communication and the high cost of land, density and the external economies become less critical...
...But the ability to institutionalize those sentiments in market terms goes back only to the past twenty-five or so years—with the expansion of postindustrial employments, particularly in the "quinary" sector of services (health, education, research) and then back into the "quaternary" areas (trade, finance, real estate...
...The Social Organization of Production The modern corporation—I take the United States as the model—is less than a hundred years old...
...Along the axis of social relations, we can have feudal, capitalist, and state-collectivist societies...
...What I intend to do, in the following sections, is to present a number of "social frameworks," or matrices, which may allow us to see how existing social structures come under pressure for change, and the ways in which such changes may occur...
...With steam power we could achieve a variety of technological feats impossible before...
...They are the easiest means for carrying bulk items...
...One is preindustrial...
...Social change is seen as "holistic" changes from one form of production to another...
...Thus the imprint of economic geography...
...Chemistry, for the first time, allows us to create synthetics, from dyes to plastics, from fibers to vinyls, that are unknown in nature...
...a dial system) in which signals were converted into electricity...
...It is, first, a society of services...
...The problem with such a strategy is that it is increasingly difficult to understand the technological changes in terms of single major innovations, and even more difficult to trace the multiple effects...
...In England, until 1870, the largest single occupational class was that of domestic servants...
...We had 4k (k = a thousand) bits on a chip, the size of a thin fingernail, then 32k, 64k, and now we begin to construct megabits, or a million binary digits, or bits, on a chip...
...Can these be whether given by another human being or by a "computer...
...Work, here, is a game against fabricated nature: the hitching of men to machines, the organized rhythmic pacing of work in a highly coordinated fashion...
...I said before that one has to distinguish technological changes (even when they are now not only in machine technology but in intellectual technology) from the more valuable changes in social structure...
...managed...
...But to think in these terms is to confuse applications or instruments with some underlying processes that are the crucial understandings for this revolution, and only by identifying the relevant underlying processes can we begin to "track" the vast number of changes in socioeconomic and political structures that may take place...
...The breakdown between isolated segments of a society comes when roads are built to connect these, so that trade can commence...
...The greatest attention has been paid to those who have been the organizers of the production system itself: Eli Whitney, who created standardized forms and interchangeable parts in production...
...Models of these have been made today, and they show how prescient he was...
...For this reason, I begin with social matrices and try to see how they may change with the introduction of the new technologies...
...To that extent, if there is a single overriding sociological problem in the postindustrial society — particularly particularly in the management of transition— it is the management of scale...
...The sources go far back, lost in the vistas of time, when the human animal was able, because of the voice box in the larynx, to take the sounds of communication made by all birds and animals, and to codify these into distinct vocables that could be combined, differentiated, and organized into complex meanings, and, through voice, to make intelligible signals that could be transmitted through an oral tradition...
...Press, 1969), William Nordhaus lays out an analytical framework in which, "for the purposes of economic analysis, it is important to distinguish two kinds of knowledge, general and technical...
...Given that distinction, we can then see, along the axis of technology, societies that we can call preindustrial, industrial, and postindustrial...
...Metaphorically, this goes back to Galileo's square-cube law: If you double the size of an object, you triple its volume...
...Older computers had the instructions or operating systems wired into the machine, and one had to learn a programming 166 • DISSENT language, such as Cobol or Fortran, or the more specialized languages such as Pascal or Lisp, to use the machine...
...Vertical integration, the control of all aspects of a product—in the case of Teagle, from oil in the ground, to shipping, refining, and distribution to industrial customers and retail outlets— was created for the clear reasons of economies of scale, reduction of transaction costs, the utilization of information within the entire process, and the control of prices, from raw materials to finished goods...
...The pleasant story goes that as a boy Watt saw the kettle boiling on his mother's hearth and the heavy iron top being raised by the rising steam, and he wondered what would happen if that steam could be enclosed within a chamber and used to push shafts and drives...
...they pose problems that the political controllers of society have to deal with...
...The first is the introduction of steam power, more than two hundred years ago, an innovation identified largely with the name of James Watt...
...England was an island bedded on coal, but one could not dig down very far because of the large pools of underground water, which hand pumps could not extract...
...Increasingly, electronic systems have taken over and replaced mechanical parts...
