Industrial society

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Chicago and Northwestern railroad locomotive shop in the 20th century

In

pre-modern, pre-industrial age. Industrial societies are generally mass societies, and may be succeeded by an information society. They are often contrasted with traditional societies.[1]

factories where mechanization is utilized to further increase efficiency. As populations grow, and mechanization is further refined, often to the level of automation, many workers shift to expanding service industries
.

Industrial society makes

economic activity
.

These urban centers require the input of external energy sources in order to overcome the diminishing returns[3] of agricultural consolidation, due partially to the lack of nearby arable land, associated transportation and storage costs, and are otherwise unsustainable.[4] This makes the reliable availability of the needed energy resources high priority in industrial government policies.

Industrial development

A factory, a traditional symbol of the industrial development (a cement factory in Kunda, Estonia)

Prior to the

industrialization throughout the world in the 20th century, most economies were largely agrarian. Basics were often made within the household and most other manufacturing was carried out in smaller workshops by artisans with limited specialization or machinery.[5]

In Europe during the late Middle Ages, artisans in many towns formed

factories for more centralized production in certain industries.[7]

With the Industrial Revolution, the manufacturing sector became a major part of European and North American economies, both in terms of labor and production, contributing possibly a third of all economic activity. Along with rapid advances in technology, such as

steam power and mass steel production, the new manufacturing drastically reconfigured previously mercantile and feudal
economies. Even today, industrial manufacturing is significant to many developed and semi-developed economies.

Deindustrialisation

Main article:
Deindustrialisation
Colin Clark's sector model of an economy undergoing technological change. In later stages, the Quaternary sector of the economy grows.

Historically certain manufacturing industries have gone into a decline due to various economic factors, including the development of replacement technology or the loss of competitive advantage. An example of the former is the decline in

automobile
was mass-produced.

A recent trend has been the migration of prosperous, industrialized nations towards a

off-shoring
.

Measurements of manufacturing industries outputs and economic effect are not historically stable. Traditionally, success has been[by whom?] measured in the number of jobs created[dubious – discuss]. The reduced number of employees in the manufacturing sector has been assumed to result from a decline in the competitiveness of the sector, or the introduction of the lean manufacturing process.

Related to this change is the upgrading of the quality of the product being manufactured. While it is possible to produce a low-technology product with low-skill labour, the ability to manufacture high-technology products well is dependent on a highly skilled staff.

Industrial policy

Main article: Industrial policy

Today, as industry is an important part of most societies and nations, many governments will have at least some role in planning and regulating industry. This can include issues such as

financing, vocational education, and labour law
.

Industrial labour

Further information: industrial sociology, industrial and organizational psychology, industrial district, and industrial park
worker amidst heavy steel components (KINEX BEARINGS, Bytča, Slovakia
, c. 1995–2000)

In an industrial society, industry employs a major part of the population. This occurs typically in the manufacturing sector. A labour union is an organization of workers who have banded together to achieve common goals in key areas such as wages, hours, and other working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members (rank and file members) and negotiates labour contracts with employers. This movement first rose among industrial workers.

Effects on slavery

Ancient Mediterranean cultures relied on

abolition of slavery, partly because domestic manufacturing's new economic dominance undercut interests in the slave trade.[10]
Additionally, the new industrial methods required a complex
division of labor with less worker supervision, which may have been incompatible with forced labor.[11]

War

Main article: Industrial warfare
P-39 Airacobra
fighters

The Industrial Revolution changed warfare, with

military industry and modern warfare
.

Use in 20th century social science and politics

“Industrial society” took on a more specific meaning after World War II in the context of the Cold War, the internationalization of sociology through organizations like UNESCO, and the spread of American industrial relations to Europe. The cementation of the Soviet Union’s position as a world power inspired reflection on whether the sociological association of highly-developed industrial economies with capitalism required updating. The transformation of capitalist societies in Europe and the United States to state-managed, regulated welfare capitalism, often with significant sectors of nationalized industry, also contributed to the impression that they might be evolving beyond capitalism, or toward some sort of “convergence” common to all “types” of industrial societies, whether capitalist or communist.[12] State management, automation, bureaucracy, institutionalized collective bargaining, and the rise of the tertiary sector were taken as common markers of industrial society.

