ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is not to predict the future relations between the 'developed' and the 'underdeveloped' societies. Less grandly, it is to consider some of the attempts that have been made in that direction, with a view to assessing their value for the sociology of development. For some years now, and especially during the last decade, a number of social scientists in all the major industrial countries of the world have been engaged in what many of them have been pleased to call 'the futurological enterprise'. 1 They have been attempting to discern the main structural outlines of future industrial society. They have conjectured, many of them, that industrial society is entering a new phase of its evolution, marking a transition as momentous as that which a hundred years ago took some European societies from an agrarian to an industrial social order. They have called this new society variously: the 'post-industrial society' (Daniel Bell), the 'post-modern era' (Amitai Etzioni), 'post-civilization' (Kenneth Boulding), 'post-economic society' (Herman Kahn), and - to vary the phrase a little - 'the knowledge society' (Peter Drucker), 'the technetronic era' (Zbigniew Brzezinski), and, more modestly, 'the service class society' (Ralf Dahrendorf). 2