...But along the axis of social relations, the Soviet Union and China are state-collectivist 176 • DISSENT tive control...
...But the basic point remains that fundamental innovations in theoretical knowledge— not just in physics, as in the illustrations above, but in biology (going back to the discovery of the double helix of the DNA molecule by Crick and Watson, and to the branching structure of molecular biology by Monod, Jacobs, and Lwoff) or in cognitive psychology (as the basis for expert inference systems)—become the new principle of innovation in society...
...This gives us some indication of the magnitudes of change from World War I to the present...
...What is a market...
...SPRING • 1989 • 171 Tedmoloidcal Revolution Within the system of transport, the most important has been water routes...
...And this is true for most commodities, especially for capital and currency markets...
...Thus, theory preceded artifice...
...Changes in technology, as I have insisted, do not determine social changes...
...and Minneapolis-St...
...Yet this is patently not true...
...Today the limit is almost a million components...
...A single chip can itself be a microcomputer with input/output processing capability and randomaccess memory and be, like the AT&T WE* 32100, smaller than an American dime...
...And if so, by the "market," or by some kind of "industrial policy...
...One could "walk across the street" and have easily available legal services, financial services, advertising services, printing and publishing, and the like...
...The pulse rate can transmit the entire thirty-volume Encyclopedia Britannica in a few seconds...
...More important than these, the first technological revolution introduced, and made possible, a vast new conception in the creation of wealth: the idea of productivity, the simple proposition of greater output with less effort, as a result of investment...
...and the third was Alfred P. Sloan, of General Motors, who created the system of financial controls and budgetary accounting that still rules the corporate world today...
...Alfred P. Sloan, the MIT-trained engineer who was installed as head of the company by the Du Pont interests (the largest block of stockholders until the courts forced them to divest their holdings about twenty-five years ago), installed unit cost accounting and financial controls with a single aim: to obtain a clear return on investment for the monies given to the different divisions...
...In his pathbreaking book, Invention, Growth and Welfare: A Theoretical Treatment of Technological Change (M.I.T...
...Yet the crucial point is that Einstein's paper was the starting point for much twentiethcentury work in optics, from such simple things as we now see in the application of photoelectric effects, in breaking light beams, to the work of Charles Townes in creating lasers (an acronym for "light amplification stimulated by the emission of radiation"), Dennis Gabor on holography, and the development of photonics as the new frontier for telecommunications...
...Durant never knew which of the companies was making money, and which not...
...Yet the social costs were rarely reckoned or dealt with...
...the production of food and products from the soil does not disappear from the Western world (in fact, more food is produced than ever before), but there is a significant change in the way food is produced, and, more significantly, in the number of persons engaged in agricultural production...
...In every society there is a high component of services...
...Business, the exchange of goods and services, is as old as human civilization itself...
...Route 1 in New Jersey, from New Brunswick to Trenton, with Princeton University at its hub...
...The idea of a computer goes back to the work of an earlier Cambridge mathematician, Charles Babbage, who in 1837 conceived of a "difference engine" that could mechanize any mechanical operation...
...On the higher level, there is general knowledge, such as the laws of nature, liberal arts, and language, knowledge "not particularly useful for the specialized problems of producing goods...
...Now all this is changing, as industrial society begins to give way...
...One can point to a significant development that promises the enlargement and enhancement of the new technology: photonics...
...My division can be seen as corresponding to the Marxist distinction between "forces of production" (technology or technique) and the "social relations of production" (property, organization of work, etc...
...The nature of hierarchy in work may be increasingly questioned, and new modes of participation may be called for...
...One paper was on the Brownian motion, which not only "proved" the "reality of molecules," but provided exact computations that demonstrated the correctness of Boltzmann's interpretation of thermodynamic laws...
...or by tithes on work, such as in serfdom...
...1. The shrinkage of the traditional manufacturing sectors—augmented, in these instances, by the rising competition from Asia and the ease whereby the routinized, low-value-added production can be taken up by some of the Third World societies—raises the question whether Western societies (all or some) can reorganize their production to move toward the new "high-tech, high-value-added" kinds of specialized production, or whether they will be "headquarter economies" providing investment and financial services to the rest of the world...
...In the Mesabi range of Minnesota there was iron ore...
