Soc (2010) 47:269–271
DOI 10.1007/s12115-010-9310-x
BOOK REVIEW
Daniel Cohen, Three Lectures on Post-Industrial Society.
Translated by William McCuaig
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 106 pp. $19.00. ISBN-10: 0262033836; ISBN-13:
978-0262033831
Anthony S. Clark
Published online: 1 April 2010
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
In the wake of recent worldwide economic events, social
scientists and others have begun to contemplate the role of
capitalism in fomenting the financial crisis that started in
the United States and spread around the globe, as well as
the ongoing role of the free market as an organizing
principle in general. Even prior to the financial crisis it was
apparent that the world had entered into a new era marked
by new economic and social arrangements. The industrial
era reached its zenith in the West in the middle of the
twentieth century. Though the shift to the post-industrial era
has been underway for some time, institutions—political,
economic and social—still appear to be in flux. Daniel
Cohen, Professor of Economics at the École Normale
Supérieure and the Université de Paris-I, provides a
framework for analyzing this shift in his latest book, Three
Lectures on Post-Industrial Society.
In the book’s first chapter (his first lecture), Cohen exam-
ines the causes for the dissolution of Western industrial
society, attributing its decline to five separate factors he calls
ruptures. The first rupture Cohen attributes to the dawning of
a third industrial revolution brought on by the advent of
information technology (the first industrial revolution came
about due to the invention of the steam engine and the
second due to electricity). Closely linked to the proliferation
of information technology, but not necessarily flowing from
it, is the second rupture in Cohen’s schema: the social
revolution. By “social revolution” Cohen is referring to the
combined changes in the organization of work that may
A. S. Clark (*)
ISEE, Lindenwood University,
209 S. Kingshighway,
St. Charles, MO 63301, USA
e-mail: aclark@lindenwood.edu
occur in conjunction with technological revolutions but are
in no way caused by them. In making his case that the social
revolution is independent from the technological revolution,
Cohen asserts, “The fact that these phenomena are intimately
linked does not at all imply that technology automatically
produces its own proper mode of social organization. At the
moment when electricity was domesticated, nothing allowed
contemporaries to think that it would lead to assembly-line
production. In fact, they believed at first that it was going to
boost small artisans relative to large enterprises...”
While it is certainly arguable that a stronger linkage
exists between the broad adoption of a revolutionary new
technology (the first rupture) and the subsequence changes
in the modes and organization of work (the second rupture)
than Cohen acknowledges, his basic point is well-taken:
over the past few decades a major transformation has been
taking place in the organization of production and thus the
organization of human labor. Electricity came together with
“Taylorism,” or the scientific organization of work, Cohen
points out, just as the IT revolution can be linked with
“Toyotaism,” which entails a flattening of hierarchical
structures; a reduction in the level of specialization within
a given production unit; and the introduction of flexible,
just-in-time, and made-to-measure production.
Further exacerbating this transformation in the organiza-
tion of work is globalization, another of the major con-
tributors to the decline of Western industrial society; a
rupture Cohen addresses more completely in his second
lecture, titled “The New World Economy.” Cohen charac-
terizes the new world economy in terms of the new
international division of labor, or the “vertical disintegra-
tion of production.” He illustrates this concept using the
example of the Barbie doll: “Barbie’s raw materials, the
plastic and the ‘hair,’ come from Taiwan and Japan.
Assembly was done in the Philippines, before it was moved
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to Indonesia and China, where wages were lower. The
molds come from the United States, and the last touch of
paint is applied there before the dolls go into the stores.
What we have here is not sectoral specialization (textiles for
some, automobiles for others). Specialization applies here
to the tasks accomplished by each in order to fabricate a
given product.”
Cohen uses the example of Nike shoes to emphasize a
crucial point regarding globalization’s impact on the orga-
nization of work: “This cost structure [of the production of
a pair of Nike shoes] perfectly illustrates...the contours of
post-industrial society...Conceptualization and design up-
stream, and ‘prescription’ downstream (in the sense given
this word in the introduction: all the myriad ways of getting
a pair of these shoes onto the feet of the end user) become
the core activities of rich countries. The middle stage, fab-
rication, becomes non-essential and can be externalized. In
the new international division of labor, the rich tend to sell
immaterial goods and buy material goods.”
In what perhaps constitutes the most engaging section
of the book, Cohen contrasts the current wave of
globalization with the first globalization that began in the
nineteenth century and ended with the onset of World
War I. He notes a number of similarities between the two
episodes of globalization, in particular the fact that both
were precipitated by technological revolutions. The first
period of globalization was brought on by revolutionary
advancements in communications and transportation
technology—namely the telegraph, the steamship and
the railroad—while the current globalization is closely
associated with the IT revolution. Cohen argues that the
earlier globalization was not inferior to the current day's, and
in making his case cites a striking statistic: “[I]n 1913, 10%
of the world’s population was composed of immigrants, in
the straightforward statistical sense of persons residing in a
country different from that in which they were born. The
corresponding number today is no more than 3% of the
world’s population.” The notion that the two episodes of
globalization are of similar scope and magnitude is one of
the cornerstones of Cohen’s broader argument concerning
globalization because he brands the earlier period as a “test
case of globalization in virtually pure form.” In Cohen’s
view, “The result [of the first globalization] is stark and
unambiguous. Globalization quite simply proved incapable
of diffusing the prosperity of the richest to the poorest.
Indeed, what we witness during the nineteenth century is a
formidable increase in inequality worldwide. To confine
ourselves to the most representative example of this trend,
England in 1820 was (already) twice as wealthy per capita
as India. But in 1913, at the close of the first globalization,
the income gap had gone from 1:2 to 1:10. What we have
here is a fivefold increase in the wealth gap between rich
and poor.”
