ABSTRACT
The use of the concept of industrial society was explicitly supported by writers such as Raymond Aron and Ralf Dahrendorf as the main basis for an improved understanding of modern societies In its examination of the past, present and future of 'advanced industrial' societies, sociological inquiry necessarily begins by investigating the importance of industry in creating a distinctive type of society. The necessary fact of inequality within industrial society is lent added significance because of the prevalence of egalitarian ideologies and because industrial societies necessarily give rise to such ideologies. One dominant strand of thought on industrial society has mistakenly equated Weber's concept of rationality with the search for efficiency. Industrial society theory, is broader than Giddens's theory of industrial society, for it is not necessarily based on the assumption of the 'convergence' of all industrial societies or on the compatibility of liberal democracy with a stage of advanced industrialism.
