Post-industrial society
As a new, educated, and politicized generation, more impassioned by liberalism, social justice, and environmentalism, comes into being; the shift of power into their hands, as a result of their knowledge endowments, is often cited as a good thing.
[12] The valuation of specifically scientific knowledge and technology can paradoxically be devalued by individuals in a post-industrial society as they still expect its benefits but are more sensitized to moral trade-offs and risks.
As education itself becomes more and more oriented towards producing people capable of answering the need for self-actualization, creativity, and self-expression, successive generations become more endowed with the ability to contribute to and perpetuate such industries.
This change in education, as well among the emerging class of young professionals, is initiated by what James D Wright identifies as an "unprecedented economic affluence and the satiation of basic material needs".
[14] Urban geographer Trevor Barnes, in his work outlining the Vancouver experience in post-war development, evokes the post-industrial condition, citing the emergence and consolidation of a significant video games industry as a constituent of the elite service sector.
[16] This is necessitated by the demands of a tertiary and quaternary sector: in order to better service an industry focused on finance, education, communication, management, training, engineering, and aesthetic design, the city must become points of exchange capable of providing the most updated information from across the globe.
Actor and then-artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre, Kevin Spacey, has argued the economic case for the arts in terms of providing jobs and being of greater importance in exports than manufacturing (as well as an educational role) in a guest column he wrote for The Times.
A mild view held by Alan Banks and Jim Foster contends that representations of post-industrial society by advocates assume professional, educated elites were previously less relevant than they have become in the new social order, and that changes that have occurred are minor but greatly embellished.
[11] More critical views see the entire process as the highest evolution of capitalism, wherein the system produces commodities as opposed to practical goods and is determined privately instead of socially.
Neo-Malthusian in essence, this outlook focuses on post-industrial society's continuing struggle with issues of resource scarcity, overpopulation, and environmental degradation, all of which are remnants from its industrial history.
[19] This is exacerbated by a "corporate liberalism" that seeks to continue economic growth through "the creation and satisfaction of false needs", or as Christopher Lasch more derisively refers to it, "subsidized waste".
Urban sprawl, characterised behaviourally by cities "expanding at the periphery in even lower densities" and physically by "office parks, malls, strips, condo clusters, corporate campuses, and gated communities", is singled out as the main issue.
[14] Resulting from a post-industrialist culture of "mobile capital, the service economy, post-Fordist disposable consumerism and banking deregulation", urban sprawl has caused post-industrialism to become environmentally and socially regressive.
[19] Of the latter, "post-industrialism's doctrine of … mobility and malleability" encourage a disconnect between communities where social belonging falls into the category of things considered by the "post-Fordist disposable consumer[ist]" attitude as interchangeable, expendable, and replaceable.
The response from the "more advanced" nation might be eventually effective or damaging, however it would be hard pressed to bridge the gap until domestic industry could makeup for the lack of imported manufactured goods.
