The following question refers to the topic of the origins and effects of industrialization.

Costs and Benefits of Industrialization

Industrialization's legacy of delegation of responsibility for environmental problems has been well documented by geographers and industrial ecologists. The internalization of its negative environmental externalities remains an inconsistent and poorly enforced practice in many parts of the world. Furthermore, the deeper question of the limits of natural resource substitution has received sustained attention only from a few specialists, despite the fact that the fate of industries is written in the answer to that question.

Unlike the developed countries who became industrialized before World War II (England, United States, USSR, Germany, and Japan), the Third World countries who are currently trying to start or speed up the process are confronted with the lack of sufficient local capital. This means that for them industrialization can come only at the cost of increasing dependence on foreign capital. If they choose to specialize in export-oriented industrial production instead of import-substitution industrial production, this foreign dependence for capital is further amplified by a dependence on volatile and competitive foreign markets. Furthermore, given that current international economic policies set by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization implicitly or explicitly support national economic specialization (Ricardo's principle of comparative advantage writ large), the least-developed countries in the world are pressured to participate in a global economic gamble in which their odds of winning are very long indeed.

Aside from modernization, the other most frequently invoked benefit of industrialization is economic development. The problem—as some Third World countries have found out—is that industrialization does not necessarily lead to massive economic development. Let us clarify the concepts involved. Economic growth refers to a quantitative increase in the gross domestic product of a country. Economic development refers to a qualitative structural change in a given economy. If a given country or region has some industrial plants specialized in the production of consumer goods and/or is totally export oriented, it runs the risk of witnessing economic growth without economic development. The respective industries are not organically embedded in the regional or national economy and play the role of the cherry on the cake instead of playing the more ambitious role of the yeast that makes the whole cake grow. This latter role usually is performed by capital goods industries, i.e., those industries that produce equipment needed for the development of other industries. The lesson to be gleaned from this brief analysis of economic growth versus economic development is that whether industrialization is beneficial or not critically depends on what kind of industrialization one is speaking about.

Scholars and policymakers have also argued that industrialization is the best way to fight excessive population growth in the Third World. Rural dwellers tend to have very large families partly because they are less educated than urban dwellers, and partly because for them children are a source of wealth and security in old age. The process of industrialization leads to increased urbanization, increased general level of education, and increased income, all of which contribute to changing cultural and demographic patterns in the direction of massively reduced fertility rates. In statistical parlance, the impact of industrialization on fertility rates is mediated by the variables urbanization, education, and income.

1 Key Features

Processes of industrialization across diverse kinds of capitalist societies as well as across state-dominated societies with central planning, such as the former Soviet Union, have shared essential similarities. Initially industrialization is marked by massive transfers of labor out of agriculture and into factories that have concentrations of capital equipment. Increases in the productivity of the labor devoted to manufacture come to balance increases in demand for goods, however, and employment in the service sector increases more rapidly than in manufacture after initial industrialization. In the leading industrial societies of Europe, East Asia, and North America, consequently, employment growth during the second half of the twentieth century was concentrated in services, professions, and finance. Even in industrialized countries that are net exporters of manufactures, including Germany and France, the absolute number of workers in manufacturing has been in decline since the 1970s. Some of the most dynamic national economies, including those of the USA and the UK, have become net importers of manufactured goods and net exporters of know-how and of services derived from the use of technology. Insofar as industry is identified by the application of scientific know-how and of inanimate sources of energy, however, it is misleading to speak of a process of ‘deindustrialization’ in these expanding and comparatively prosperous economies. Concentrations of smoke-stack industry are likely to continue shifting their location around the globe. There is little to suggest that a particular kind of industry comprises a transhistorical requisite for economic preeminence.

Processes of industrialization have universally produced key changes in culture. As the sociologist Reinhard Bendix emphasized, the concentration of workers in factories has everywhere triggered the elaboration of novel ideologies to legitimate the employers' exercise of authority. The mobilization of resources for industrialization also entails innovative definitions of responsibilities and rights over the factors of production, including guidelines for finance or capital allocation and for monitoring workers' health in some measure. Ownership of resources by the state alters only the details of these regulatory challenges. In all settings industrialization has demanded new statutory frameworks for governing the flow of labor across nations, cities, and firms. Industrialization triggers the development of procedures for identifying intellectual discoveries and for singling out their creators for reward, whether in the form of patents and copyrights or through other kinds of social privilege.

