A society which exhibits an extended division of labour and a reliance on large-scale production using power-driven machinery. This characterization does not include any specification about markets, and thus industrial society has been seen as a common designation for recent capitalist and socialist formations. Saint-Simon, who used the category of industrial society in historical contrast with military society, envisaged a technocratic future. Other writers who were conscious of the emergence of a new form of market society emphasized a further characteristic: widespread participation in the labour market, coupled with very limited participation of the direct producers in the product market. Marx, for example, saw this as one characteristic of the capitalist form of industrial society. It has been suggested that post-industrial society has now emerged. In post-industrial society, division of labour may be looser than in industrial society because people have transferable skills; accordingly, the industrial discipline of fordism is looser as well. Hence some Marxist scholars call modern post-industrial societies ‘post-fordist’.
— Andrew Reeve