...Postindustrial developments do not replace previous social forms as "stages" of social development...
...He asked whether mathematics could be complete, consistent, and decidable...
...The management of scale has been one of the oldest problems in social institutions, whether it be the church, the army, or economic enterprise, let alone the political order...
...Thus we have had many studies of "The Social Effects of the Railroad," of radio, of the automobile, of aviation, etc...
...It is a social way of life that is, increasingly, a "game between persons...
...Motors are everywhere, from automobiles to boats to power tools and even household devices (such as electric toothbrushes and electric carving knives) that can run on fractional horsepower—motors of one-half and onequarter horsepower...
...The Question of Scale The crucial question, as I have indicated, is how new social structures will be created in response to the different values of societies, to the new technological instruments of a postindustrial world...
...Similarly, in the coming decades, we shall be "pervaded" by computers— not just the large ones, but the "computer on a chip," the microcomputer, which will transform all our equipment and homes...
...The ways that these are used are social choices...
...For the first time, there existed a peaceful means of generating wealth, a means that was not primarily a zero-sum game but one whereby all might benefit, albeit differentially...
...And there is a second tier of technical knowledge, in which he includes computer programs and engineering formulas, which is useful in producing goods but not additional knowledge...
...3 For a convenient summary of these technologies, see Information Technologies and Social Transformation," The National Academy of Engineering (Washington D.C.: National Academy of Science, 1985...
...Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect flouted the concepts of classical physics, which held that light (like sound) was a wave...
...Printing was a system in which mechanical type was applied, with inked surfaces, to paper...
...And, with the spread of mini- and microcomputers, the ability to "down-load" databases and memories, and to place these in 172 • DISSENT Technological Revolution the small computers (as well as give them access to the large mainframes) means there is less of a necessary relation to fixed sites in the location of work...
...In the new technology information is represented by digits...
...It is not, thus, deindustrialization, but a new form of industrialization, which is taking place...
...Societies have tended to function reasonably well when there is a congruence of scale between economic activities, social units and organization, and political and administraNotes There are important consequences for sociological theory in these distinctions...
...Let us take the relation of technological invention to science in the major sectors of industrial society...
...q societies while the United States and Indonesia are capitalist...
...The location of human habitats has come with the crossing of roads or the merging of rivers and arms of lakes: traders stop with their wares, farmers bring their food, artisans settle down to provide services, and towns and cities develop...
...Two years later, in 1930, the Czech mathematician Kurt aidel had produced his theorems, which showed that, given the problems of providing a complete and consistent set of axioms, if mathematics was complete it could not be consistent, and if consistent it could not be complete...
...The oldest system has been transportation...
...2 A simple methodological point: Most discussions of technological change have focused on a single, major item and then sought to trace the social effects...
...With steam, we could create railroads that could go faster (and longer) than any known animal, steamships that could sail faster, and more steadily, than any wind-driven sails, machines that could card and spin and thus create cloth faster than the nimble fingers of a trained woman...
...One of the most remarkable changes is the "shrinkage" of units that conduct electricity or switch electrical impulses...
...And now, the third technological revolution...
...In the older conceptions of classical economics (including Marxism), services were thought of as inherently unproductive, since wealth was identified with goods, and lawyers and priests or barbers or waiters did not contribute to the national wealth...
...These are activities that are primarily processing, control, and information...
...NB: I make a distinction between a technological revolution and its socioeconomic consequences...
...Digits are numbers, discrete in their relation to one another, rather than continuous variables...
...It is still called the Rotterdam spot market for oil, but it is no longer in Rotterdam...
...In his Notebooks, da Vinci imagined an airplane, a submarine, a threshing machine, and refrigeration, and he drew the machines to embody these ideas with extraordinarily painstaking accuracy: the wheels, the gears, the shafts, and so on...
...Beyond the structural frameworks I have tried to identify, there is one crucial variable that must be taken into account—the change in scale...
...In the case of Sloan's system of a return on investment through budgetary controls, the assumptions he made were those of a quasi monopoly or oligopoly in a "steady-state" market, and that kind of financial planning can scarcely adapt to a changing world where old product lines are breaking down (one need simply consider the old distinctions between banks, insurance companies, brokerage houses, credit firms, real estate investment, all of which become to some extent interchangeable under the rubric of financial-asset management), where substitutions of products provide price challenges, where market share and cash flow may be more important momentarily, and a long-term commitment necessary technologically, than the simple unit-cost accounting that Alfred Sloan introduced...
