If philosophy is necessary for some trades, and these trades are
crucial for the network of relationships that are necessary for
manufacturing, then philosophy is sometimes a profitable investment,
however the procurment is distributed.
http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/context/toffler.html
A post-industrial society is a society in which an economic transition
has occurred from a manufacturing based economy to a service based
economy, a diffusion of national and global capital, and mass
privatization. The prerequisite to this economic shift is the
processes of industrialization of liberalization. This economic
transition spurs a restructuring in society as a whole.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Industrial_Society
In economics and marketing, a service is the non-material equivalent
of a good. Service provision has been defined as an economic activity
that does not result in ownership, and this is what differentiates it
from providing physical goods. It is claimed to be a process that
creates benefits by facilitating either a change in customers, a
change in their physical possessions, or a change in their intangible
assets.
By supplying some level of skill, ingenuity, and experience, providers
of a service participate in an economy without the restrictions of
carrying stock (inventory) or the need to concern themselves with
bulky raw materials. On the other hand, their investment in expertise
does require marketing and upgrading in the face of competition which
has equally few physical restrictions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service
The tertiary sector of industry (also known as the service sector or
the service industry) is one of the three main industrial categories
of a developed economy, the others being the secondary industry
(manufacturing), and primary industry (extraction such as mining,
agriculture and fishing). Services are defined in conventional
economic literature as "intangible goods". ...
...The tertiary sector of industry involves the provision of services
to businesses as well as final consumers.
Services may involve the transport, distribution and sale of goods
from producer to a consumer as may happen in wholesaling and
retailing, or may involve the provision of a service, such as in pest
control or entertainment.
Goods may be transformed in the process of providing a service, as
happens in the restaurant industry. However, the focus is on people
interacting with people and serving the customer rather than
transforming physical goods. Since the 1960s, there has been a
substantial shift from the other two industry sectors to the Tertiary
Sector in industrialised countries.
The service sector consists of the "soft" parts of the economy such as
insurance, government, tourism, banking, retail and (education). In
soft sector employment, people use time to deploy knowledge assets,
collaboration assets, and process-engagement to create productivity
(effectiveness), performance improvement potential (potential) and
sustainability. Typically the output of this time is content
(information), service, attention, advice, experiences, and/or
discussion (also known as "intangible goods").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_sector_of_industry
A service system (or value co-creation system) is a configuration of
technology and organizational networks designed to deliver services
that satisfy the needs, wants, or aspirations of customers. Marketing,
operations, and global environment considerations have significant
implications for the design of a service system. Three criteria used
to classify service systems include: customer contact, capital
intensity, and level of customer involvement. Properly designed
service systems employ technology or organizational networks that can
allow relatively inexperienced people to perform very sophisticated
tasks quickly -- vaulting them over normal learning curve delays.
Ideally, empowerment of both service provider employees and customers
(often via self service) results from well designed service systems.
Service systems range from an individual person equipped with tools of
the trade (e.g., architect, entrepreneur) to a portion of a government
agency or business (e.g., branch office of a post office or bank) to
complete multinational corporations and their information systems
(e.g, Domino's Pizza, Federal Express). Hospitals, universities,
cities, and national governments are designed service systems. The
language, norms, attitudes, and beliefs of the people that make up a
service system may evolve over time, as people adjust to new
circumstances. In this sense, service systems are a type of complex
system that is partially designed and partially evolving. Service
systems are designed to deliver or provision services, but they often
consume services as well.
Every service system is both a service provider and a customer of
multiple types of services. Because service systems are designed both
in how they provision and consume services, services systems are often
linked into a complex service value chain or value network where each
link is a value proposition. Service systems may be nested inside of
service systems (e.g., staff and operating room unit inside a hospital
that is part of a nationwide healthcare provider network).
Service system designers or architects often seek to exploit an
economic complementarity or network effect to rapidly grow and scale
up the service. For example, credit cards usage is part of a service
system in which the more people and businesses that use and accept the
credit cards, the more value the credit cards have to the provider and
all stakeholders in the service system. Service system innovation
often requires integrating technology innovation, business model (or
value proposition) innovation, social-organizational innovation, and
demand (new customer wants, needs, aspirations) innovation.
For example, a national service system may be designed with policies
that enable more citizens (the customers of the nation) to become an
entrepreneur, and thereby create more innovation and wealth for the
nation. Service systems may include payment mechanisms for selecting a
level of service to be provided (upfront or one time payment) or
payment based on downstream value sharing or taxation derived from
customers who received the benefit of the service (downstream or
ongoing payment). Payments may also be in the form of credit (creative
arts) or other types of intangible value (see anthropological theories
of value and theory of value).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_system
Productivity ...is the most important objective that businesses and
their management try to improve all around the world. The reason, of
course, is that productivity is very closely connected to
profitability. Productivity is simply the ratio of the value of goods
and services provided consumers to the amount of time worked and
capital used to produce the goods and services. If a firm produces
more goods and services for the same effort or it produces the same
goods and services for less effort, its profitability increases.
...we reviewed the structure of modern economies and saw that service
industries now dominate. In developed economies, employment in service
industries accounts for 70 to 75 percent of all employment.