The “industrial society” paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s was strongly marked by the unprecedented economic growth in Europe and the United States after World War II, and drew heavily on the work of economists like

W.W. Rostow, and Jean Fourastié.[13] The fusion of sociology with development economics gave the industrial society paradigm strong resemblances to modernization theory, which achieved major influence in social science in the context of postwar decolonization and the development of post-colonial states.[14]

The French sociologist Raymond Aron, who gave the most developed definition to the concept of “industrial society” in the 1950s, used the term as a comparative method to identify common features of the Western capitalist and Soviet-style communist societies.[15] Other sociologists, including Daniel Bell, Reinhard Bendix, Ralf Dahrendorf, Georges Friedmann, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Alain Touraine, used similar ideas in their own work, though with sometimes very different definitions and emphases. The principal notions of industrial-society theory were also commonly expressed in the ideas of reformists in European social-democratic parties who advocated a turn away from Marxism and an end to revolutionary politics.[16]

Because of its association with non-Marxist modernization theory and American anticommunist organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom,[17] “industrial society” theory was often criticized by left-wing sociologists and Communists as a liberal ideology that aimed to justify the postwar status quo and undermine opposition to capitalism.[18] However, some left-wing thinkers like André Gorz, Serge Mallet, Herbert Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School used aspects of industrial society theory in their critiques of capitalism.

Selected bibliography of industrial society theory

  • Adorno, Theodor. "Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?" (1968)
  • Aron, Raymond. Dix-huit leçons sur la société industrielle. Paris: Gallimard, 1961.
  • Aron, Raymond. La lutte des classes: nouvelles leçons sur les sociétés industrielles. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
  • Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: Free Press, 1960.
  • Dahrendorf, Ralf. Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959.
  • Gorz, André. Stratégie ouvrière et néo-capitalisme. Paris: Seuil, 1964.
  • Friedmann, Georges. Le Travail en miettes. Paris: Gallimard, 1956.
  • Kaczynski, Theodore J. "
    Industrial Society and its Future
    ". Berkeley, CA: Jolly Roger Press, 1995.
  • Kerr, Clark, et al. Industrialism and Industrial Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960.
  • Lipset, Seymour Martin. Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1959.
  • Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
  • Touraine, Alain. Sociologie de l'action. Paris: Seuil, 1965.

See also

References

  1. doi:10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/02028-3. Online
  2. ^ "Chapter 1: Energy Fundamentals, Energy Use in an Industrial Society" (PDF). Retrieved 2007-12-18.
  3. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0290-92
    .
  4. S2CID 54683871
    .
  5. ^ "Industrial Revolution - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com". HISTORY.com. Retrieved 2018-07-04. Before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, [...] [m]ost manufacturing was done in homes or small, rural shops, using hand tools or simple machines.
  6. S2CID 154328341
    . The empirical findings cast doubt on views that guilds existed because they were efficient institutional solutions to market failures relating to product quality, training, and innovation.
  7. ISBN 978-0-521-66102-7
    , retrieved 2024-02-14
  8. ^ Betzelt, Sigrid (2001). The Third Sector as a Job Machine?: Conditions, Potentials, and Policies for Job Creation in German Nonprofit Organizations. European University Studies: Economics and Management – ISSN 0531-7339. Vol. 2805. Peter Lang. p. 52.
    ISBN 9780820454306
    . Retrieved 6 November 2019. 'Tertiarization', the quantitative shift of economic relevance from agricultural and especially industrial production [...].
  9. ^ Pujolar, Joan (2018). "Post-Nationalism and Language Commodification". In Tollefson, James W.; Pérez-Milans, Miguel (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 487.
    ISBN 9780190458898
    . Retrieved 6 November 2019. Tertiarization refers to the dominance of so-called third- or tertiary-sector production in the economy.
  10. ^ Harley, Charles (September 2011). "Slavery, the British Atlantic Economy and the Industrial Revolution" (PDF). Working Paper: 7–8. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-08-02. Retrieved 2020-08-11. As the Industrial Revolution proceeded, the main focus of economic attention shifted to the new industries created by Britain's technological prominence. These industries looked not for protection but for an opening of export markets. As the political economy shifted, the West Indian interest became vulnerable to their opponents. The slave trade was abolished in 1807 and slavery eventually abolished in 1833.
  11. ^ Lagerlöf, Nils-Petter (2006-08-30). "Slavery and other property rights" (PDF). Some argue that slavery died out due to the rise of industrial production modes, involving a larger number of work tasks, thus making slavery more costly in terms of supervision. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  12. ^ Brick, Howard (2006). Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  13. S2CID 199311563
    .
  14. ^ Gilman, Nils (2003). Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  15. ^ Aron, Raymond (1961). Dix-huit leçons sur la société industrielle. Paris: Gallimard.
  16. ^ Sassoon, Donald (1996). A Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century. New York: Free Press. pp. chapter ten.
  17. S2CID 153804847
    .
  18. ^ Giddens, Anthony (1982). Sociology: A Short But Critical Introduction. London: Macmillan Education. pp. 31–40.


Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Industrial_society&oldid=1216335143"