...The ways in which technologies can be organized vary widely, and these are social decisions, which can be made in a conscious way...
...For a contrast with the older modes of analysis and the hazards of their contemporary use, see Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962] and W. F. Ogbum, The Social Effects of Aviation [Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1946...
...In the case of production, the older standardized, routinized, low-value-added forms of production are being increasingly taken over by the newly industrializing societies, where cheap wages provide the crucial cost differential in competition...
...As geography is no longer the controller of costs, distance becomes a function not of space but of time...
...All of these portend huge changes in the structures of organization from those we have seen in the older models of the army and the church, or the industrialfactory organization, which have been the structures of organization (if not domination) until now...
...And given the water-transport system tying these together, we get the locational reasons for the great industrial heartland of the United States, the bands of cities along the lakes and rivers of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh...
...Even today there is no unified rational rail system in the United States...
...As I stated in an essay several years ago,5 the national state has become too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems...
...Computer-aided manufacturing and robotics are beginning to transform the production floor...
...The invention of the transistor is akin to the invention of steam power, for it represented a quantum change in the ability to manufacture microelectronic devices for the hundreds of different functions of control, regulation, direction, and memory that microprocessors perform...
...Navy Consulting Board during World War I, he said that there ought to be someone on the board who knew some mathematics, in the event they encountered some problems that had numbers or equations, and the Navy hired a physicist...
...There are three kinds of innovators who conjoined to create the modern industrial system...
...In a country such as India, most persons with a middle-class income would have one or two servants, because many persons simply wish for a roof to sleep and a place to eat...
...Whatever utility that distinction may have had for the measurement of inventions and the rate of technological change, it is increasingly diminished and even misleading in understanding the way innovation now increasingly proceeds with the new technology...
...Let me briefly, however, with the more delimited framework of a postindustrial hypothesis, pose a number of questions...
...north to Westchester County in New York...
...This does not mean the disappearance of manufacturing or the production of goods...
...in the fields of southern Illinois and western Pennsylvania there was coal...
...thesis on a new theoretical method for determining molecular radia and Avogadro's number), any one of which would have won him eponymous fame in the history of science...
...3) Digitalization...
...It would take a book to begin to explore the many problems suggested by the possible changes we have seen...
...The introduction of computeraided design and simulation has revolutionized engineering and architectural practices...
...Together, these innovations were the corporate principles of modern industrial capitalism...
...It was Maxwell who started us off, thus, on the search that continues today for the unification of all the forces that hold matter together in the universe...
...These have been the countries around the Atlantic littoral: those of Western Europe and the United States, and then the Soviet Union and Japan...
...The machines of industrial society were mechanical instruments, powered first by steam and later by electricity...
...SPRING • 1989...
...L a postindustrial society there is an expansion of new kinds of service...
...More important, there is a new principle of innovation, especially of knowledge and its relation to technology...
...175 Tedmoloolcal Revolution Given the nature of "real time" communication, we are for the first time forging an interdependent international economy with more and more characteristics of an unstable system in which changes in the magnitudes of some variables, or shocks and disturbances in some of the units, have immediate repercussions in all the others...
...Before the advent of coast-tocoast air flight, if a traveler wanted to go from New York to the West Coast by train, he could not do so on a single system...
...In effect, markets are no longer places but networks...
...The second illustration is the revolution in solid-state physics...
...Yet in Marxist theory the two are yoked into a single form, the "mode of production...
...5 "The Future World Disorders," reprinted in my book of essays, The Winding Passage (Cambridge, Mass.: Abt Books, 1980...
...Software—the basis of customization—is still a developing art...
...If character is defined by work, then we shall see a society where "nature" is largely excluded and "things" are largely excluded within the experience of persons...
...The second paper dealt with "special relativity" and described how the invariance of the velocity of light held in different moving frames of reference, thus showing the limiting nature of the Newtonian view of the universe, putting space and time into a single continuum and the pregnant equation E = mc 2, which exploded into the atomic age...
