ABSTRACT
Several authors have argued that recent decades have seen the end of industrialism and the birth of a new kind of post-industrial or post-modern society (Bell 1973, 1980; Toffler 1981; Naisbitt 1984; Pakulski and Waters 1996). The end of industrialism has been associated with the relative decline of manual employment and the traditional manufacturing or ‘smoke-stack’ industries that produce tangible goods. Post-industrial society has arisen with the emergence of new industries based upon the creation and manipulation of information and knowledge, or ‘non-tangible’ goods, and a vast expansion of the service sector. The growth of these industries is linked to a rise in non-manual occupations, the expansion of employment opportunities for women workers and the coming of what some have called the ‘information’ or ‘network’ age (Hamel and Prahalad 1996; Castells 1996).