Despite these profound similarities in industrialization, scholars guard against exaggerating its concomitants and against identifying industrialization with modernity. The mechanization of some forms of production has called forward more of its opposite, traditional hand work. In nineteenth-century UK, for example, production in centralized facilities with steam power created great demand for the inputs of artisanal trades, including tools and equipment. Mechanization of the simpler branches of enterprise, such as spinning, stimulated home crafts that proved more difficult to mechanize, such as weaving. Factories in Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere have relied upon and invigorated traditional kinship networks to secure better supplies of reliable labor. The growth of factory systems that employed whole families in relatively closed communities sometimes cut down on geographical mobility of labor and reinforced the influence of male family heads who supervised the labor process and recruitment. Especially in contrast to craft work by independent producers for putting-out merchants, therefore, industrialization can intensify the authority of family heads or the subordination of women.

In late nineteenth-century Europe, when employers located factory work in rural areas to reduce wage costs, industrialization also stemmed migration to cities. Rural factories generated supplemental income for families of small land-holders who would have been unable to sustain themselves in the countryside with only agriculture or handiwork. Industrialization in some settings is compatible with the growth of domestic employment using electric-powered looms, grinders, and other home equipment. Most recently, headway in telecommunications and computer linkages has enabled professional workers in finance and science to work from home or to reside in rural communities. Depending on context, therefore, industrialization may run counter to such putatively modern patterns as geographical mobility, centralization of production, personal independence from family authority, and urbanization.

Conjunctural Coincidences

Comparative research on industrialization has isolated the massive effects of political and geographical accidents in relation to endogenous commercial evolution. Britain's island focus on naval power combined with the necessity of import substitution during the Napoleonic disruption of Continental markets was crucial for sustaining the country's gradual technological improvements. The vast expansion of material inputs, especially cotton, from North America helped Britain overcome the ecological constraints of its land size. In China, by contrast, promising macroeconomic conditions in the eighteenth century, such as high agrarian productivity and capital stocks, were dissipated due to the Qing empire's experience of overstretch and its lack of incentives to steer ambitious overseas commerce. China's coal reserves in the north were accidentally distant from its most dynamic markets and from southern centers cultivating iron production. More astute imperial settlement and transport policies might have united Chinese mineral deposits with iron making. The more closely social scientists examine proximate conditions, the more they enlarge alternative possibilities for Britain to have fallen into an economic cul-de-sac or for East Asia to have escaped from one two centuries ago (Pomeranz, 2000).

In our day, China's breathtakingly swift rise to manufacturing preeminence also relied on international contingencies. US imports from China increased 10-fold from 1991 until the Great Recession of 2008. Industry-specific studies suggest that Chinese imports account for as much as 40% of a decline in US manufacturing employment in this period. The diversion of US funds to military campaigns after 9/11 and accompanying US divestment from domestic research, education, and infrastructure facilitated a shift of initiative to China.

Explaining and Timing Industrialization

The fundamental question geographers have to ask is whether the concept industrialization has contributed in any substantive way to furthering scientific enquiry into how our social world works. There is probably no easy way to answer in any meaningful form such a question, because the answer given would depend on the level of explanation at which the concept industrialization is being deployed. It has been argued that industrialization has been particularly fruitful in helping geographers and social scientists operate at the higher levels of explanation, or, at what might be termed ‘big-picture’ thinking. Scientists and lay people alike relate to the world by building a more or less detailed and accurate model of what the world consists in and of how it works. At a very general level, it becomes fertile to have an understanding of how the history of the world has unfolded, and such an understanding would need to include the saga of industrialization. As an illustration of ‘big-picture’ thinking, we can consider Alvin Toffler's depiction of the course of history as a succession of three waves. The first wave refers to the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural, sedentary societies. The second wave refers to the relative decline of agriculture and the growth of industrial activities. Finally, the third wave designates the shift from industry-based economic growth to service-based economic growth, and the relative decline of blue-collar workers in favor of white-collar workers.

