The Evolution of Industrial Systems

The Forking Paths

Timothy Leggatt

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138352971
• eBook ISBN: 9780429785009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book, first published in 1985, tackles simultaneously three major questions about the course of industrial evolution: what are the features of the industrial systems that have developed outside Western capitalism? What are the salient evolutionary developments now occurring in all advanced capitalist systems? What light can social theory throw upon the evolution of industrial systems thus far and in the future? In answering these questions the author provides an exposition of how the Soviet system works and how the Japanese system developed; a critical analysis of three issues of major contemporary concern – the control of giant corporations, the impact of automation, and the shift to service employment; and a commentary on the theories of classical and contemporary social thinkers. Concluding with his own conceptualisation of the determinants of industrial evolution, the author also offers his own evaluation of the needs of the advanced industrial societies.

PART ONE

THE FRAMEWORK OF ANALYSIS

1 INTRODUCTION

The subject of this book, and of the studies it contains, is the continuing development of the world’s advanced industrial systems. The process of initial industrial development as an issue of general interest or the conditions of industrial take-off are not treated here; they have been the subject of extensive study elsewhere.¹ The title also declares a view of the processes at work that denies the relevance of the rhetoric and symbolism of revolution. The story of evolutionary development contains sufficient surprise and fascination without recourse to the heightened dramatic scenarios of revolution.

Reflections upon human societies and upon their pasts tend, to the sombre analyst, to be bedevilled by dramatic simplicities. It comes to be thought that societies develop in inevitable ways, either according to one plan or according to minor variants of it; that history is full of crossroads or watersheds, vivid disjunctive points punctuating the otherwise largely undifferentiated process of change; that major changes are brought about by single or pre-eminent causes. It is seldom so; indeed perhaps it is never so. But so insistent is the human disposition to simplify the complex flow of historical and contemporary events, to conceptualise with enforced clarity what is normally veiled and obscure, that the simplest patterns of interpretation tend to be the most eagerly grasped.

The evolution of industrial systems does not follow a simple pattern, and this emerges in some detail in the studies that follow. But this does not force us to accept the confessed total ignorance of Heeb: ‘whether there are one or many time paths to one or many, or any, end states is unknown’.² The way of discretion is surely to assume that there is indeed no end state (short of obliteration) to industrial development but that there are paths, and many of them, into the future. So the study of the Soviet and Japanese industrial systems that follows strongly suggests, in the light of which no simple convergence thesis can remain tenable. The smaller studies of certain issues now of great salience in advanced capitalist systems confirm the complex nature of industrial development.

The argument is also put forward that industrial systems are still very much in process of evolution. Little support is found for the idea that to characterise one society as the forerunner of post-industrial development serves to clarify understanding of the changes now taking place. Can we not simply accept, as we do in biological science, ‘the continual generation of novel change and the proliferation of diverse genotypes’?³

The reader will have recognised that a special claim is being made about the interest and importance to historians and social scientists of ‘industrial systems’. This term is chosen to encompass less than ‘industrial societies’, with all the social institutions and relationships that they comprise. It also affirms the belief that what goes on in these societies and how their futures evolve are dependent, more than upon any other features, upon the complex of institutions, relationships, practices and other factors that make up their industrial systems: upon, for example, the organisation of industry, the nature of work, relations between managers and workers, the place of trade unions, the control of large companies and the applications of advanced technology.

The object of the studies, for both historians and social scientists, is twofold: to throw more light on areas that have hitherto been only fitfully and inadequately illuminated; and to try to identify the principal features of advanced industrial systems that will shape their continuing evolution. In Chapter 2 the ideas of leading social theorists, both classical and contemporary, are investigated in order to provide a theoretical frame of reference for what follows. Our concern is primarily with those of their ideas that relate to the nature of industrial systems and the experience of industrial life, but so large is this subject already that wider issues, related to possible developments in advanced industrial societies, are also germane to the discussion. In Part Two certain critical issues for capitalist systems are comprehensively treated: in Chapter 3, the complex issue of the control of corporate power, with some special reference to multinational companies; and in Chapter 4 the impact of automation upon work and employment and the implications of the shift to service employment. These issues are relevant to all advanced capitalist systems but the focus is upon Britain and the USA from which the evidence discussed is drawn.

In Parts Three and Four the focus shifts first to the Soviet Union and then to Japan, the two pre-eminent nations to industrialise in the twentieth century. Both nations were deliberate followers of the first industrialising nations and deliberate borrowers from them. In the case of the Soviet Union we have a society which, as Russia, for some hundreds of years aspired to be Western but which for ideological reasons chose a different industrial system and a different path of development. In the case of Japan we have a society which never wished to be Western but has deliberately sought to borrow from the West and to adapt to its own cultural traditions whatever was necessary to emulate the industrial development of the West. Each society has found its own path to, and form of, industrial evolution that is distinct from that trodden by the Western pioneers of industrialisation.

