Has Canada as a Postindustrail Society

Has Canada become a “postindustrial” society?

To properly discuss if Canada has become a postindustrial society, it is first important to understand what is meant by the term post-industrialization, and what characterizes a society as industrial or postindustrial. An industrial economy is characterized by using advances in technology and machinery to drive business and the economy, particularly within manufacturing. Whereas, a postindustrial society is taking “new technologies” even further and changing the focus from what Critoph (2013) describes as “computer chips and processors and, even more recently, nanotechnology are all shifting the focus of work from factories and manual labour to what some call “knowledge work” (Unit 2, Section 2.1, para. 9). Post- industrialization is characterized by the shift from the production of goods to the production of services such as computer engineers, doctors, accountants and even HR professionals. There is a noticeable replacement of “blue collar” with “white collar,” the replacement of practical knowledge with more theoretical, and certainly more of an emphasis on university and technical institutes as these are the graduates that guide and create the technologies which are essential to the postindustrial society.

So, let’s then look at how work has changed in Canada. There are a few different ways in which the labour market has changed in Canada, first of which the population is aging; and this poses a challenge to fill the jobs that are required. With the baby-boomers entering retirement, as Critoph discusses, and the birth rate not being high enough to counteract that, we are looking at a shortage of workers to sustain our economy. To combat this, historically Canada has depended on immigration and bringing in temporary foreign workers to hold jobs. Also, women are now more prevalent in the workforce compared to years past, although typically within lower-paid and administrative or “pink collar” jobs, “lower-level...