Historians of industrialization have pointed out the fact that the timing of this process is crucial for understanding its nature. In particular, they identify three periods of industrialization: the first refers only to England and pertains to historical contingencies between 1763 and 1846. The second includes countries such as USA, USSR, Germany, and Japan, which became industrialized in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The third refers to the countries that have started their industrialization after World War II (e.g., the tigers and dragons of Southeast Asia). The important observation in this context is that all other countries except England have had at least some other model of industrialization which they could imitate and emulate. England is unique in that there industrialization appeared spontaneously, unplanned, from scratch, through a set of economic initiatives that only in retrospect have been labeled ‘industrialization’. The theories invoked to explain the English Industrial Revolution have not ceased to proliferate and to take into account hitherto ignored factors such as genes. Since for all other cases of industrialization the imitation factor has played a role, it follows that the geographical study of innovation diffusion is a required step in any serious attempt to make sense of this process.

Geography pretends to be a scientific endeavor and the hallmark of a scientific endeavor is the attempt to explain and predict phenomena. To explain something means to uncover the law-abiding mechanism that caused it. Scholars of industrialization have fallen short of this task, even though their work has converged on admitting the complexity of this process. There are several interlocked problems that together keep industrialization in the clouds of ambiguity. At the most general level, industrialization is a social process, and epistemologists of the social sciences have cast doubt over the feasibility of explanation in the social realm. The innumerable variables that contribute to social outcomes do not seem to allow the social sciences to aspire to the same level of explanatory rigor as the natural sciences. Therefore, a more modest goal would be to understand rather than explain the process of industrialization. Understanding results from describing and comparing the various historical and contemporary contexts in which industrialization has occurred, without assuming that there is a law-abiding mechanism through which industrialization necessarily emerges. The description and comparison of the aforementioned contexts allow researchers to detect both the nomothetic and the ideographic components of industrialization. The nomothetic components refer to those general facets of industrialization shared by all the various contexts in which it has occurred, whereas the ideographic components capture the unique, particular features that have stamped industrialization in a specific context.

A related insurmountable obstacle to the explanation of industrialization is that it is not possible to experimentally test and refute the various theories attempting to account for this phenomenon. Karl Popper made a forceful case for the idea that theories are scientific only to the extent that they are refutable. The problem with the scholarship on industrialization is that one can always invent a plausible ‘just-so’ story and propose it as the explanation for this process, without having to subject it to the risk of experimental refutation.

There is no single cause of industrialization. The process can emerge from a variety of causes. Similarly, the consequences of industrialization vary widely across geographical regions and historical times. In order to grasp these ideas in all their complexity, it is worth disentangling and studying the relations between the often confused concepts of capitalism, modernization, and industrialization.

Abstract

Industrialization includes a rapid transformation in the significance of manufacturing in relation to all other forms of production and work undertaken within national or regional economies. The process is accompanied by technological and organizational change which leads to higher levels of productivity, rising living standards, population growth, urbanization, cultural changes, and shifts in the balance of power among nations. When, how, and why particular societies passed through the process continues to preoccupy social scientists, who for more than two centuries, have elaborated in historical depth and analytical sophistication on ‘connections’ between techniques of production, transport facilities, financial intermediation, state policies, foreign trade, urbanization, institutions, legal systems, and cultures on the one hand and the observed pace and pattern in different regions of the world economy on the other. Alas these connections cannot be specified, investigated, and weighted in ways that might give rise to a general theory of industrialization for Europe or other continents. There is only the complexity of history.

IV.E. The Industrialization of Behavioral Care

Industrialization occurs when an economic endeavor emerges from individual, family, or small group proprietorship with limited production (known as cottage industries) to large-scale production employing large work forces and utilizing innovations in technology, organization, and consolidation resulting in increases in both productivity and its resulting lower cost to consumers. Examples of industrialization are manufacturing (1900s), mining (1930s), transportation (1950s), and retailing (1970s). The industrialization of the automobile is illustrative. Previously hand-built in “garages” at high cost and low productivity, Henry Ford's introduction of the assembly line resulted in the manufacture of the automobile within the affordability of most Americans. However, industrialization results in a shift of control of the product from the worker (or craftsperson) to a capitalistic structure, often resulting in labor strife. When health care was the last major economic sector (14% of the GNP) to industrialize from solo practice and individual hospitals to HMOs, PPOs, and hospital chains, labor strife was revealed in the large-scale dissatisfaction on the part of providers who seemingly lost control of the dispensing of health care.

