Post-industrial Development and the New Leisure Economy

Abstract

One of the central tenets of economic and political thinking in the Anglophone countries during the recent phase of globalisation has been the inevitability of a permanent shift away from manufacturing as the central plank of the economy in favour of a new scenario where technical innovation, creative performance and information management are the main sources of activity. A modernist worldview typical of the 1950s would likely characterise this as a process of ‘undevelopment’. In a changing world, however, we might elect to see the de-industrialisation of the West as a necessary rebalancing of the uneven development of the colonial era. More commonly, however, the notion of a ‘post-industrial’ society has been postulated not as a lapse into a pre-industrial epoch or a lasting redistribution of productive wealth, but rather as marking a paradigm shift into a new stage of post-modern social and economic development (Bell 1973; Masuda 1980; Kumar 2005). By this reading, the most developed countries are deemed as having passed through certain stages in economic and social organisation (namely, agricultural society and industrial society) prior to the pursuit of a post-industrial society. This teleology naturally causes us to question the implications of this new paradigm for a country like India, which has invested so much in industrialisation as the ultimate goal of the development process.