Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell, Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University and currently, in his 'retirement', an active Scholar-in-Residence at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the most illustrious recruit the information society cause has ever one. This is not a rhetorical opening. A study from the 1970s employing a 'reputational methodology' placed him in the top ten of the 'American Intellectual elite', alongside public figures such as Noam Chomsky, John Mailer [P. Steinfels, The NeoConservatives: The Men who are Changing American Politics (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1979]. In our own day, the Times Literary Supplement, one of the chief vehicles of the British intelligentsia, has listed two of Bell's writings, The End of Ideology (1960) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), among the 'hundred most influential books published since the war'....
Bell's contrinution specifically to the 'infomation society thesis' - that is to say, very broadly speaking, the claim that modern nations are undergoing some kind of transformation into post-industrial infomration-centred societies - has been immense.
Duff, A.S., "Daniel Bell's theory of the information society", Journal of Information Science, 24(6) 1998, pp. 373-393.
Duff takes Bell to task on the details of the information society in the above article.
I believe that the 'study from the 1970s' on reputation is the 1974 book American Intellectual Elite by Charles Kadushin and I seem to recall that last year someone tried to duplicate the 'reputational methodology' to come up with a more current list of 'American intellectual elite'... but I can't find mention of it. Yet.
3:54:05 PM 
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