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Novelty or Business as Usual? The Information Society and the Global Political Economy
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International Studies Association
March 18-21, 1998
Abstract
For some time there has been a growing recognition of the importance of knowledge both as a resource and as an element in power relations within the global political economy. This has led to claims that new technologies are leading to (or have already produced) a (post-industrial) information economy. This paper looks at the conceptual construction of the information economy (through the term the 'information society') to explore whether this is really a new form of (post-) capitalism. This paper critically engages with arguments regarding the novelty of this new capitalism and suggests that while the form of the global political economy's socio-economic relations may be changing, the underlying substance of such relations remains similar to previous forms of modern capitalism. Thus, while there are new forms of enterprise, there are also extensive and crucial commonalties with the substance of what has gone before in the global political economy. The paper underlines the need to examine the 'common-sense' that globalisation has ushered in a new epoch.
"The new society - and it is already here - is a post-capitalist society...
It will not be an 'anti-capitalist society'. It will not even be a 'non-capitalist society';
the institutions of Capitalism will survive..." 1"... if there has been a major epochal shift since the 1970s, it is not a major discontinuity in capitalism but, on the contrary, capitalism itself reaching maturity." 2
"Gardening, for instance, may be uncomputerisable.
Lawyers and accountants... could be today's counterparts of early-19th-century weavers, whose incomes soared after the mechanisation of spinning
only to crash when the technological revolution reached their own craft." 3
Introduction
At the centre of many claims involving globalisation is the posited increase in the importance of 'knowledge' in economic activity (at all levels from local to global). However, this is a growing recognition of the importance of knowledge resources rather than a major shift in the structure of capitalism. To support this claim I will explore the emergence of the oft evoked 'information society', sometimes referred to as the 'Third Wave', the 'Third Revolution' 4 or other epochal characterisations of a 'new' era of economic organisation. Much of the celebration of this new age leaves one issue either obscured or forgotten: might this only be an intensification or extension along the lines capitalism has been developing for quite some time? At the same time, the discourse is often used to organise and shape actor behaviour. Certain developments are presented as inevitable and of a particular character, requiring specific political economic actions and responses.
Woods has suggested five questions that can help research move beyond the 'rational neglect' of ideas about economic organisation at the international level:
These questions underlie much of what I will discuss in this paper regarding the idea of an information society, this supposed new or emergent way of organising economic activities in the global political economy. I will return to these questions explicitly in the conclusion and draw out some initial answers from the discussion in the text.
There is a long history of writings proclaiming the emergence of a post-industrial society. 6 At one extreme there has been optimism, a post-industrial expansion of leisure time and general freedom from drudgery. This includes empowerment through information technology and the transformation of work into something approaching the experience of the 'professions'. 7 At the opposite pole, there is a pessimistic view, an information rich and poor hermetically sealed off from one another, with the excluded masses unable to enjoy the fruits of knowledge work (which might be referred to as the 'Bladerunner' thesis 8 ). In this bleak vision Curtis suggests, inequality will be entrenched through the mobilisation of information to segment society into a 'computer generated caste system'. 9 Opinions range between these two positions, but all are based on the presumption that the rise of the knowledge economy (or information society) will change the nature and logic of global capitalism. There is some form of break with the past, a new age.
Despite the pervasiveness of the literature of transformation, I contend that while the superficial appearance of the information society may be different from what has gone before, far from changing the nature of capitalism, this new period leaves important elements firmly in place. While the global 'information society' may be changing the appearance (or form) of the global political economy, it has done little to change its underlying power relations (or substance). Indeed if anything it has enabled power relations to be reproduced at a higher level of intensity while differentiating their form.
