The processes of modernization and industrialization transformed and redefined all the elements of the social plane. When agriculture was modernized as industry the farm progressively became a factory, with all of the factory's discipline, technology, wage-relations, and so forth. More generally, society itself was gradually industrialized even to the point of transforming human relations and human nature. Society became a factory. Humanity and its soul are produced in the very processes of economic production. The processes of becoming human and the nature of the human itself were fundamentally transformed in the qualitative shift of modernization.

In our times, however, modernization has come to an end, or as Robert Kurz says modernization has collapsed. In other words, industrial production is no longer expanding its dominance over other economic forms and social phenomena. A symptom of this shift is manifest in terms of quantitative changes in employment. Whereas the processes of modernization were indicated by a migration of labor from agriculture and mining (the primary sector) to industry (the secondary), the processes of postmodernization or informatization are recognized through the migration from industry to service jobs (the tertiary), a shift that has taken place in the dominant capitalist countries, and particularly in the U.S., since the early 1970s. The terms "services" here covers a large range of activities from health care, education, and finance to transportation, entertainment, and advertising. The jobs for the most part are highly mobile and involve flexible skills. More important, they are characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, communication, and affect. In this sense we can call the postindustrial economy an informational economy.

[...] Just as the industrial revolution transformed agriculture and made it more productive, so too the informational revolution will transform industry redefining and rejuvenating manufacturing processes—through the integration, for example, of information networks within industrial processes. [...] Postmodernization all production tends toward the production of services, toward becoming informationalized.

The passage toward an informational economy involves necessarily a change in the quality of labor and the nature of laboring processes. This is the most immediate sociological and anthropological implication of the passage of economic paradigms. Information, communication, knowledge, and affect come to play a foundational role in the production process.

A first aspect of this transformation is recognized by many in terms of the change in factory labor—using the auto industry as a central point of reference—from the Fordist model to the Toyotist model. The primary structural change between these models involves the system of communication between the production and consumption of commodities, that is, the passage of information between the factory and the market. The Fordist model constructed a relatively "mute" relationship between production and consumption. The mass production of standardized commodities in the Fordist era could count on an adequate demand and thus had little need to "listen" closely to the market. A feedback circuit from consumption to production did allow changes in the market to spur changes in production but this communication was restricted (due to fixed and compartmentalized channels of planning) and slow (due to the rigidity of the technologies and procedures of mass production).

Toyotism is based on an inversion of the Fordist structure of communication between production and consumption. Ideally, according to this model, the production planning will communicate with markets constantly and immediately. Factories will maintain zero stock and commodities will be produced just in time according to the present demand of the existing markets. This model thus involves not simply a more rapid feedback loop but an inversion of the relationship because, at least in theory, the productive decision actually comes after and in reaction to the market decision. This industrial context provides a first sense in which communication and information have come to play a newly central role in production. One might say that instrumental action and communicative action have become intimately interwoven in informationalized industrial processes. [...] One should quickly add, however, that this is an impoverished notion of communication, the mere transmission of market data.

The service sectors of the economy present a richer model of productive communication. Most services indeed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledges. Since the production of services results in no material and durable good, we might define the labor involved in this production as immaterial labor—that is, labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communication. One face of immaterial labor can be recognized in analogy to the functioning of a computer. The increasingly extensive use of computers has tended progressively to redefine laboring practices and relations (along with indeed all social practices and relations). Familiarity and facility with computer technology is becoming an increasingly general primary qualification for work in the dominant countries. Even when direct contact with computers is not involved the manipulation of symbols and information along the model of computer operation is extremely widespread. One novel aspect of the computer is that it can continually modify its own operation through its use. Even the most rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence allow the computer to expand and perfect its operation based on interaction with its user and its environment. The same kind of continual interactivity characterizes a wide range of contemporary productive activities throughout the economy, whether computer hardware is directly involved or not. In an earlier era workers learned how to act like machines both inside and outside the factory. Today, as general social knowledge becomes ever more a direct force of production, we increasingly think like computers and the interactive model of communication technologies becomes more and more central to our laboring activities. Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves.

The model of the computer, however, can only account for one face of the communicational and immaterial labor involved in the production of services. The other face of immaterial labor is the affective labor of human contact and interaction.[...] Health services, for example, rely centrally on caring and affective labor, and the entertainment industry and the various culture industries are likewise focussed on the creation and manipulation of affects. To one degree or another this affective labor plays a certain role throughout the service industries, from fast food servers to providers of financial services, embedded in the moments of human interaction and communication. This labor is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible: a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion—even a sense of connectedness or community. Categories such as in-person services or services of proximity are often used to identify this kind of labor, but what is essential to it, its "in-person" aspect, is really the creation and manipulation of affects. Such affective production, exchange, and communication is generally associated with human contact, with the actual presence of another, but that contact can be either actual or virtual. In production of affects in the entertainment industry, for example, the human contact, the presence of others, is principally virtual, but not for that reason any less real.

This second face of immaterial labor, its affective face, extends beyond the model of intelligence and communication defined by the computer. Affective labor is better understood by beginning from what feminist analyses of "women’s work" have called "labor in the bodily mode." Caring labor is certainly entirely immersed in the corporeal, the somatic, but the affects it produces are nonetheless immaterial. What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower.

[...] This affective immaterial labor is now directly productive of capital and the extent to which it has become generalized through wide sectors of the economy. In effect, as a component of immaterial labor, affective labor has achieved a dominant position of the highest value in the contemporary informational economy. Where the production of soul is concerned, as Musil might say, we should no longer look to the soil and organic development, nor to the factory and mechanical development, but rather to today's dominant economic forms, that is, to production defined by a combination of cybernetics and affect.

This immaterial labor is not isolated to a certain population of workers, say computer programmers and nurses, who would form a new potential labor aristocracy. Rather immaterial labor in its various guises (informational, affective, communicative, and cultural) tends toward being spread throughout the entire workforce and throughout all laboring tasks as a component, larger or smaller, of all laboring processes. That said, however, there are certainly numerous divisions within the realm of immaterial labor—international divisions of immaterial labor, gender divisions, racial divisions, and so forth. As Robert Reich says, the U.S. government will strive as much as possible to keep the highest value immaterial labor in the United States and export the low value tasks to other regions. [...]