on to suggest that ‘class’ divisions be reinterpreted to include any
politically relevant dimension; black/white, unemployed/employed;
football supporters/non-supporters, etc. Further, he argues the
overlapping of all these various splits has contributed to the ‘floating
vote’ phenomena referred to above and the stability of pluralist
political systems.
There is clearly some strength in these criticisms – although it can
be argued that a real divergence of interests remains between
‘capitalist’ and labour groups, and that Dahrendorf’s reinterpretation
of class goes so far as to rob the term of any clear meaning.
Other writers, such as Bell (1973), have taken a rather different
(perhaps ‘technological determinist’) line of argument: that Marx’s
focus on the mass production factory mode of production is funda-
mentally inappropriate to the emerging ‘information economy’.
Economic development is seen as having gone through a series of
stages dominated by different occupations and technologies: hunter-
gatherer with stone and wood axes, bows, coracles, etc.; agrarian with
simple iron craft tools; manufacturing based on the steam engine and
factory production. The main division in the economy and society is
now seen as focusing on the dominant technology of the late
twentieth and twenty-first centuries: information technology. The
emerging dominant class are thus ‘knowledge workers’ who control
this technology.
It is indeed difficult to underestimate the economic and social
importance of scientific knowledge and its manipulation through
information technology at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inventors were often
practical men influenced by the experimental and innovative temper
of the age, but not necessarily using the most advanced scientific
theories. More recent advances such as radio, atomic energy and
electronic computing were, however, all theoretically developed
before increasingly large teams of scientists and technologists realised
them in practical terms. Increasingly, scientific and professional
expertise is being brought to bear on business and social problems. So
that the ability to co-ordinate teams of highly qualified and well-
informed experts becomes crucial to success – whether in developing
the next generation of weapons (say anti-missile systems) or the next
generation of consumer goods (e.g. digital television).
In addition to producing, recruiting and co-ordinating human126 PROCESSES