The rationale for developing this argument lies in the claims that are made on behalf of 'globalisation' in popular and academic literatures. While there is an expanding body of work criticising these claims, much accepts the novelty of the knowledge industries and the posited organisational change in capitalism. To establish that the information society is only new in form (and not in substance) is to argue that political alternatives which have been ruled obsolete by the discourses of globalisation may still be usefully considered. This is to refute the argument that the old 'answers' to both state and global political economic problems are no longer valid (or plausible). The argument for disjuncture is fundamentally mistaken and is predicated on the misreading of the information society. While I question the characterisation of this particular period as one of substantive transformation, in this paper I do not consider the history of capitalism overall, or its periodisation. Here I am concerned with contemporary changes or continuities, rather than the developmental path of capitalism overall, though I recognise these issues are linked. 10
Information Society and the New Age
The idea of the 'information society' and its attendant 'post-industrial' literature, lies behind much of the presumption for the revolutionary potential of information technology. The following brief review is by no means comprehensive but serves to establish the main thrusts of this important discourse. One of the key driving forces in the technological view of globalisation is the development of the 'knowledge industries' (especially in the communications sector). This is a wider concept than the expansion of a globalised services sector: it attempts to capture both the value-added increasingly accorded to non-material inputs into products; and the importance of global flows of knowledge to wealth creation. 11 This is a recurrent motif in the posited development of a post-industrial society, where the movement of material goods seems less important than the flows of information and knowledge - the move to a 'weightless economy'. 12
Anthony Smith has gone as far as to argue that the early writings on post-industrialism
had more of a Hegelian ring about them. Information technology was penetrated by the historic spirit... and the very act of formulating this idea of an information and communication society has exercised much of the transforming power, or at least has provided the political acceleration. 13
The arguments for the emergence of an information society reinforced the observed dynamic, and have contributed to the reorganisation of socio-economic relations they purported to 'recognise'. Thus the post-industrial position may itself have contributed to the emergence of a new socio-economic settlement: the information society. The currency of this term followed an (in)famous report by Marc Porat which attempted to define and 'measure' the seemingly emergent information society of the mid-1970s in the United States. 14 Indeed Hepworth goes as far as to suggest that the "concept itself was coined by Porat", though Webster traces its genealogy back to Fritz Malchup working in the early 1960s. 15 Nonetheless, Porat's typology enables a useful discussion of the duality of the economy in an information society.
Porat proposed a primary information sector, which encompassed those companies where information products were made available in established markets (or elsewhere, where a discrete economic value could easily be assessed). This included areas such as the media and education, advertising and (before a separate software sector had emerged) computer manufacture. In all these industries the manipulation of information was the primary activity generating value-added. By adding a secondary information sector, embedded within other industries (those parts of companies dealing in material products which manipulate knowledge and information, design, R&D, marketing, for instance), Porat was able to suggest that nearly half of America's GNP was accounted for by information. American was turning into a society organised on the basis of information and the manipulation of knowledge. 16 Wielding vast quantities of statistics regarding these two sectors, Porat's report became the first major statement on the emergence of the information society.
Around the same time Daniel Bell, prompted by a similar perception of the role of information in the American economy, concluded a post-industrial society was emerging (though it was far from fully developed) and could be recognised as a potential movement in five dimensions:
Bell did not argue that this new form of society had emerged globally, rather it was the direction in which societies would move in the future. This dynamic was already recognisable in the most developed states but would (need to) be followed by outlying states as they integrated and developed stronger links with the global system. 18
With the notion of 'intellectual technology' Bell recognises that methods of organising activities can be regarded as technologies themselves which will spread and have distinct impacts on the adopting sectors, organisations or societies. Successful adoptions of new organisational techniques will be copied by other actors when such innovations seem to contribute to success (however conceived). 19 Interestingly, Bell notes that what is "distinctive about the new intellectual technology is its effort to define rational action and to identify the means of achieving it". 20 Indeed he argues that "the major source of structural change in society... is the change in the character
Around the of knowledge", a change which will substitute "a technical order for the natural order" - the appliance of science. 21 This new knowledge order will increasingly set the agendas from which problems are addressed, it will define the acceptable and unacceptable through the technological assumption of discoverable rationality. This major claim regarding the perfectibility of technocratic knowledge (not only made by Bell) has for the last twenty years been subjected to a welter of academic criticism. 22
Bell argues that the services which indicate the emergence of the post-industrial society are those which prompt the "expansion of a new intelligentsia - in the universities, research organisations, professions and government". 23 He recognises that
knowledge has of course been necessary in the functioning of any society. What is distinctive about the post-industrial society is the change in the character of knowledge itself. What has become decisive for the organisation of decisions and the direction of change is the centrality of theoretical knowledge - the primacy of theory over empiricism and the codification of knowledge into abstract systems of symbols that... can be used to illuminate many different and varied areas of experience. 24
This claim has been taken up more recently by Robert Reich in his discussion of the rise of 'symbolic analysts' and their increasing importance. Though Reich (following the 'spirit of the age') accords more weight to private institutions, he too sees these sectors of the workforce as holding a pivotal role in contemporary (and future) society. 25 Indeed, if the concern with information and knowledge has been a major issue during the last twenty five years, one of the shifts within the discourse has been a move from collective provision of knowledge resource development, to a more individualised responsibility. 26
In Bell's post-industrial society the "central person is the professional" who provides the "services and amenities - health, education, recreation, and the arts - which are now deemed desirable and possible for everyone". 27 The choice of services and amenities 'deemed desirable and possible for everyone' lies with the technocratic professional - the top down provision of rational knowledge. But paradoxically in a supremely individualist argument, Bell's post-industrial society is again and again typified as a new set of 'games between people'. Classes and groups are sidelined by the individual as the possessor and user of knowledge, but guided by the (enlightened?) technocratic governors - perhaps only the services and amenities mandated by the knowledge elite would be desirable (?)
