Some time ago, I came across a small portrait of a rather severe looking lady in a bonnet. To my great delight, she turned out to be a great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, who went to live in Berwick-on-Tweed in 1731. The portrait would have been painted about 1750, the year that I was taught the industrial revolution began.

There she is, looking at me across 265 years of time from the tail end of the agrarian civilisation, and here I am looking at her from the tail end of the civilisation that supplanted hers – the industrial civilisation, which Alvin Toffler called The Second Wave.

Did she imagine that her First Wave civilisation was about to be totally transformed by a combination of technological and social change into a new, more productive, freer, and more democratic order? I doubt it – certainly living in 18^th Century Berwick-on-Tweed!

Similarly, today, it is hard for people to comprehend that the industrialised world is undergoing a change just as momentous as the industrial revolution, which will bring into being a newer, more productive, more democratic and freer order – a post-industrial civilisation, which Toffler called The Third Wave.

One of the reasons things are so confused at present – and are likely to remain confused for several generations – is that, on top of the conflicts, logic and modus operandi of our industrial civilisation we are being confronted by a much more fundamental conflict –between the logic, potentials and modus operandi of the post-industrial civilisation being born and the inherited logic and institutions of our established industrial civilisation.

The industrial revolution took 100 years to become fully established in Britain. It may well be the end of the present century before our transition to the post-industrial civilisation is complete.
We have entered a long period of dialectical conflict (in the Marxian sense) between the economic potentials offered by the post-industrial era and the political, institutional and attitudinal superstructure belonging to the industrial era.

A major dilemma for the next few decades is going to be how to give expression in our political, economic and institutional structures to the freedom and belonging that is at the heart of the new era.

Workplace-focussed industrial relations (involving true enterprise bargaining), for example, is consistent with meeting these post-industrial objectives of freedom and belonging, allowing each worker to be more expressive in highly productive, participatory, small-scale teams – sharing in, and identifying with, the results of the enterprise as a whole.

This is the real triumph in what South Australian electronic automotive-components manufacturer Redarc has managed to achieve – transition to the post-industrial era. No wonder it is going from strength to strength.

The post-industrial, Third Wave future is essentially a rejection of bigness, centralisation and bureaucracy. Its motto is “Small is Beautiful”. It is the antithesis of the bureaucratic civilisation advocated by some intellectuals. It is anarchistic and communistic in the real sense (in which the State withers away). It is not socialistic in the sense of “big government”; it is small government.

Big State socialists (and some conservatives, too) often see post-industrial developments as threatening, because they are locked into industrial civilisation assumptions and prefer not to contemplate the prospect that a version of Marx’s small government utopia is on the horizon already – but not by the process that Marx foresaw.

The essence of Marx’s vision of a socialist society is a loosening of the grip of those in power at the centre to permit political and social democratisation.

Nor is Third Wave civilisation capitalistic in the sense of a predominance of large-scale capitalistic enterprise and control. Its heart is small-scale capitalistic, cooperative and self-employed production units, involving employee participation of a high order, both in organisation and the distribution of rewards. John Ralph, former head of 1990s company CRA, said that unless big business can give the feel of small business, it is finished.

The future is likely, therefore, to belong with small to medium-sized production units. Some will be quasi-autonomous units of large umbrella firms. Some will be contract suppliers to key producers. Some will be downstream distributors and retailers. Many will be horizontally linked in networks giving the flexibility to undertake small, medium or large tasks. Much of Italy’s successful leather industry is organised that way. East Asian business activity has also been heavily influenced by small group networking. Trust is a key value; family ties and social connections play a strong role.

The famous sociologist, Eric Trist, one-time head of the Tavistock Institute in London, sees a coming rejection of technocratic planning. Things get done as a result of a combination of market forces and shared objectives at the grassroots of society. Organisations become decentralised and power is dispersed rather than concentrated. This development is assisted by the revolution in communications and electronics. The periphery is freed from control by the centre.

Legendary Chinese General and philosopher, Lao-tzu, summed it up several thousand years ago: “To lead the people, walk behind them. As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. When the best leader’s work is done the people say ‘we did it ourselves’.”

In combat, officers should eat last.

The Second Wave is about them and us; the Third Wave is about me and us. It is about the empowerment of ordinary human beings living in a free and decent society. It is about reducing the dependency of people on the State, which permits them to do the real living, while we sit befuddled in front of our TVs watching the latest circus event. It is about getting rid of the controllers.

When the controllers are in charge the Chinese have noted that “the masses lose enthusiasm”.

*Richard Blandy is an Adjunct Professor of Economics in the Business School at the University of South Australia. This article is an edited and amended version of his Inaugural Address as Ronald F. Henderson Professor at the University of Melbourne in 1992.