Page 109 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Commun cat on and Knowledge Labor

the first sustained analysis of the division between agriculture, manufactur-
ing, and the expanding services sector. Fritz Machlup was among the leaders in
charting the expansion of the data and information components of the economy,
and Marc Uri Porat built on this work to document the shift from an economy
based on the primary (agriculture) and secondary (manufacturing) sectors to
one rooted in services (tertiary) and information (quaternary) occupations.
Neither Machlup nor Porat addressed the political, social, and cultural implica-
tions of this transformation in anything approaching the theoretical sophistica-
tion of Daniel Bell.
According to Bell, we were not merely experiencing a growth in data and
information, nor merely a shift in the major occupational categories, but a trans-
formation in the nature of capitalist society. Capitalism had been governed for
two centuries by industrialists and their financiers, who comprised the capitalist
class. Now, with the rise of a society dependent on technology and particularly
on the production and distribution of information, Bell maintained that a new
class of leaders, a genuine knowledge class of well-trained scientific-technical
workers, was rising to prominence and ultimately to leadership of a postindus-
trial capitalism. Inherited wealth and power would shrink in significance and a
genuine meritocracy would rule. Such a society would not necessarily be more
democratic, but it did portend a shift in power from its traditional base in fam-
ily inheritance to technical and scientific knowledge. The ranks of knowledge
workers would literally power and manage this new postindustrial economy,
leading to steady economic growth and the decline of historic ideologies. For
Bell, political battles over public policy would diminish as technical algorithms
and knowledge-based measures would govern. There would no doubt be ten-
sions in such a society, but these would be technical and not ideological.

knowLEDgE ComPaniEs DominaTE
anD DE-skiLL workErs

It did not take long for others to conclude that, cultural issues aside, postindus-
trialism itself was not inherently progressive. For Herbert Schiller, postindustri-
alism meant the rise of transnational media and communication businesses that
would pump out support for American values, including its military and im-
perial ambitions, and eliminate alternatives through increasingly concentrated
market power. According to Harry Braverman, for the vast majority of workers
in the service, retail, and knowledge professions, labor would be as regimented
and ultimately de-skilled, as it had been in assembly-line manufacturing. In-
deed, given the immateriality of knowledge work, it would be easier than in
the industrial era to separate conception from execution, and to concentrate the
power of conception (e.g., design and management) in a dominant class.
There has been widespread debate ever since Bell, Braverman, and Schiller
addressed these issues, but there is some agreement in key areas. There is con-
sensus that a shift has occurred in developed societies, and that one is begin-
ning in some less developed ones, from manufacturing to knowledge work. Yes,
people agree, there was and still is considerable knowledge required in much of