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The trend in the BMI values of the United States population has not been estimated accurately because time series data are unavailable and because the focus has been on calculating period effects. This chapter attempts to estimate long-run trends and the rate of change of BMI values by birth cohorts, stratified by gender and ethnicity, beginning with the mid-nineteenth century. The transition to post-industrial BMI values began in earnest after the First World War and, after slowing down during the Great Depression, accelerated with the spread of television viewing. While period effects provide an upper bound when the weight change occurred, birth cohort effects provide a lower bound. In the absence of longitudinal data, both effects need to be considered. Hence, the evidence leads to the hypothesis that transition to post-industrial weights probably started considerably earlier than hitherto asserted.

The chapter presents a historical analysis of technocracy and its major revolutions, from its original conception in the French revolution to the latest and largely unexplored revolution from the 1980s and onwards. In this way, the chapter provides a historically informed understanding of the technocratic regime and establishes the core idea that the dynamics and structures of post- industrial society is the main driver of technocratic influence on policy and politics.

Wealth and power are traditionally associated with the possession of various physical resources. Factors of production, materials, labour, and money are all physical in nature. We are now, however, experiencing a shift from a world largely dominated by physical resources to a world that values knowledge and intellectual resources. In a post-industrial society, goods are being replaced by services. This chapter illustrates the impact that the knowledge industry has on work and on jobs and defines knowledge, presents its key characteristics, and establishes the economic value of knowledge. The chapter also includes a discussion about the commercial application of information technology (IT), how it has evolved, and how trends in IT influence the growth and development of the knowledge industry.

This chapter discusses the concepts of empowerment and partnership in post-industrial society. It uses empowerment as a benchmark against which the claims of partnership will be tested. It evaluates whether partnership facilitates or has negative consequences for empowerment, focusing on the Education Action Zone in west Newcastle, England, and related initiatives in communities in Brazil. It concludes that it is not possible to achieve empowerment through partnership.

This chapter discusses theories concerning post-industrial society. It evaluates research evidence concerning the limits of the structural aspects of post-industrial theory and suggests that its account of industrial and occupational trends is too gross to be useful. It argues that the major structural and cultural trends in rich countries are better captured by convergence theory with its accent on the universal and specific effects of continuing industrialization.

This introductory chapter offers a new agenda for research in political economy centered on the transformation of advanced capitalist democracies from industrial to services-based economies. It introduces the research questions which form the core of this agenda and the central themes of the volume; explains what the existing political economy literature can and cannot tell us about these questions; and outlines (based on the analysis in the volume) the principal economic and political characteristics of a set of alternative models of service sector development, which can provide a framework for future analyses of the political economy of service societies. In particular, it outlines a set of arguments about the ways in which the institutional configurations of existing socioeconomic regimes (or “varieties of capitalism”) influence their service sector development trajectories, and examines some of the economic, distributional, and political implications of the pursuit of alternative paths to service sector development (e.g., the rate of service employment creation, and the types of service sector jobs which are created, patterns of inequality, rates of labor force participation, the distribution of political preferences over policy among different labor market groups, patterns of political coalition formation, and partisan electoral outcomes). It concludes by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of alternative service sector development models (some of which have been highlighted by the recent financial crisis), which have implications for the long-term economic and political sustainability of these regimes.

This concluding chapter explains that American-style postwar “Fordism” was only one pattern in the mottled global legacy left behind by Henry Ford. It was not the least ideological effect of American hegemony that in the 1960s modernization theory could universalize this unique historical arrangement — what can be called “high mass-consumption” — as the target of successful development itself. Responding to the crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, social scientists added a next phase: “Post-Fordism” or “post-industrial society” signaled deindustrialization to some and the promise of a “service and information economy” to others. What united these constructs was a thinking in sequential stages, a preoccupation with national patterns of development, and a theory of causation centered on self-generating forces. It has become clear that cycles of industrialization and deindustrialization are inseparable from concerted efforts to restructure the global division of labor, that productive dual-use technologies are fiercely contested by states and corporations alike, that investment and disinvestment cannot be dislodged from contests over the terms of globalization, and that capital has no autonomous power outside of the designs and struggles of political actors.

This chapter discusses two contrasted processes that take plce in Europe today: On one hand, religion is perceived as a main dimension that organises social and political life at the global level, and, on the other hand, national identity and the nation-state is re-emerging as the main community of allegiance and belonging in a post-industrial society. I am arguing that actually both processes find their roots in the re-organisation of the political and symbolic world order that took place in 1989 with the collapse of Communism. They are of course conveniently supported and fuelled by the recent socio-economic crisis in Europe, which has intensified inequalities both within and between countries making citizens increasingly worried about their future.

The future for older workers has recently become an issue of major concern to individuals, governments and employers. For many people confronted with diminishing pension savings, entitlements and extensions to state pension ages, the prospects for an early and smooth transition to retirement appear to be diminishing. For employers facing a more regulated labour market with the advent of age discrimination legislation and in the context of changing demographics and possible skill shortages, there is an increasing need for the reconsideration of the management of the older workforce. For governments, concerns about the tendency of people to retire earlier and live longer and the strains on the public purse in terms of state pensions and health service costs called for an increasingly urgent commitment to extending working life. This volume brings together various up-to-date research findings on older workers. It examines from different perspectives the opportunities and constraints that face older workers in post-industrial societies in the twenty-first century. This volume was inspired by a string of seminars which were supported by a grant from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), on the Subject of ‘Employability of Older Workers’. The seminars identified a number of underdeveloped themes that are significant to extending working lives. This introductory chapter provides an introduction to the national and international context for the current interest and concern about older workers. In addition, the chapter also provides an outline of the contents of the succeeding chapters which explores the significance and impact of the various stakeholders — governments, employers and the older individuals — in shaping the future prospects for older workers.

This chapter provides an overview of the experiences of Muslim minority communities in Britain, as well as in other parts of Western Europe. It explores the nature of the immigration process and its associations with the changing nature of the economy and society. Over time, a myopic concentration on ethnic, racial and religious differences has fed into Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment, where a discourse on mutually recognized integration has shifted into forced assimilation, partially into a dominant framing of ‘values’. For example, the discourse in relation to Britishness has shifted away from a focus on celebrating diversity and differences in society as part of a vision of a unitary political whole, and instead moved towards one in which ethnic nationalism, in the form of an idealized notion of Englishness in the case of the UK, is the centerpiece. Examining immigration in the contexts of politics, culture and identity, this chapter reveals the complexity of contested identities in post-industrial urban settings that were once the initial sites of immigration for these groups, focusing on Britain and other important centers of Muslim politics and populations across Western Europe. How such conditions provoke specific types of responses from these Muslim groups is also explored, and two aspects of the nature of the fissures within Islamism are also introduced – one is potentially regressive and reactionary, with the other being worldly and spiritual.

The interim remarks take a step back from the hustle and bustle of politics to reflect on the forces that supported the rise of environmentalism. The chapter discusses transnational trends such as the growing prominence of post-material values, new ideas about health and the declining significance of industry in Western economies. A number of specific German conditions underscored the trend. Activists in the post-1968 tradition recast the environmental crisis in Marxist terms. Ambitious politicians embraced environmental causes to advance their careers. Environmentalism also helped to cope with a sense of insecurity that was fuelled both by the Cold War and Germany's deeply troubling past. Over time, German businessmen realized that a commitment to green values met nicely with its commitment to cutting-edge engineering. There was also an element of luck. For all the supporting conditions, it was completely unexpected that so many things came together in a spectacular boom of environmentalism in the 1980s.