ABSTRACT
The established industrial societies in the 1950s were centered in North America, Western Europe, Australia/New Zealand, Eastern Europe, and Japan. Growth rates in the Soviet Union were reported at 8 to 10 percent per year, about on a par with the most rapidly expanding areas of Western Europe and ahead of the United States. Within the industrial societies, rapid economic growth paid off in improvements in living standards. Some authorities contended that new technologies and management forms added up to a decisively new economy; they heralded a postindustrial revolution and argued that it was as sweeping in its implications as the industrial revolution before it. Whether the structural changes in the industrial economies of the West and Japan added up to a new revolution was unclear. The most striking balance shift among the established industrial nations, however, focused on Eastern Europe, where industrialization had forged ahead so notably in the immediate postwar decades.
