Canada: The Post-industrial Transformation
             Has Canada become a "post-industrial" Society? In order to answer that question, we must first define just what is a post-industrial society comprised of.
             For more than two decades sociologists have debated the social and political consequences of an emergent post-industrial society. A post-industrial society relies on service industries, knowledge-production, and information technology to create wealth, rather than, as in most Western societies from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards, heavy industrial manufacture. Post-industrialism can be identified with the post-modern, in much the same way that industrialism, with its commitment to the exploitation of the environment in the name of social progress, can with modernism. A concern with knowledge-production is in fact now seen as one of the hallmarks of a post-industrial society.
             For some, the post-industrial world promises a new kind of capitalism that will draw its vitality from an expansion of knowledge and the creative capacities of working men and women. Others have highlighted post industrialism's darker side and concluded that it is simply the next stage in the degradation of labour. For some, the massive entry of women into paid labour that accompanies post industrialism will finally liberate women from domestic patriarchy. For others, it is no more than an extension of private patriarchy into the public sphere.
             Historical residues and the contemporary impact of major economic and political factors have produced not one but several post-industrial trajectories. They reveal how post industrialism has brought a new distribution of productive forces and of effective powers over people, and show that the shape of that distribution varies considerably in different countries and different fields as a result of both institutionalized practices (inherited from industrial capitalism) and the contemporary ef...