The interesting contribution of this book is not just confined to
capturing the role changes that a knowledge based society
characterizing post-industrialism demands, but that it is able to
bring about a fusion of micro individual and the macro societal
role relationships..... This book makes interesting and useful
reading for the serious management practitioner interested in
gaining a grasp of the role alterations that are taking place in
his own work domain, and comprehend its implications. The
contribution of this work to sociological theory is in making
predictions about the social changes which can come up with the
transformation to a knowledge based society. --Vikalpa "The
interesting contribution of this book is not just confined to
capturing the role changes that a knowledge based society
characterizing post-industrialism demands, but that it is able to
bring about a fusion of micro individual and the macro societal
role relationships. This book, due to its rigour, is essentially
academic oriented. But the writing style is such that it can also
make interesting and useful reading for the serious management
practitioner interested in gaining a grasp of the role alterations
that are taking place in his own work domain, and comprehend its
implications." --Unnikrishnan K. Nair in Vikalpa The shift from an
industrial to a post-industrial society has been documented
extensively, as has its impact on the macro-level institutions of
society--government, the workplace, and the economy. But how has
post-industrial life impacted the individual and relationships
between individuals? Hage and Powers examine this intriguing
question by linking global changes in work patterns, information
flow and knowledge to the practice of everyday life. They conclude
that the complexities of society require a different kind of
people, those with complex selves and creative minds, capable of
confronting the challenges of the forthcoming century. Creativity,
flexibility, and emotional astuteness will be the buzzwords of the
future, as well as personality traits that will enable people to
successfully adapt to the ever-changing swirl of workplace,
familial, personal, and leisure roles. Based on the tenets of
social theory, the authors present a window into the future and a
plan for personal and interpersonal action. Their insights will
shed light for social psychologists, social theorists,
futurologists, organizational theorists, network analysts, and
communication researchers. "It is stimulating to encounter a work
of such intellectual audacity that is so solidly buttressed by
sound scholarship and respect for evidence. The core argument,
which is based heavily on symbolic interactionist theory, has the
ring of truth. This is a thoroughly remarkable book--broad in
scope, significant in its implications, and, better than any I
know, making eminently good sense of the eddying social currents
and bewildering social changes that characterize contemporary
society. I predict that it will have a major and lasting impact on
the field." --Morris Rosenberg, University of Maryland "This book
is one of those rare works that courageously turns established
assumptions on their heads and challenges the whole field of
sociology to shift directions. It offers a version of functionalism
calling for continuous change rather than stability, with
functional prerequisites at the individual level. It deplores
current sociology's dominant emphasis on power and money, offering
in their place the unequal distribution of knowledge as the key
organizing principle. Rather than formulating theory primarily at
the macro or micro level, it focuses on the meso level, where micro
and macro are linked through a unique revision of role theory. Hage
and Powers take symbolic interaction as their starting perspective,
but modify and extend the work of George Herbert Mead in
imaginative ways. At the same time, they draw selectively on the
work of structuralists Merton and Nadel to develop a thoughtful
linkage between micro- and macro-sociological processes in a social
structure in which flexible networks rather than formal
organizations are the key components. Post-Industrial Lives could
well become the touchstone for broad debate on the nature of
sociological theory, and the paradigm that stimulates a widely
ranging body of new empirical research." --Ralph Turner, University
of California, Los Angeles "Hage and Powers bring their in-depth
sociological analysis of the changes central to post-industrial and
post-modern life home--to where we live and work. They succeed in
the best sense of the sociological imagination to bridge the micro
and macro, the personal and the structural. They not only build a
theoretical framework for understanding the changes in society, but
encourage us to appreciate that as the old role scripts and
hierarchical controls give way to networks of interacting people,
we have more independence to fashion our own personal connections
to others." --Barbara Sherman Heyl, Illinois State University "The
authors have given a remarkable, coherent theoretical outline of
postindustrial society. . . . This book is written in an
extraordinarily clear and understandable scientific prose."
--American Journal of Sociology "Most of the books on
post-industrial society, and more recently, on post-modernism are
distinguished by their vagueness and imprecision. In contrast, this
book examines in detail the effects of increasing societal
complexity and change on the structure of roles, and vice versa.
The book does a masterful job of utilizing, criticizing, and
extending classic and contemporary theoretical literatures in
developing a well reasoned conceptual perspective. By focusing on
roles, role-sets, status-sets, person-sets, and role-relationships,
the authors link changes in the macrostructural forces of modern
societies in terms of increased complexity of networks and matrices
to meso level changes in organizational forms and to micro level
transformations in self, emotions, and styles of interaction. And,
all of this fine analytical work is done in a highly readable
fashion which realizes the rare goal of appealing to students,
practitioners, lay persons, and academics. The authors have,
therefore, made the analysis of post-industrial society
theoretically sophisticated, while at the same time making it
empirically and experientially relevant." --Jonathan H. Turner,
University of California, Riverside
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