While recognising that there are various definitions of knowledge which might be useful Bell limits his account to that which is circumscribed by the concept of intellectual property. 28 While this is clearly not meant as a final definition but as an instrumental analytical device, this limits the discussion that might follow from his identification of the importance of knowledge in a putative post-industrial society. And by appealing to a set of ideas about property in a market society his analysis implicitly maintains that post-industrial society is different from industrial society while its property relations remain in place in the areas deemed central to his analysis. 29 This stands in stark contrast to his claim that the "emerging post-industrial society is communal... insofar as the criteria of individual utility and profit maximisation become subordinated to broader conceptions of social welfare and community interest". 30 If knowledge is held as property in a market organised society (and nothing Bell discusses suggests post-industrial society will be anything but market organised) then it is difficult to see how such a subordination might proceed. 31 Indeed, Bell's claim that societies will move beyond current models of economic organisation seems problematic given his acceptance of intellectual property. Despite such shortcomings this remains a highly influential analysis. 32
Though Bell's work is well known in the academy, the more populist Alvin Tofler has delivered the vision of a post-industrial, information society to a wider and (perhaps, more) influential international audience. Tofler's vision of the future accepts that there are potential benefits and dangers in the new 'civilisation' that is emerging with the third revolutionary wave. The first wave of agricultural revolution is long past, while the second wave of industrial revolution, for Tofler, is almost spent. In language reminiscent of Marx and Schumpeter, Tofler argues that,
in the midst of destruction and decay, we can now find striking evidences of birth and life... and with intelligence and a modicum of luck - the emergent civilisation can be made more sane, sensible, and sustainable, and more democratic than any we have ever known... even if the transitional years immediately ahead are likely to be stormy and crisis-ridden. 33
Where Bell is concerned primarily with society as an arena for economic activity, Tofler takes a more general view of cultures and civilisations. And while Tofler recognises the upheavals created by this third wave, he believes that they are only short lived.
Tofler argues that this third wave is "not a straight line extension of industrial society but a radical shift of direction... a comprehensive transformation at least as revolutionary" as the industrial revolution. 34 It is this disjuncture with the past, this new way of organising society (Tofler's canvas stretches from psychology, through social relations to international relations), which resonates through the literature of the emerging information society. For Drucker, the expansion of knowledge as a basic economic resource will lead to a division between 'intellectuals' and 'managers', which will be the key political challenge of this new period. 35 The key refrain in Drucker's vision of the post-capitalist society, is again one of disjuncture. However, as suggested by the quote at the head of this paper, Drucker also recognises a continuity of capitalist institutions, though "looks are deceptive". While the,
world economy will remain a market economy and retain the market institutions, its every substance has been radically changed. If it is still 'capitalist' it is now dominated by 'information capitalism'... there is less and less return on the traditional resources: labour, land and (money) capital. The main producers of wealth have become information and knowledge. 36
The emergence of this new resource has transformed the nature of capitalism. Though it still revolves around markets and profit, economic organisation has been fundamentally changed. And the key transformation is in the process of resource capture and use.
The importance of the shift to post-industrial organisation is the move from the centrality of material resources to a process that accords more importance to the securing of knowledge and ideational resources. 37 But also, value added is increasingly seen by entrepreneurs not to stem from the good's materiality but to be based on its ideational elements. Which is to say, though goods may still have some material value related to their various inputs, the knowledge related inputs (such as, design, marketing, 'quality' and technological novelty) are becoming the key aspects of competition as understood by market actors. Thus, it is proposed that knowledge based capitalism breaks with previous capitalist models by virtue of its raw materials and the uses it makes of them, the sorts of products that it produces. This is directly implicated in the globalisation discourse by the importance put on the 'shrinking world' of instantaneous knowledge dissemination and the ability to heighten the speed of electronic value transfer, not least of all in the global financial markets.
