Industrial Society Revisited - Recent Trends on Industrial Production, Industry/Service-Linkages, and the Organization of Modern Economies

The notion of ‘post-industrialization’ has been at the center of most reflections upon our information age. From this perspective, economic foundations no longer are rooted in industrial production but primarily to be found in services and information processing. Our claim in this article is that this is not an up to date perspective on modern economies. In a first step we deal with what may be called the underestimation of the industrial sector and manufacturing. Secondly, emphasis is upon close linkages to be found between many services and manufacturing processes. Thirdly, our empirical findings are related to research fields that may offer a framework for a deeper investigation of linkages between manufacturing and services. It is argued that recent contributions to the analysis of economic networks offer important insights into organizing principles of coupling services and manufacturing.