But the Western reader’s knowledge and needs are so different in the two cases that the treatments of the two societies are equally different. Although the social system of the USSR is frequently thought of as alien, because characterised as Communist or despotic or both, all the ideas upon which it is based are of European origin and Russia, as it then was, shared its earlier phases of social and economic development with the remainder of Europe. Hence the exposition of the Soviet industrial system in Part Three is not historical but is concerned with recent developments, with only passing reference to the period before 1945. The focus is upon the planning system, examined within its institutional and governmental framework. Customarily, economists ignore the political and social context of economic behaviour, while non-economists concern themselves with this context, leaving scrutiny of economic behaviour to the specialists. Here a broader, more comprehensive analysis is attempted.

In the Japanese case, while capitalist institutions are familiar to the Western reader, the history is not. Usually, what is surprising about Japanese practices — for example, the employment system — is treated in a few paragraphs of historical explanation. The approach in Part Four, however, is unashamedly historical, and in order to place in context the discontinuities of the Meiji period of modernisation and the aftermath of World War II the account starts with the Tokugawa regime. Only in an historical framework, however brief, can the process of development be properly examined.

In Part Five are put forward the writer’s views as to the main factors and issues that are even now shaping the evolution of the advanced industrial societies.

Notes

1. The economic literature starts with Colin Clark, The Conditions of Economic Progress (Macmillan, London, 1951) and W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 1971); the historical literature starts with Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Harvard University Press, 1962) and David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 1972).

2. Quoted in Leon N. Lindberg, ‘Introduction: Politics and the Future of Industrial Society’, Ch. 1 of Lindberg (ed.), Politics and the Future of Industrial Society (David McKay Co., New York, 1976), p. 6.

3. James R. Millar, On the Merits of the Convergence Hypothesis’, Journal of Economic Issues, vol. II, no. 1 (1968), pp. 60-8. The quotation is from p. 68.

2 THEORIES OF INDUSTRIAL CHANGE

The purpose of this chapter is to review the work of leading social theorists where they have touched upon theories related to the process of industrialisation and the development of industrial societies. These issues became of central importance in the nineteenth century with the industrialisation of Britain and of the other leading European nations. The chapter therefore starts with a survey of the ideas of Marx, Weber and Durkheim and sets out their great insights into the process of industrial development. It is at once apparent that their conceptualisations of the process remain the starting point of any study even in the closing years of the twentieth century.

The chapter continues with an exposition of the analyses of industrial society of six leading social thinkers in the period since the Second World War: Aron, Galbraith, Bell, Habermas, Mandel and Marcuse. Their relevant ideas are set out as fully as possible given the summary nature of the exposition.

The chapter is completed by a discussion of the main issues raised, the object being to bring together the thoughts of the theorists who have been considered, in order to draw out the questions of common concern. This discussion provides both a framework for consideration of the empirical material of the following six chapters and a point of reference for the theoretical concerns of the final chapter.

The Classical Legacy

The great trinity of classical sociological thinkers, Marx, Weber and Durkheim, were all deeply concerned about the nature and direction of change of the industrialising societies of their time. They were aware that the changes brought about by what is now termed the industrial revolution were quite without precedent in their powers of destruction of the former, traditional ways of living associated with agrarian society and in their promise of a different society in the future. They all had different ideas as to what was most significant in the processes of change and therefore also as to what social factors would pre-eminently shape the future.

No one can predict the future in any kind of detail, but it is possible to point to the key factors in its unfolding or to attempt to do so. The classical thinkers were not ‘right’ in their examination of trends. Their claim to greatness rests upon their identification of factors and forces that have aided man’s understanding of the processes of social change and their concern with issues that have proved to be general and enduring.

Even if they did not focus on industrial societies by that name, their concern was with the societies of their day whose destiny was evidently being shaped by developments in science, technology and manufacturing industry.

Marx and the Analysis of Capitalism

Marx is acknowledged everywhere as the most provocative of social thinkers but he was just as unequivocally one of the most original. Unfortunately for later social critics reared in the heritage of positivism it has not always been easy to treat fairly someone who did not divorce thought and philosophy and science from action, and whose passionate humanism led him to marry his concern for the realisation of man’s essential nature to his analysis of contemporary society. But here we are solely concerned with his social analysis.¹

In this domain Marx offered three profound insights that have had an enduring influence on the study of industrial society.² The first was to single out the economic sphere from every other sphere of social behaviour and to give it priority. Thus Marx analytically separated the economic substructure from all other elements in society, from the superstructure which included other social institutions (political, legal, cultural, etc.), beliefs and forms of consciousness and pointed to the economic substructure as the principal determining feature of any society.

Within the economic substructure Marx identified the forces of production, the current state of production technology, as giving rise to the relations of production, the prevailing property relations and the social division of labour, which in turn determined corresponding forms of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: The Framework of Analysis
• Part Two: Issues for Advanced Capitalist Systems
• Part Three: The Industrial System of the USSR
• Part Four: The Japanese Industrial System
• Part Five: The Forking Paths
• Subject Index
• Name Index