ABSTRACT
The best known thesis of this kind has been advanced by Kerr, Dunlop, Harbison and Myers in their Industrialism and Industrial Man (1960). These authors argue that there is a logic of industrialism, generating imperatives of an economic and technological nature, which is steadily moulding the development of industrial societies into a common pattern. Despite the diverse political, ideological and cultural origins of industrialized societies, their institutional frameworks are converging under the force of a common industrial logic. Galbraith, in his The New Industrial State (1967) has, of course, advanced a comparable argument. It bears some affinity to the Marxist view that the form of social institutions is moulded by forces in the economic substructure.
