Sociology321 Assignment 1

Sociology 321

Assignment 1

2015-10-28

Has Canada become a post-industrial society?

“Post-industrial” is discussed as the stage of society’s development that demonstrates a move from manufacturing service industries, and from a focus on the production of physical goods to the production of knowledge or information. Post industrialism has been in circulation since the 1970s and the theory of it has both its supporters and criticisers. Whether the post-industrial society involves changes of the magnitude seen in the industrial revolution is questionable, except there is no doubt that, in many western economies, service industries and knowledge work have grown, while manufacturing and the production of tangible goods have decreased. Accepting the post-industrial theory means that many parts of the Canadian economy and society could be portrayed in this way.

The industrial revolution involved a substitution of jobs in agriculture and skilled trades with those in manufacturing and the processing of raw materials (Krahn, Lowe, & Hughes, 2011, p.26). However, beginning in England and Western Europe before moving to North America, the industrial era was a time in which work was changed by new technologies, such as the steam engine, electricity, and the loom, as discussed in unit two of “Work, Industry, and Canadian Society”. As factories and assembly lines were built to industrialize work and maximize the efficiency of machines and workers, a new class of physical wage-labourers, which according to Marx were referred to as proletariat, formed and came to be seen in conflict to management classes and the owners of the means of production, bourgeoisie and capitalists. By the late nineteenth century, Canada had become an industrial society, which Krahn, Lowe, & Hughes (2011) outlines as one that “inanimate sources of energy such as coal or electricity fuel a production system that uses technology to process raw materials” (p.3).

The service industry, on the...