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Synonyms

Information age; Information capitalism; Information society; Knowledge economy; Post-industrial capitalism; Post-industrial economy; Service economy

Definition

Post-industrial society is a concept popularized by Bell (1973), describing the transition from a society predominantly based on the production of physical goods to a service-based one. Economically, it is associated with the rise of the service sector, or the so-called tertiary sector, to the point that it either produces more wealth than the manufacturing, or so-called secondary sector, of the economy – at least insofar as wealth is measured the traditional way; through output captured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – and/or provides a larger proportion of employment within a national economy. It should be pointed out, though, that services as distinguished term is hard to conceptualize because of its use as a residual category encompassing various heterogeneous fields: There “are lumped together miscellaneous...

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Correspondence to Volker M. Rundshagen MBA MA .

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© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Rundshagen, V.M. (2013). Post Industrial Society. In: Idowu, S.O., Capaldi, N., Zu, L., Gupta, A.D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Corporate Social Responsibility. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28036-8_175

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28036-8_175

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-28035-1

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