ABSTRACT

Amongst those who subscribe to the notion that a new sort of society is emerging, far and away the best known characterisation of the ‘information society’ is Daniel Bell’s theory of post-industrialism. Indeed, the terms are very frequently used interchangeably: the information age is presented as expressive of post-industrial society (hereafter PIS) and post-industrialism is widely regarded as an ‘information society’. And, it should be said, Professor Bell, though he coined the term post-industrialism as long ago as the late 1950s, did himself take to substituting the words ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’ for the prefix ‘post-industrial’ around 1980 when a tidal wave of enthusiasm for futurology was swelled by interest in developments in computer and communications technologies.