ECONOMIC CRISES, STRUCTURAL CHANGE 113
time, the industrial sector began to off er more knowledge-intensive
products. Durable consumer goods such as washers, vacuums, and other
home electronics, for example, reduced the time spent on household
chores. Simultaneously, modern electronic devices also replaced mar-
ket-related services in the trade, credit, and transportation branches, as
well as in public administration. This then stimulated the production of
capital goods in return, countering the trend toward deindustrialization.
The expansion of the service sector was also tied in part to the fact that
certain services within the industrial sector were externalized—for exam-
ple, marketing and legal counsel. A purely statistical eff ect was therefore
also at work in this process. But this could account for only a small part
of this general phenomenon. In fact, tertiarization primarily refl ected the
increased service intensity attached to production that rested on new
technological innovations, especially in terms of the storage, processing,
and transmission of information throughout the whole economy. It was
also linked to a stronger intersectoral division of labor in which the tradi-
tional boundaries between diff erent branches were increasingly blurred
and more fl uid.^42 Ultimately, the industrial and service sectors moved
more and more toward “a symbiotic relationship”; it became increasingly
diffi cult to diff erentiate between the secondary and tertiary sector, rais-
ing doubts as to the applicability of the three-sector model considering
the developments of the previous forty years. Likewise, “deindustrial-
ization” only applies to a limited extent because industry continued to
hold a dominant position within the economic, political, and social struc-
ture of the Federal Republic.^43 Even the political responses to collapsing
branches made this clear because the West German government was
most interested in the preservation of industrial jobs. Interestingly, this
intra-industrial structural change attracted political attention in relation
to unemployment, but the waning signifi cance of the industrial sector as
a whole within the national economy went largely unnoticed.^44 Quite pos-
sibly, it was the cross-sector nature of the transformation within produc-
tion structures that kept the sinking importance of the “pure” industrial
economy in its nineteenth-century robes from being noticed.
One of the decisive, short-term factors behind this drop was that the
recession in 1974/75 hit the industrial sector particularly hard. Addition-
ally, the demise of the Bretton Woods system did away with the under-
valuation of the German Mark, which had benefi ted the industrial sector
in particular.^45 Simultaneously, these factors, together with mid-range and
long-term aspects, ultimately slowed down structural change in the FRG
beginning in the mid-1970s. On the whole, this deceleration resulted from
the mostly complete deagriculturalization process mentioned above, the