| Twentieth-century U.S. society has experienced rapid, large-scale change. The movement from a manufacturing to a service economy, the demise of political machines and the rise of rational administration and management, the replacement of mechanical and hydraulic machine tasks with electric "information", the increasing scientization of society, the dispersal of populations out of large concentrated central cities into suburban, electronic villages, and the globalizing tendencies of economy, technology and even culture--all are regarded as evidence of a transition from industrialization to postindustrialization. A prevalent view of this social transformation is that modernity is entering a new phase of development and that technology and markets are replacing politics as the agents of social change. Postindustrial society, in this view, is evolutionary and represents an advanced stage over previous social development.; This dissertation challenges the evolutionary thesis of postindustrial transformation and presents an alternative institutional analysis of postindustrial development. Borrowing from the work of Lewis Mumford, four institutions are conceived as working together in an integrated manner: centralized power, corporatism, "big science" (Price, 1963), and the technocratic state. A historical examination of each of these institutions is provided, including the growth of an international petroleum consortium and national electric network, the rise of the corporation as the dominant form of economic organization, and the establishment of a national science and technology R&D apparatus. The coordination of these institutions with the military and the state have produced a highly centralized, technocratic social order. Particular attention is given to the role of the energy sector as a staging ground from which organizational, technological, and political initiatives for the operations of postindustrial integration have developed.; Rather than a progressive development, postindustrialism is argued to exhibit compulsive, deterministic social tendencies. In particular, this development path presumes a permanent underclass, the decline of the city as a basis for community and effective political action, the spread of a technocratic energy order which includes the export of nuclear technology, the perpetuation of conditions of unequal national and international development, and an exploitive relation with the environment. |