Manufacturing accounts for 20 to 25 percent, with agriculture at less
than 5 percent. The productivity of any economy is simply the average
of the productivity of each individual worker. Thus if there were
differences in productivity across the advanced economies, there had
to be differences in productivity in the service industries because of
their sheer size. Thus we concluded that if we were to tackle the
conventional wisdom question, we would first study service
industries...
...Moreover, of the total value produced by the manufacturing firm,
one-fourth of that value was created by accounting, banking, legal,
consulting, janitorial, and other business services. Thus, services
accounted for one-half of the value to a consumer from the purchase of
a good such as a CD, a can of beans, or a car. On top of this, one-
half of all services are delivered directly to consumers and not to
firms. From this light, it's easy to see why services make up about 75
percent of the total value created in an economy...
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/476766.html
http://www.dallasfed.org/fed/annual/1999p/ar94.html
The following is an incomplete list of service industries, grouped
into rough sectors. Parenthetical notations indicate how specific
occupations and organizations can be regarded as service industries to
the extent they provide an intangible service, as opposed to a
tangible good.
business functions (that apply to all organizations in general)
-consulting
-customer service
-human resources administrators
child care
cleaning, repair and maintenance services
-janitors
-gardeners
-mechanics
construction
-carpentry
-electricians
-plumbing
death care
-coroners
-funeral homes
dispute resolution and prevention services
-arbitration
-courts of law
-diplomacy
-incarceration
-law enforcement
-lawyers
-mediation
-military
-negotiation
#################################
education (teaching and access to information)
-library
-museum
-school
##################################
entertainment
-gambling
-movie theatres
-performing arts productions
-sexual services
-sports
-television
fabric care
-dry cleaning
-laundromat
financial services
-accounting
-banks and building societies
-real estate
-stock brokerages
-tax return preparation
foodservice industry
hairdressing
health care
hospitality industry
information services
-data processing
-database services
-language interpretation
-language translation
risk management
-insurance
-security
social services
-social work
transport
utilities
-electric power
-natural gas
-telecommunications
-waste management
-water industry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service
Environmental effects of the service economy: This is seen, especially
in green economics and more specific theories within it such as
Natural Capitalism, as having these benefits:
1. Much easier integration with accounting for nature's services
2. Much easier integration with state services under globalization,
e.g. meat inspection is a service that is assumed within a product
price, but which can vary quite drastically with jurisdiction, with
some serious effects.
3. Association of goods movements in commodity markets with negative
commodity (representing emissions or other pollution, biodiversity
loss, biosecurity risk) public bads so that no commodity can be traded
without assuming responsibility for damage done by its extraction,
processing, shipping, trading and sale - its comprehensive outcome
4. Easier integration with urban ecology and industrial ecology
modelling
5. Making it easier to relate to the Experience Economy of actual
quality of life decisions made by human beings based on assumptions
about service, and integrating economics better with marketing theory
about brand value e.g. products are purchased for their assumed
reliability in some known process. This assumes that the user's
experience with the brand (implying a service they expect) is far more
important than its technical characteristics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_economy
Social and economic attributes of the post-industrial society
The University of Maryland's George Ritzer provides six changes in
social structure associated with the transition to a post-industrial
society:
1. Within the economy, there is a transition from goods production to
the provision of services. Production of such goods as clothing and
steel declines and services such as selling hamburgers and offering
advice on investments increase. Although services predominate in a
wide range of sectors, health, education, research, and government
services are the most decisive for a post-industrial society.
2. The Importance of blue-collar, manual work (e.g., assembly line
workers) declines and professional (lawyers) and technical work
(computer programmers) come to predominate. Of special importance is
the rise of scientists (e.g. medical and genetic and engineers.
3. Instead of practical know-how, theoretical knowledge is
increasingly essential in a post-industrial society. Such knowledge is
seen as the basic source of innovation (e.g., the knowledge created by
those scientists involved in the human genome project is leading to
new ways of treating many diseases) Advances in knowledge also lead to
the need for other innovations such as ways of dealing with ethical
questions raised by advances in cloning technology. All of this
involved an emphasis on theoretical rather than empirical knowledge
and on the codification of knowledge. The exponential growth of
theoretical and codified knowledge, in all its varieties, is central
to emergence of the postindustrial society.
4. Postindustrial society seeks to assess the impacts of the new
technologies and, where necessary, to exercise control over them. The
hope is, for example, to better monitor things like nuclear power
plants and to improve them so that accidents like that at Three-Mile
Island or Chernobyl can be prevented in the future. The goal is a
surer and more secure technological world.
5. To handle such assessment and control, and more generally the sheer
complexity of postindustrial society, new intellectual technologies
are complexity of postindustrial society; new intellectual
technologies are developed and implemented. They include cybernetics,
and game theory and information theory.
6. A new relationship is forged in the post industrial society between
scientists and the new technologies they create, as well as systematic
technological growth, lies at the base of postindustrial society. This
leads to the need for more universities and university-based student.
In fact, the university is crucial to postindustrial society. The
university produced the experts who can create, guide, and control the
new and dramatically changing technologies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Industrial_Society
