Advanced Industrial Economies

The established industrial societies in the 1950s were centered in North America, western Europe, Australia/New Zealand, eastern Europe and Japan. All began to generate another round of significant industrial growth during the 1950s. The results followed many of the lines set by the previous industrial revolution: extensions of new technologies, the introduction of new products, more sophisticated organizational forms. But sheer expansion created some novel results. Further, it became increasingly apparent—by the 1960s and 1970s—that more fundamental changes were occurring in many of the advanced industrial societies—though eastern Europe lagged—as a new generation of industrial technologies seized center stage. These, too, had widespread social effects, altering yet again the definition of industrialization’s wider impact.