Page "Information society" Paragraph 12

Alain Touraine already spoke in 1971 of the post-industrial society.

" The passage to postindustrial society takes place when investment results in the production of symbolic goods that modify values, needs, representations, far more than in the production of material goods or even of ' services '.

Industrial society had transformed the means of production: post-industrial society changes the ends of production, that is, culture.

(…) The decisive point here is that in postindustrial society all of the economic system is the object of intervention of society upon itself.

That is why we can call it the programmed society, because this phrase captures its capacity to create models of management, production, organization, distribution, and consumption, so that such a society appears, at all its functional levels, as the product of an action exercised by the society itself, and not as the outcome of natural laws or cultural specificities " ( Touraine 1988: 104 ).

In the programmed society also the area of cultural reproduction including aspects such as information, consumption, health, research, education would be industrialized.

That modern society is increasing its capacity to act upon itself means for Touraine that society is reinvesting ever larger parts of production and so produces and transforms itself.

This makes Touraine's concept substantially different from that of Daniel Bell who focused on the capacity to process and generate information for efficient society functioning.