Theories of Industrial Society (RLE Social Theory) by Richard Badham

Author:Richard Badham [Badham, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317650522
Google: J_pTBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-08-21T03:18:18+00:00

6 THE INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

At the heart of industrial society theory, there lies the assumption that industry is not just one, but the, central feature of the modern world. Ever since Saint-Simon first speculated on the nature of industrial society, proponents of this theory have been almost exclusively preoccupied with the nature, preconditions and consequences of industrial advance. Ernest Gellner (1972: 37–8) remarked that political theory’s ‘central question — the basis of political order as opposed to anarchy — is now replaced … by an interest in the bases of industrial society as opposed to pre-industrial society’.

It is frequently assumed that the development of industry has a destabilizing impact on society, that it imposes conditions upon society which are unwelcome to many of its inhabitants, and that one of the responses to the impositions created by industry is a rejection of industry itself, or possibly even worse, a refusal to accept the ‘costs’ of industrial progress while attempting to retain its ‘benefits’. Industrial society theory, on the basis of these assumptions, attaches great significance to investigating the exact requirements of industry and to popular acceptance of and adaptation to the supposed inevitability and desirability of industrial advance.

Ernest Gellner (1972:69) has put the position in the following terms:

in this one specific area I believe that the Real and the Rational do happen to converge. Industrialisation is good, and industrialisation must happen. Industrialisation is good on independent grounds; but it is also good in virtue of being inevitable. To this extent, the present argument is ‘historicist’, it abjectly prostrates itself before what it holds to be predetermined, a cosmic or at any rate global trend. In those cases (which are rather rare) when some social — or other — development is known with adequate certainty to be inevitable, it is better to adjust oneself to it and learn to like it rather than to condemn it. This pattern of moral reasoning — the recognition of necessity … does find application sometimes, and this is one of these times.

Yet, as we shall see, industry has been variously defined, and used to refer to a whole complex of technical, economic and social processes. The ambiguities and problems that this has created become significant because industrial society theory places such a high priority on the investigation of this industrial complex and its social requirements, as the major issue facing modern states. The main concerns of this and the next chapter are (i) with the ambiguity of the concept of industry, together with the effects of this ambiguity; and also (ii) with the limitations imposed upon social inquiry through the dominant focus on the ‘industrial’ character of modern states.

In regard to (i), it may be said that a weakness of past theories of industrial society has been the portrayal of industry, not merely as a set of technical or economic means for achieving socioeconomic goals, but as an autonomous goal inherent in modern societies. In this way, technological and economic change has often been attributed to the

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