This shift may have considerable implications for the state. Castells claims while the industrialisation of societies was based on statism (which is to say that industrialisation did not only take place through the direct consequence of capitalism, but was extensively mediated through the intervention of the state) the move to the information age has been an entirely capitalist shift. 38 However Castells recognises the importance of the state's role in deregulating international markets (especially those in the financial sector), as well as supporting research and development. He suggests that those states "who fall victims to their own ideology" of the minimal state will be unable to support their domestic market's continuing economic development. 39 Given the roots of the Internet in the American military-industrial complex, for instance, this modification of the non-statist development argument is necessary. 40 But, Lash and Urry suggest that capitalism in the future will be essentially disorganised, the global flows on which it is predicated (of information, of people, of capital) have wrested the regulation of the capitalist process from the state and returned it to the market. 41 This would seem to indicate that states are required to maintain a reactive role to economic requirements, rather than a proactive role in modifying the market. If this is the case, and it is certainly a wide spread view (linked with the 'decline of the state' thesis), then the issues of governance, persistent inequalities and the protection of the disadvantaged will be left to the market and removed from the political process. It is these sorts of claims, widely evident in much of the celebratory discourse of globalisation, that I am concerned to undermine.
The issues that seem important in light of this brief discussion of the posited shift to a (potentially global) information society are two fold: What is the economic character of the 'new' information society?; and is the global information society fundamentally different from what has gone before? If the answer to the second question is negative, then this has profound implications for the mobilisation of political efforts on behalf of (and importantly by ) the disadvantaged in this 'new' global society. Rather than the state no longer being a useful loci for political pressure, it may retain a significant role in the reduction of social and economic inequality (even if this is currently denied). By exploring these two issues I will also start to develop answers to the questions posed by Woods in regard to the incidence and power of economic ideas (in this case, that of 'information society').
Technology, Knowledge and Property
At the centre of debates regarding the growing importance of knowledge and information has been the argument that this shift has been the result of the development of powerful information technologies (the computer revolution). As Webster has noted, though this technological determinism is not often as crude as Tofler's 'techno-boosterism', it is an element in a wide range of characterisations of the new information age. 42 Discussions of the information society have been tied up with the ability of companies and individuals to utilise information and knowledge for profit. But, there is nothing new in recognising that value resides in the idea of the product. For instance, successful branding (in accounts as goodwill); novelty of designed solution to the problem the product is intended to solve; and knowledge of cross market differences of price (arbitrage) have all had economic value accorded to them for some time. These factors (Porat's secondary information sector) by themselves do not establish the information society. Rather it is the expansion, and increasing economic power, of Porat's primary information sector driven by new technologies of knowledge capture and reproduction, that has reinforced the perception of the shift to an information society.
This "will be a new type of society, completely different from the present industrial society" according to Masuda and the transformation is a direct consequence of this move to informational resources. 43 Masuda claims the use of information produces different socio-economic relations from the use of material resources, not least of all the "liberation from productive labour" that will result from the full development of robotic manufacture, allowing what might be termed the professionalisation of labour - the concentration on informational and knowledge tasks. 44 Masuda essentially sees this as a transformation from below:
When mankind's crisis deepens further, citizens aware of their mission to save mankind... will rally other people around themselves, and these autonomous networks of people will expand and multiply... networks that will grow on a world-wide scale. 45
This transformation is crucially concerned with the empowerment which information will bring - in the glossary at the end of the book Masuda defines the information society as one which "grows and develops around information and brings about a general flourishing state of human intellectual creativity, instead of affluent material consumption ". 46 For Masuda this is explicitly a transformation away from capitalism, away from material consumption to something more 'creative'.
Though Masuda talks of 'functional co-operative labour' rather than flexible labour, he suggests that within the emergent 'voluntary communities' of information users there will be a need for roles to change "in response to current demands" and "being a member of a functional voluntary community would not prevent a person from belonging to several communities or engaging in some other paying work". 47 This would seem to be analogous to Charles Handy's 'portfolio worker', working at several jobs to optimise their work/leisure balance. 48 Of course, this has the advantage for knowledge capitalists of transferring the risks of economic fluctuations (or the business cycle) to the contracted workforce, though if this transformation was completed presumably there will be no knowledge capitalists to benefit from this flexibility only fluid functional networks. Indeed Masuda's vision of the information society is of an atomised and constantly fluctuating amorphous set of networks mediated through information technology, breaking up and coming together again, as function requires.
It is this new form of society that he defines as information society. Transformation is the result of automation, followed by 'knowledge creation', which is essentially a second generation of 'smart technology', leading to a "set of political, social and economic transformations". 49 This shift is directly caused by the advent and further development of information technology. It will support "freedom of decision and equality of opportunity" through the diffusion of information, allowing individuals to decide on their own goals as well as having the opportunity to achieve them. 50 Masuda suggests that the diffusion of information to 'voluntary communities' will allow the information society to become a 'classless society', one where power relations are absent. This society will only require a "small staff of specialists... to carry out administrative duties" as all decisions will be taken through a form of participatory democracy founded on information networks. 51 Though this is perhaps the most extreme of the characterisations of an emergent information society, Masuda's ideas (like Bell's) are echoed throughout the literature and can be found in various strengths in most writings.
