Abstract
There has been much theorising about the nature of the industrialisation process and many attempts to abstract sets of core principles which explain the conditions for the development of industrial society. In this chapter we are going to examine some variants of one approach to the process of industrialisation: this approach has been called the convergence hypothesis. The basic idea of all theories of convergence is that industrialism brings with it certain inevitable changes in the way that social life is organised and imposes common patterns of social behaviour on societies that embark on the path to becoming ‘industrial societies’. This can be oversimplified: all societies that industrialise converge, or tend to become alike.
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Suggested Further Reading
Giddens, A. (1973) The Class Structure of Advanced Societies, chaps. 8, 9, 14 (London: Hutchinson).
Kerr, C., Dunlop, J. T., Harbison, F., and Myers, C. A. (1973) Industrialism and Industrial Man, 2nd ed., postscript (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books).
Kumar, K. (1977) ‘Continuities and Discontinuities in the Development of Industrial Societies’, in R. Scase (ed.) Industrial Society: Class, Cleavage and Control (London: Allen & Unwin).
Bibliography
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Dahrendorf, R. (1959) Class and Class Conflict (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
Dore, R. (1973) British Factory — Japanese Factory (London: Allen & Unwin).
Feldman, A. S., and Moore, W. E. (1969) ‘Industrialisation and Industrialism: Convergence and Differentiation’, in W. A. Faunce and W. H. Form (eds.) Comparative Perspectives on Industrial Society, pp. 55–71 (Boston: Little, Brown).
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Touraine, A. (1974) The Post-Industrial Society (London: Wildwood House).
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© 1978 David Brown and Michael J. Harrison
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Brown, D., Harrison, M.J. (1978). Convergence Theories. In: A Sociology of Industrialisation: an introduction. Macmillan Business Management and Administration Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15924-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15924-6_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
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