ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 introduces the first of Bell’s ‘big ideas’, the notion that ideology has been exhausted as a principle for the organization of political life. In this chapter we address perhaps the biggest of his ideas, the one that has become the most influential both inside sociology and in wider intellectual circles, the idea that society is becoming ‘post-industrial’. The term ‘post-industrial society’ has become common conceptual currency because of Bell’s construction of it, even where that construction is not acknowledged, much as the concept of ‘charisma’ is invoked without making reference to Weber. This alone is a tribute to the effectiveness of the conceptualization.
