Post-Industrial Society

In pre-industrial societies – still the condition of most of the world today – the labor force is engaged overwhelmingly in the extractive industries: mining, fishing, forestry, agriculture. Industrial societies – principally those around the North Atlantic littoral plus the Soviet Union and Japan – are goods-producing societies. Manufacturing is still the single largest source of jobs in the economy. In 1980 the total manufacturing labor force will number about 22 million, or 22 percent of the labor force at that time. The central occupational category in the society today is the professional and technical. Growth in this category has outdistanced all other major occupational groups in recent decades. The German sociologists, and Mills, had been writing principally about managerial, administrative, and clerical personnel. The most serious efforts to apply Gorz's ideas to the American scene have been made by some radical young economists at Harvard, notably Herbert Gintis.