ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the decisive mid-twentieth-century compromise of industrial society within Western Europe. It shows the distinctive features of the subsequent growth of the service sector in different European countries. The chapter also gives a more realistic picture of the role of education in the social structure of today's society. Theorists of the information society make two claims. First, they claim that information or perhaps knowledge is the new resource. Second, they claim that knowledge workers are becoming more important numerically or even that such workers now make up the majority of the workforce. Education is central to all sets of theories considered in the chapter the theory of industrial society, of the service society, of the knowledge-based society (KBS). The understanding of knowledge becomes increasingly utilitarian, so that the advocates of the KBS end up with a concept of knowledge that is as limited as that of Dickens' Mr Gradgrind.
