page_title: Industrial society
section_title: Deindustrialisation
hierarchical_section_title: Industrial society / Deindustrialisation
caption_attribution_description: English: Clark's Sector Model (see Industry)
context_page_description: In sociology, industrial society is a society driven by the use of technology to enable mass production, supporting a large population with a high capacity for division of labour. Such a structure developed in the Western world in the period of time following the Industrial Revolution, and replaced the agrarian societies of the pre-modern, pre-industrial age. Industrial societies are generally mass societies, and may be succeeded by an information society. They are often contrasted with traditional societies.
  Industrial societies use external energy sources, such as fossil fuels, to increase the rate and scale of production. The production of food is shifted to large commercial farms where the products of industry, such as combine harvesters and fossil fuel-based fertilizers, are used to decrease required human labor while increasing production. No longer needed for the production of food, excess labor is moved into these factories where mechanization is utilized to further increase efficiency. As populations grow, and mechanization is further refined, often to the level of automation, many workers shift to expanding service industries.
context_section_description: Historically certain manufacturing industries have gone into a decline due to various economic factors, including the development of replacement technology or the loss of competitive advantage. An example of the former is the decline in carriage manufacturing when the automobile was mass-produced.
  A recent trend has been the migration of prosperous, industrialized nations towards a post-industrial society. This has come with a major shift in labor and production away from manufacturing and towards the service sector, a process dubbed tertiarization. Additionally, since the late 20th century, rapid changes in communication and information technology (sometimes called an information revolution) have allowed sections of some economies to specialize in a quaternary sector of knowledge and information-based services. For these and other reasons, in a post-industrial society, manufacturers can and often do relocate their industrial operations to lower-cost regions in a process known as off-shoring.
  Measurements of manufacturing industries outputs and economic effect are not historically stable. Traditionally, success has been measured in the number of jobs created. The reduced number of employees in the manufacturing sector has been assumed to result from a decline in the competitiveness of the sector, or the introduction of the lean manufacturing process.
  Related to this change is the upgrading of the quality of the product being manufactured. While it is possible to produce a low-technology product with low-skill labour, the ability to manufacture high-technology products well is dependent on a highly skilled staff.
caption: Colin Clark's sector model of an economy undergoing technological change. In later stages, the Quaternary sector of the economy grows.
exif: {}