Of particular significance to psychotherapists is the industrialization of behavioral care, which occurred separately, but in parallel to the industrialization of medicine and surgery. This resulted in the carve-out, discussed earlier, and the reason for that separate entity. DRGs had tethered medical and surgical costs so drastically that hospitals experienced as much as 50% bed vacancies. They converted these to adult and adolescent psychiatric hospitalization and the seemingly ubiquitous 28-day substance abuse hospitalization. Behavioral care costs soared, and at a time DRGs reduced medicine and surgery to an 8% annual inflation rate, behavioral care was driving the entire health spiral upward with its own annual inflationary rate of 16%. With the absence of DRGs in MH/CD, third-party payers felt helpless in the face of this inflationary spiral and began dropping the MH/CD benefit. In time the MH/CD benefit might well have disappeared were it not for the emergence of carve-out managed behavioral care, which offered to increase benefits, lower costs, and cap the benefit package for 3 to 4 years.

During the rapid growth of the managed care industry in general, managed behavioral care also grew phenomenally from zero in the mid-1980s to 75% of the insured market by 2000. This was also the era of the mega-merger in American business, and the health care industry became part of what economists have termed “merger mania.” At one point in time there were literally hundreds of small MBCOs. By 2000 mergers and acquisitions had greatly reduced their number. One MBCO (Magellan) achieved a 40% market share, and when added to Value/Options and United, the top three companies accounted for 60% of market share. Even more startling is the fact that the top 10 companies account for 95% of the managed behavioral care market.

3.3 Does Modernization Lead to Democracy?

Industrialization leads to urbanization and mass literacy, which facilitate the organization of labor unions, mass political parties, and the enfranchisement of the working class. This process transforms the masses from isolated peasants into organized citizens with the power to bargain for a more equal share of the pie. The institutions that mobilized mass political participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—labor union, church, and mass political party—were hierarchical organizations in which a small number of leaders or bosses led masses of disciplined troops. These institutions were effective in bringing large numbers of newly enfranchised citizens to the polls in an era when universal compulsory education had just taken root and the average citizen had a low level of political skills. However, while these elite-directed organizations could mobilize large numbers, they produced only a relatively low level of participation, rarely going beyond mere voting.

Democracy continues to evolve. The emergence of postindustrial, or ‘knowledge’ society, favors democratic institutions, partly because these societies require highly educated and innovative workers, who become accustomed to thinking for themselves in daily job life. They tend to transfer this outlook to politics, undertaking more active and more demanding types of mass participation. It becomes increasingly difficult for democracies to limit mass publics to an elite-directed role, and increasingly difficult for authoritarian systems to survive as they face rising mass pressures for liberalization.

Abstract

Industrialization and economic development have historically been associated with man's ability to harness natural energy resources to improve his condition. Based on this definition, two industrial revolutions occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries, where natural resources such as coal (first revolution) and petroleum (second revolution) were widely exploited to produce levels of energy far beyond what could be achieved by human or animal muscle power. Renewable energy technologies are considered as clean sources of energy, and optimal use of these resources minimize environmental impacts, produce minimum secondary wastes, and are sustainable based on current and future economic and social societal needs.

Most developing countries include rural electrification programs in their efforts to improve social conditions. Alternative energy is any energy source that is an alternative to fossil fuel. These alternatives are intended to address concerns about such as those associated with the usage of fossil fuels. Today, because of the variety of energy choices and differing goals of their advocates, defining some energy types as “alternative” is highly controversial. Some of the recent and existing alternative sources of energy are discussed in this chapter. There are, however, several obstacles to the evaluation of such programs, and therefore, of their social, economic, environmental, and energy impacts on the target population, particularly in impoverished communities located in remote areas.

The materials provided reviewed present research and the possibilities of the future outcome within the field of energy technology in various sectors, including rural areas, as well as identified key energy problems of modern societies, explored the latest alternative energy sources and energy storage systems. The latest up to date literature on this topic have been summarized and presented as well. However, a few barriers and challenges that have been identified in this review must be carefully addressed before it can be fully implemented in the industrial applications.

