Mankind in Transition

Mankind in Transition is a book by Masse Bloomfield.

Bloomfield was born in Franklin, New Hampshire in 1923 and attended schools in Laconia. He obtained a degree in bacteriology from the University of New Hampshire in 1948 and a Master of Library Science from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1951.

In World War II, Bloomfield received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal. He was in the Retired U.S. Air Force Reserves as a lieutenant colonel.

For twenty-two years he was Head of the Hughes Aircraft Company Technical Library. While at Hughes, he wrote numerous articles for library journals. He has written several books, including Man in Transition (1993) and The Automated Society (1995).

His volunteer activities include acting as a liaison officer for the U.S. Air Force Academy. After some twenty years of service as a liaison officer, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Academy in 2009.

He describes human evolutionary history as a step function of punctuated equilibrium, with long periods of stability interrupted with short periods of transition. He argues that humans are now in a period of transition from a stable agrarian society through a transitional industrial and/or information society becoming a stable automated society. Each stable society has its own social organization. The animal society has a dominant male and everyone else; the tribal society has a chief, a medicine man, hunters and everyone else. The peasant society has a nobility, overseers and peasants in the food production category which also has a military category, a religious category, tradesmen and craftsmen. The transitional industrial society features top executives, managers and workers in many categories.

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