Soc (2010) 47:269–271
Of the five ruptures presented in Three Lectures glob-
alization receives the most attention, but Cohen also cites
the cultural revolution of the 1960s as another factor
precipitating the shift from the industrial era to the post-
industrial era. He reminds the reader that the generational
conflict of the 1960s, and the ensuing rejection of social
norms, was not just a single-nation event; such protests
occurred in countries throughout the industrialized world.
Nonetheless, Cohen chooses to focus much of his attention
on the protests that took place in France in May 1968, a
period of time which, in his view, “marks an undeniable
rupture in the functioning of the institutions that were
exposed to its onslaught: the family, the factory, schooling.
The crisis shifted them from a position in which their
legitimacy was innate to one in which it had to be
acquired...Each was deeply affected, undergoing something
close to a genetic mutation so as to adapt to this new
environment. Families rearranged themselves, schooling
gave way to pedagogy, the factory began the process of
externalization.”
The final rupture (actually the fourth in Cohen’s schema,
coming before globalization) was the financial revolution of
the 1980s. Here Cohen is primarily referring to the changes
in executive compensation practices that removed managers
from the salary-earning class and created a wedge between
those who direct companies and the wage and salary
earners who work under them. Cohen brings into this
discussion the issue of hostile takeovers, referencing some
research which shows that target firms in hostile takeover
situations tend to increase in value—anywhere from 15 to
30%, depending on the time frame examined—while
bidding firms neither lose nor gain in value. Traditional
wisdom always held that the gain in the target firm’s value
occurs due to an increase in the firm’s productive efficiency
resulting from the merger. Cohen dispels this notion, citing
an article titled “Breach of Trust in Hostile Takeovers,” in
which economists Andrei Shleifer and Larry Summers offer
a different take on the empirical evidence. Rather than
increase the value of a target company by improving its
efficiency, what Shleifer and Summers believe a corporate
raider really does is expropriate the target firm’s stake-
holders to the benefit of shareholders. For example, in
hostile takeover situations, arrangements with long-term
employees are often scuttled. This interpretation of Shleifer
and Summers, in Cohen’s words, “sheds light on a basic
rupture: the old equilibrium between markets has swung to
the side of the markets. The organic link binding wage and
salary earners to CEOs, to the detriment of shareholders, in
the age when CEOs were salary earners themselves, has
broken, and the invisible handshake between management
and workers has relaxed.”
The five-rupture framework outlined in Three Lectures is
a useful rubric for analyzing the shift from the industrial to
Soc (2010) 47:269–271
the post-industrial era. Some obvious overlap exists be-
tween a few of the ruptures; Cohen hasn’t fully explored
these potential interrelationships, which leaves some room
for debate among his students and readers. The discussion
of the rupture in the financial markets is fascinating (as well
as timely) and warrants more space than Cohen gives it. His
treatment of globalization, particularly the comparison of
the first globalization to the current one, is highly thought-
provoking; though some of his arguments are not fully
supported. Most notably, he fails to provide evidence that
poor countries are worse off than they were before the start
of the nineteenth-century globalization. (It is entirely
plausible that the poor countries grew wealthier as well
but at a lesser rate than the rich countries, meaning that
even though inequality is greater, the poor countries are still
better off in absolute sense; Cohen conspicuously fails to
address this point in his analysis.)
In a relatively small amount of space (106 pages) Cohen
manages to broach a large number of important ideas. Some
of these ideas he expounds upon quite satisfactorily—
e.g., the material on globalization alone makes the book
worth perusing—while other ideas he merely brushes
against. The first two lectures in Cohen’s book—“The Era
of Ruptures” and “The New World Economy”—are fairly
unified in theme and work together as a seamless tract. The
third chapter, “Is There a European Social Model,” is really
a standalone essay in which Cohen delineates the various
forms of European capitalism, raises the idea of the need
for a unified European social model, and advocates for the
creation of a European university system.
Far more interesting than the third chapter, the conclusion
of Three Lectures includes a discussion of the increasing
prevalence of social endogamy (i.e., the development of a
series of closed-off social classes) in today’s world. Cohen
offers Gary Becker’s theory of assortive mating as a possible
explanation for the current rise of social endogamy. A full
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discussion of the theory (which better applies to the context
of individuals seeking marriage partners) goes beyond the
scope of this article, but Cohen uses it to interpret certain
realities of industrial society. Cohen’s application of Becker’s
theory is reasonably well encapsulated in the following
passage: “Those best endowed decide to remain among
themselves. Those just below, in frustration, close off access
to the level below them in turn. The secession of the richest
reverberates down through the whole of society. Endogamy
becomes the rule. The theory of assortive pairings throws
into relief an important point: people find themselves
grouped together, in homogeneous social classes, less out
of self-love than out of rejection of the other, of those who
are poorer.”
Cohen introduces some novel material in Three Lectures,
particularly a few truly insightful connections and compar-
isons; though it’s fair to say that the book also contains
its share of well-trod arguments. Further, as alluded to
previously, some of the arguments presented in Three
Lectures are supported with mere examples rather than
sound empirical evidence. However, in reading and digest-
ing his arguments, one gets the idea that Cohen’s primary
purpose was not so much to convince his readers of certain
facts as it was to raise certain questions in their minds. On
that count he unquestionably succeeds. There is no doubt
that a new era is upon us, and Cohen deserves credit for
beginning the process of defining the parameters—the new
economic, social and political models—that will ultimately
come to be associated with the post-industrial era.
Anthony S. Clark is an Associate Professor of Economics and
Director of the Institute for Study of Economics and the Environment
(ISEE) at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, MO. His areas of
interest include land use change, energy policy, regional economics,
and economics education.