...Alfred P. Sloan's innovations came about when he took over the sprawling General Motors from William C. Durant, a Wall Street speculator who had put together the different automobile companies (named for their early founders: Chevrolet, Olds, Cadillac, and the like) into a single firm, General Motors...
...Similarly, Guglielmo Marconi, who invented wireless communication, knew little of the work of Hertz on radio waves...
...Water and natural resources become less important as locational factors for cities, particularly as, with the newer technology, the size of manufacturing plants begins to shrink...
...and by the year 2000 between ten and one hundred million Today a tiny chip of silicon contains an electronic circuit consisting of hundreds of thousands of transistors and all the necessary interconnecting conductors, and it costs only a few dollars...
...Prior to modern times, wealth had been gained largely by direct exploitation, such as slavery...
...2 Three Technological Revolutions Any dating or numbering is somewhat arbitrary, yet if we look at the nature of the technological changes and their consequences, we are justified, I believe, in speaking of three major technological revolutions in the Western world in modern times...
...Electricity gives us a new, enhanced form of power that can be transmitted hundreds of miles, as steam cannot, thus permitting new kinds of decentralization that the bunching of machines in a factory, to minimize the loss of steam heat, could not...
...and Harvard...
...The intellectual task is how to "order" these changes in comprehensible ways, rather than just describing the multitude of changes, and thus to provide some basis of analysis rooted in sociological theory...
...The household is being transformed as digital devices begin to program and control household appliances and, in the newer home designs, all aspects of the household environment...
...We can already see the shape of the manifold changes...
...3. The reorganization of an educational system to provide a greater degree of "alphanumeric" fluency in larger portions of the population who would be employed in these postindustrial sectors...
...or by plunder and conquest...
...And the third has been communications: postal systems (which moved along highways), then telegraph (the first break in that linkage), telephone, radio, and now the entire panoply of new technological means from microwave to satellites...
...About 17 percent of the labor force does factory work (the industrial proletariat, in the older Mandan sense of the term), and it is likely that this will shrink to about 10 percent within a decade...
...The second is energy systems: hydropower, electricity grids, oil pipelines, gas pipelines, and the like...
...A telephone system was basically a set of mechanical parts (e.g...
...As two MIT scholars have pointed out (relying, of course, on Italian studies), "Prato's success rests on two factors: a long-term shift from standard to fashionable fabrics and a corresponding reorganization of production from large integrated mills to technologically sophisticated shops specializing in various phases of production—a modern systeme Motte...
...It is a telex-and-radio system whereby brokers in different parts of the world can make their deals and redirect the ships on the high seas to different ports for the sales they have made...
...He could take one of two competitive railroads from New York to Chicago, where he changed trains and then took one of three competitive systems to the Coast...
...It takes a programmer about a year to produce a few thousand lines of code...
...More than that, the newer technologies—particularly computer-aided design (CAD), numerical-control machine tools Technological Revolution (NC), and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM)—now make possible flexible, shorterrun, batch productions that can be easily adapted to different kinds of markets, and which can be responsive to specialized products and customized demands...
...and west and southwest to Mercer County in New Jersey...
...Yet if we treat these as "ideal types," we can make relevant comparisons, depending on which axis we use...
...The third type is postindustrial...
...The most crucial fact about the new technology is that it is not a separate domain (such as the label "high-tech" implies), but a set of changes that pervade all aspects of society and reorganize all older relationships...
...When Alan Turing wrote his paper, which showed that there could be a principle of decidability (whether in principle a problem was solvable or not) if the numbers were computable, he invented a tape that would be a "table of behavior" that could through binary rules compute any possible configuration of finite numbers...
...When Edison became head of the U.S...
...Similar sections of the world have been industrial, engaged in fabrication, the application of energy to machines for the mass production of goods...
...It was the place where tankers carrying surplus oil would come so that oil could be sold "on the spot...
...It is my thesis, implicit in this article and which can be stated only schematically here, that this system, marvelously adaptive to a mass-production society, is increasingly dysfunctional in today's postindustrial world...
...A university with fifty thousand students may still be called by the same name it had thirty years before, with five thousand students, but the increase in numbers calls for a change in the institutional structure...
...These are primarily extractive industries: farming, mining, fishing, timber...
...But all of that has now changed radically...
...One sees this in sound recordings, as on musical discs...
...This is the continuing promise of technology...
