Post-industrial society

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"Post-industrial" redirects here. For the grouping of music genres, see post-industrial (music).

A post-industrial society is a proposed name for an economy that has undergone a specific series of changes in structure after a process of industrialization.

Such societies are often marked by:

A rapid increase in the size of the service sector, as opposed to manufacturing,
An increase in the amount of information technology, often leading to an "information age". Information, knowledge and creativity are the new raw materials of such an economy. The concept of the informational revolution is relevant.

Post-industrial society has often been a term of criticism, with many seeking to restore industrial development. Increasingly, however, citizens are seeing abandoned old factories as sites for new housing, shopping, recreational, and commercial development opportunities. This however does not imply that there has been a decrease in manufactured goods, as many factories now use machines instead of a human workforce.

The concept of the post-industrial society is linked with the work of Daniel Bell. Here are some of his observations from the 1970s:

A post-industrial society is one in which the majority of those employed are not involved in the production of tangible goods [1].
What is characteristic of post-industrial society is not just the shift from property or political criteria to knowledge as the base of power, but the character of knowledge itself [2].

However, Bell used Colin Clark's three-sector model, which did not distinguish between, say, retailing, personal care services and telecoms or information technology.

Examples of post-industrial societies include the United States, Canada, Germany, Austria, the Benelux and Scandinavia.