Post-Industrial Concepts and Possibilities: An Argumentative Report

In this presentation, we'll discuss the points elaborated by Mark Poster (1990) and Fred Block (1990) in their books about Post-Industrial Society. This period of time tackles the generation and working environment after the Industrial Age. There are numerous misinterpretations and gray areas, both economic and social in nature, that need to be addressed and contextualized in the Modern Era such as the concepts of liberalism, free-market, metatheory, Neo-classical economics, and the Information Age. This presentation was discussed during one of the discourses in UP-Diliman Technology Management Center's subject TM281, otherwise known as Strategic Technology Planning.

1. Concepts & Possibilities
Post-Industrial
EDNEIL D. JOCUSOL | TM281 | APRIL 22, 2021
ARGUMENTATIVE REPORT:
MARK POSTER & FRED BLOCK (1990)

2. Part 1:
Post-Industrial
Context
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

3. Key Points
much theoretical debate
centers on defining the
proper scope and ambition
of social theory and on
determining the kind of
theory that should be created
Meta-theory1
their views were
delegitimated both in the
academy and in the broader
society
Liberalism2
tampering with the operation
of the labor market will
always produce negative
economic and social
consequences
Free Market3
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES
PART 1

4. Theory of
Post
Industrialism
The concept of
postindustrial
society carries much
of the baggage of
nineteenth-century
evolutionary
thought.
PART 1
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

5. Reformulating
Postindustrial
Theory, 1
The first step in such a
reformulation is to recognize that
social science concepts are not
simply analytic abstractions, but
are themselves cultural tools that
play an important role in creating
a semblance of order out of the
potential chaos of social life.
PART 1
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

6. Reformulating
Postindustrial
Theory, 2
Constructing social
theories is, however,
always a political act
PART 1
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

7. International
Perspective
The existence of an international
economy is analytically prior to
the domestic economy; each
national economy is subject to
varying degrees of pressure and
constraints that flow from the
dynamics of international
transactions.
PART 1
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

8. Part 2:
Economic Sociology
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

9. Key Points
let that motive be religious,
political, or aesthetic; let it
be pride, prejudice, love, or
envy; and man will appear as
essentially religious, political,
aesthetic, proud, prejudiced,
engrossed in love or envy
Economic man1
the rational pursuit of self-
interest by actors will
generally lead to an outcome
that is undesirable or
substantively irrational for the
participants
Prisoner's dilemma2
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES
PART 2

10. Neo-
Classical
Economics
New framework for economic
thought to strengthen post-
industrial trends.
MARKET
LABOR
CAPITAL
OUTPUT

11. Part 3:
The "Market"
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

12. Marketness &
Instrumentalism
It is the market that is supposed
to produce a harmonious result
out of the clash of competing
interests. It is the market's
capacity to perform this feat that
sustains the idea of a self-
regulating market society in
which "external" interventions in
the market are to be kept to a
minimum.
PART 3
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

13. Problems with
Market Model
The argument here, in contrast, is
that an effort to create an
economy close to the ideal type
of high marketness and high
instrumentalism of behavior would
have disastrous consequences.
PART 3
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

14. Information &
Transaction
Costs
When some sizable percentage
of purchasers are not getting
what they think they are paying
for, for example, there cannot be
an effective balancing of
preferences and utility.
PART 3
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

15. Opportunism
& Time
Commitments
A simple example is the
disruptions that occur in an
organizational setting when an
individual is continually exploring
outside (employment)
opportunities that might prove
more lucrative than present
arrangements.
PART 3
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

16. Part 4:
The "Labor"
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

17. Theory of
Efficient Labor
It is not actual human beings who
are an input into the production
process, but one of their
characteristics — their capacity
to do work.
PART 4
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

18. Problem of
Coercion &
Coopoeration
The explicit side of the
neoclassical analysis of the labor
market emphasizes unconstrained
freedom of choice; the labor
contract is an exchange of
equivalents in which the wage is
fair recompense for the worker's
effort.
PART 4
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

19. Part 5:
The "Capital"
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

20. Traditional
Issues in
Defining
Capital
It is obvious that heavy machines
and factory buildings are part of
capital investment; there is
disagreement as to whether
"intangible expenditures" such as
spending for research or training
should also count as capital.
PART 5
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

21. The Problem of
Conceptualizing
Capital
Once we have identified many of
the nontraditional factors that
have an increasing bearing on a
firm's effectiveness, the question
is how they should be
conceptualized and measured.
PART 5
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

22. Recent
Developments in
Capital Savings
The development of the
microprocessor was not a single event,
and it launched a process of
continuous innovation. With each
successive microprocessor, engineers
managed to put many times the
number of logic circuits on a chip of
the same size, so that the
microprocessors could become
progressively more powerful in
processing information.
PART 5
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

23. Part 6:
The "Output" (GNP)
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

24. What GNP
Measures?
PART 6
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES
It is commonplace among economists
that the Gross National Product is not
a measure of the welfare of the
population. It cannot be this because it
lacks a distributive dimension; a given
level of GNP could be linked to a
highly egalitarian or a highly
inegalitarian distribution of income.

25. Household
Production
Keynes's famous observation that the
man who marries his housekeeper
diminishes total GNP remains very
much to the point, because services
produced in the home by family
members are excluded from GNP. This
includes the traditional types of
housework—childcare, cleaning, and
meal preparation—as well as unpaid
work done on maintaining and
improving housing and consumer
durables such as automobiles.
PART 6
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

26. Leisure Time
Utilities involving leisure itself are
another type that is not measured.
Within economic theory, labor is
generally seen as a disutility; this is why
people must be paid to work.
PART 6
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

27. Mismatch of
Production in
Demand
The failure of the society to replace
services that were historically
produced in the home or by voluntary
labor is one case of a larger problem.
In the market model, needs are almost
automatically turned into demand that
will be met by entrepreneurs, but in
actual economies the situation is much
more complex.
PART 6
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES

28. REFERENCES
Manza, J. (1988). The Politics of Post-Industrial
Society. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 33, 173-
179. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41035395
Whyte, C. W. (2020). Poison, Persistence, and
Cascade Effects: AI and Cyber Conflict.
Strategic Studies Quarterly, 14(4), 18–46.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26956151
Bakari, M. E. (2015). Sustainability and
Contemporary Man-Nature Divide: Aspects of
Conflict, Alienation, and Beyond. Consilience, 13,
195–215. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26427279
Poster, M. (1990). The Concept of Postindustrial
Society: Bell and the Problem of Rhetoric. In
The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and
Social Context (pp. 29–51). Polity Press.
Levett, A. (2015). Work and Unemployment in Post
Industrial Times. Labour, Employment and Work in
New Zealand, 378–384.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/229709547.pdf
Block, F. (1990). Postindustrial Possibilities: a
Critique of Economic Discourse. University of
California Press.
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29. "To know your future, you
must know your past."
George Santayana (Spanish philosopher)
POST-INDUSTRIAL CONCEPTS & POSSIBILITIES APRIL 22, 2021 EDNEIL D. JOCUSOL