...The Postindustrial Society The postindustrial society is not a projection or extrapolation of existing trends in Western society...
...These three men created modern industrial SPRING • 1989 173 Technological Revolution capitalism...
...As with habitats, so with markets...
...Those who achieved the greatest notoriety were the capitalists, the men who by ruthless means put together the great enterprises: the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, Harriman, the men who initiated the large quasi-monopoly organizations, and the financiers, such as J. P. Morgan, who assembled the monies for the formation of such great corporations as U.S...
...Yet "services" is inherently an ambiguous term and, in economic analysis, one without shape because it has been used primarily as a "residual" term...
...The industrial revolution moved along the path of least resistance because it generated profits and provided goods at cheaper prices...
...today, printing is electronic...
...They came to Rotterdam because it was a large, protected port, close to the markets of Western Europe...
...So is television, with solid-state circuits...
...I reserve the term "socialism" for more humane societies...
...For status reasons, many corporations maintain a display building in New York or Tokyo...
...Electricity gives us a new source of light, which changes our rhythms of night and day...
...waterways weave around natural obstacles...
...167 Tedmological Revolution the weather, the exhaustion of the soils, the thinning out of forests, or the higher costs of the recovery of minerals and metals...
...The early phrase "the industrial revolution" obscures two different things: the introduction of steam power as a new form of energy and the creation of factories to apply that energy to machines for the production of goods...
...and the costs of time and rapidity of communication become the decisive variables...
...There is consequently a question of shape and proportion...
...But these are still in the development stage, and we are concerned here with already proven technologies that are in the process of marketing and diffusion...
...This is the decisive break with the modes of production of the past...
...In telecommunications, large electronic switching machines (to route the hundreds of thousands of calls onto different lines) use more than two million lines...
...The reason is, broadly, that industrial work has been largely considered men's work (including the corporate sectors of management...
...What we see, equally, with communication networks becoming so cheap, is a great pull toward decentralization...
...So we find that dozens of the major U.S...
...Today one can get in "real time" quotations for dollars, D-marks, Swiss francs, yen, French francs, sterling, Italian lire, in Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Milan, Frankfurt, Paris, London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and money moves swiftly across national lines...
...An equally important change is in the role of women...
...Thomas Alva Edison, one of the great geniuses among inventors—he invented the long-lasting filament for the electric-light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture—was a mathematical illiterate who cared little about the work of Clerk Maxwell in uniting electricity and magnetism into a combined theoretical set of equations...
...But there was also a different social role, often unnoticed even in the history of business, played by men who, curiously, were probably just as important, and perhaps more so: the organizers of the corporate form, those who rationalized the system and gave it an ongoing structural continuity...
...If we look at the major industries that were developed then and that still carry over today—steel, electricity, telephone, radio, aviation— we can see that they are all "nineteenthcentury" industries (though steel was begun in the eighteenth century by Darby with the invention of the coking process and aviation in the twentieth century by the Wright brothers) created by "talented tinkerers," men who were adroit with the nature of equipment, but who knew little about, or were indifferent to, the developments of science, and in particular the theoretical aspects taking place at the time...
...In steel, integrated production is now cumbersome and costly, and it is the minimills, with their specialized, flexible production, and the specialty steels that have become the basis for survival in the Western world...
...Alexander Graham Bell, one of the inventors of the telephone, was originally a speech teacher who sought to transmit amplified voice on a wire in order to enable deaf people to hear better...
...Piore and Sabel cite the various studies of Gianni Lorenzi, Ezio Avigdor, Danielle Mazzonis, and others, and the OECD study of textile and clothing, 1983...
...2) Miniaturization...
...but since the Navy personnel slots had no designation at that time for a physicist, the man was paid as a chemist...
...It is a cliché of our time that ours is an era of acceleration in the pace of change...
...Paul in Minnesota, clustering around the large state university and the Twin City metropolis...
...Yet the phenomenon cannot be reversed, and its consequences may be even greater than the previous two technological revolutions that reshaped the West and now, with the spread of industrialization, other parts of the world as well...
...it had large storage capacity...
...original edition 1973), what I sought to do was to "de-couple" the two terms, and to treat them analytically, as two independent variables...
...4 But what holds true for textiles is true for a wide variety of industries as well...
...But Durant had little talent for creating a rational structure...
