From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society

Just as America's world-wide military role provided both the motive and the opportunity for the development of more and more sophisticated systems of information technology, so too did the world-wide expansion of the American corporation in the years following the Second World War. It has been one of the notable features of the idea of the information society that, just as with the idea of post-industrial society, its exposition and explication in the scholarly literature and at academic conferences have been accompanied by extensive popularization in the mass media and through journalistic best-sellers. Knowledge, according to information society theorists, is progressively supposed to affect work in two ways. One is the upgrading of the knowledge content of existing work, in the sense that the new technology adds rather than subtracts from the skill of workers. The other is the creation and expansion of new work in the knowledge sector, such that information workers come to predominate in the economy.