3.8 Urbanization and health

The industrialization and urbanization of the U.S. economy between the early nineteenth and turn of the twentieth centuries were associated with significant increases in productivity and real wages. Yet, despite the fact that income per capita rose over this period, the average quality of health for Americans declined markedly over this period. The heights of native-born males, as well as life expectancy, fell between 1830 and 1890 and recovered to 1830 levels only by 1930.31 Since health is an important component of human welfare, Costa and Steckel (1995) estimate that the overall welfare of Americans may have stagnated or fallen between 1830 and 1890.

Economic historians suspect that much of the decline in health was associated with urbanization. Unfortunately, the U.S. economy industrialized and urbanized prior to the invention of modern medicine and public health. People living in high density areas were subject to greater exposure to infectious and parasitic diseases, both respiratory (air-borne) and gastrointestinal (water-borne). Consequently, the health of urban Americans was much worse than their rural counterparts. In 1900, Haines (2001) finds that life expectancy of urban Americans was 10 years less than rural Americans. In 1880, Higgs (1979) finds that the urban mortality rate was 50% higher than rural mortality; in 1890 and 1900, Condran and Crimmins (1980) finds that the urban–rural differential was 27 and 18%, respectively. The urban–rural mortality differential was even more significant for infants and young children. For infants, excess urban mortality was 63 and 49% in 1890 and 1900, respectively, and for young children aged one to four, the figures were 107 and 97%, respectively. Furthermore, Costa (2000) finds that exposure to diseases at early ages may have had long-term health consequences. Costa finds that Union Army veterans who grew up in large cities faced much higher mortality rates at older ages.

The urban–rural differentials in health and mortality began to decline and reverse over the twentieth century. By around 1940, it was sometimes healthier to reside in urban rather than in rural areas. Scholars attribute the decline and elimination of excess urban mortality to improved public works such as sewers and water systems and advances in public health and medicine [Haines (2001)]. However, the transition to a healthier urban environment did not occur without complications. In 1897, half of all municipalities installed lead pipes to deliver water. Troesken (2003) finds that municipalities which used lead water pipe systems experienced higher rates of infant mortality and stillbirths by 25 and 50%, respectively.

War, Industry, and Nation: The Egalitarian Impetus

Industrialization and militarism, particularly when supplemented by nationalism, shared the mirage of equal relationships, underpinning new social relations characterized by invocations to ‘egalitarianism,’ which in turn concealed simultaneous interchangeability and hierarchization. Political cohesion was pursued first within the barracks, then within society at large, while the latter was being radically reshaped by industrialization. The mass army was possibly the most ‘egalitarian,’ yet the most hierarchical of the major modern institutions; while the rigidity of the chain of command remains inexpugnable, an army can only work on the basis of equal duties, rights, and behavior of its low-level ranks (only within the prison the new combination of hierarchy and egalitarianism yielded possibly more appalling human costs). Due to practical reasons, emerging modern armies experienced first and most forcefully the demand for cultural standardization and recruits' sameness. For instance, the U.S. army anticipated desegregation before the heydays of the civil rights movements, Fascism enrolled Italian peasants on the basis of the egalitarian promises, both symbolic (military comradeship) and tangible (pensions, special rights). This ‘egalitarian’ emphasis in times of war was shared by authoritarian, totalitarian, and democratic systems. In this way, dissent could be controlled through unprecedented, and otherwise unattainable, forms of conformism. But conformism also led to extermination, as replaceability does not value individual life and human uniqueness. In the process, European states led the way by “building up fearsome coercive means of their own as they deprived civilian populations of access to those means,” relying mostly on capital and capitalists to reorganize coercion (Tilly, 1990: 68–69). Their impact was so far-reaching that a whole global order emerged in its image.

In the social sciences, “there is virtually no disagreement that the eruption of war almost instinctively increases in-group solidarity and national homogeneity,” although it is likely that “macro-level solidarity and group homogeneity exhibited in times of violent conflicts originate outside of these conflicts … (and) homogenisation is a complex process that requires a great deal of long-term institutional work” (Malešević, 2010: 179–180). In fact, before war could complete its task of bureaucratizing and militarizing society, preparations for war had already hard-pressed citizens toward greater forms of homogeneity. But war itself contributed to wiping out many local cultures in all of the belligerent countries, while contributing to the enemy's cultural obliteration. For Eugene Weber, it was the experience of World War I, which proved decisive in diluting local attachments (Weber, 1976).