...But more than all these, the idea is a "logical construct," in order to see what is central to the new social forms, rather than an empirical description...
...If we look at the major development of high-tech in the United States, we see that the four major concentrations respond to these elements: Silicon Valley, in relation to Stanford University and San Francisco...
...A telephone, for example, was an analogue system, for sound is a wave...
...And if one speaks of a pace, or of an acceleration in pace, the words imply a metric—a unit of measurement...
...4) Software...
...What we have here, clearly, are the nerves, nodes, and ganglia of a genuine international economy tied together in ways the world has never seen before...
...It is, first, a shift in the centrality of industrial production, as it was organized on the basis of standardization and mass production...
...But the modern corporation, as a social form to coordinate men, materials and markets for the mass production and mass consumption of goods, is an institution that has taken shape only in the past century...
...Any particular society would be a combination of several forms, depending on its own historical evolution...
...And these were tied together by a Great Lakes and river-valley system that connected them with ports on the oceans: the lakes of Superior, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Erie, the St...
...Animals or freight goods, unlike human beings, could not pick themselves up and move to another 174 • DISSENT freight car...
...Now, every human society has always existed on the basis of knowledge...
...These are human services—education, health, social work, social services—and professional services—analysis and planning, design, programming, and the like...
...Technological Revolution The industrial revolution produced an age of motors—something we take for granted...
...If more and more individuals are in work situations that involve a "game between persons," clearly more and more questions of equity and "comparable worth" will arise...
...Why are they now dysfunctional...
...Lawrence waterway through Canada reaching out to the Atlantic, the Erie Canal across New York reaching down the Hudson River, and the Ohio River wending its way down to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico...
...Combined, they provide a transmission capability that far exceeds the copper wire and radio...
...Micro or personal computers have specific software programs—for financial analysis or information data-base retrieval— that tailor the system to particular user needs and become, in the argot of the computer, "user-friendly...
...If one looks at industrial societies, the location of cities and the hubs of production come from the interplay of water and resources...
...Capital flows in response to differential interest rates or in reaction to news of political disturbances...
...he did not know whether it was cheaper to make his own steel or buy outside, make his own parts or buy outside...
...the circumferential Route 128 around Boston, in relation to M.I.T...
...Markets were places...
...Photonics is the key technology for transmitting large amounts of digital information through laser and ultrapure glass or optical fibers...
...tides and currents provide means of additional motion...
...In my book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1976...
...One can think of the world as divided into three kinds of social organization...
...What this means—and I shall return to the question at the close of this article—is a widening of the arenas, the multiplication of the numbers of actors, and an increase in the velocity and volatility of transactions and exchanges...
...In distributed processing the software directing the work of a particular computer terminal operates independently of software in other terminals or in the central processing unit...
...Vail, in building a telephone network, decided that if there was to be efficient service between a person calling from any point in the United States to any other point, there would have to be a single set of "long lines" connecting all the local telephones to one another...
...But what is radically new today is the codification of theoretical knowledge and its centrality for innovation, both of new knowledge and for economic goods and services...
...or by direct political levies, such as tax farming, and so on...
...The reason for the distinction is that there is no necessary, determinate single path for the use of the new technologies...
...In the past, central business districts concentrated the headquarters of large enterprises because of the huge "external economies" available through the bunching of auxiliary services...
...If we think of the changes that are beginning to occur, we think, inevitably of things and the ways we seek to use them: computers, telecommunications, and the like...
...Some of these are explored in the following two sections on changes in infrastructure, or the social geography of societies, and changes in the nature of production systems...
...Proximity to universities and culture becomes more important as a locational factor...
...One should distinguish this innovation of Turing's from his later creation of the "Turing Machine problem": Could a human being distinguish an answer to any set of problems Tedmoloidcal nenlotion One consequence of this is that invention, or the "talented tinkerer," disappears from the horizon...
...These are largely what I call "games against nature," subject to the vicissitudes of SPRING • 1989...
...Sir Henry Bessemer, who invented an oxidation process to reduce the impurities in molten metal and to produce stronger structure steel (and to win a prize from Louis Napoleon for a better cannon), knew little of the work of the metallurgist Henry Sorby on the properties of metals...
Vol. 36 • April 1989 • No. 2