For instance, Castells also argues that the information society will be a network society - open, reversing social fragmentation, and thus allowing diverse cultural and political identities to flourish. 52 But as he has previously made clear, this potential needs to be positively developed by its potential subjects, it will not necessarily be passively benign. 53 It is prescient to emphasise that "technology neither dictates features of the manufacturing process nor has effects independent of the human actors involved, its effects are anything but self-evident". 54 Which is to say, an analysis of the information society needs to be sensitive to the socio-economic relations in which new technologies appear, and recognise that the impact of technologies is mediated through the actors deploying them. Technologies do not necessarily bring with them specific social relations antagonistic or co-operative. It is the use to which technologies are put that develops their social relations, and though this may be partly implied by the technology's design, its social effects are not given.
Such a concern has led Castells to contribute to the 'High-level expert group' report Building the European Information society for us all . 55 The report, while retaining the patina of dirigiste European policy, is concerned with supply-side issues of training and education, as well as the promotion of competition. It suggests that the requisite powers for the regulation of the information society should be transferred by states to the European level. The report argues that:
it is essential that people, and excluded groups in particular, should not be forced to adjust to the new technologies. Rather, the technologies must become better geared to human needs. The Information Society should not create new categories of exclusion; it should improve social integration and quality of life. 56
Underlying this, and other aspects of the report is the expectation that information technology will transform the socio-economic relations of the European population (and by extension, the global population).
This leads to the proposed emancipatory potential of information technology: have information technologies changed the socio-economic basis of productive activity?; and does access to the globalised flow of information (and knowledge) transform the political-economic experiences of the user? A recent report produced by the IBM sponsored National Working Party on Social Inclusion concluded that it
would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of communication and information-handling skills in the Information Society. Too much attention paid to the technology draws attention away from the need for people to be able to exploit information once they have it...
but argues on the next page that,
Gaining access to the communication facilities can be the hardest step in the processes of participating in a creative communication environment. Once there, most groups will know exactly how to exploit the technology. 57
This encapsulates the technological issue. Once they have access to communication and information technologies will 'most groups know exactly how to exploit it'? The study warns that access is not the only issue, but is confident that access can be sufficient, given the extant skills of groups (and individuals). Though this seems in the first instance to be aware of the technological determinism in suggesting that access is necessary but not sufficient for 'empowerment', a page later this conclusion is reversed.
The debate regarding the shift to an information society is often expressed in terms of access to knowledge. Especially within Internet discussion groups, it is expected that the information society (where 'information wants to be free') will be a naturally democratic global public sphere. However, given information society's overtly market character, the "irony is that those who might most benefit from the net's democratic and informational potential are least likely to either have access to it, the tools to use it, or the educational background to take advantage" of the knowledge resources on offer. 58 Before continuing, this issue of the market leads me to note a distinction between the notion of information society which includes wide claims regarding the worth of information networks and the more limited term, the information economy.
That there is slippage between the concept of an information society and an information economy is admirably exhibited in the (British) Department of Trade and Industry's recent report Development of the Information Society - An International Analysis . In this report the "term is used to mean a society where individuals - whether they be consumers or employees - use information intensively", a characterisation which regards individuals as only acting in markets. 59 And the report notes "the most important driver of uptake of the Information Society is the enhanced utility that products and services will deliver to consumers and the extent to which the supply side is able to develop to deliver these enhanced benefits". 60 The Information Society is thus a transformation of the nature of market activity. Throughout the report the Information Society is conceptualised as a competitive economic strategy, which should be supported by the state. The emergence of the information society is no longer a social transformation, which would impact on the economy, here it has become an economic transformation that will impact on society.
Most of the report is concerned with international comparisons of a vast array of economic figures regarding productivity, investment, market share, exports and other information technology related indicators. Even when the report finally looks at the role of politics in the Information Society it is only to note that:
governments see the importance of the Information Society for national competitiveness, but they do not exaggerate their role in achieving it. Leadership is seen as important, but making the key decisions is generally seen as the preserve of the market. 61
So, though earlier writers stressed the social impact and transformation that would be wrought by the emergence of the information society, in this report at least there is a move to think of the information society as a developmental strategy to enhance 'national competitiveness'. 62
Crucial to the rise of information society, particularly in its guise of the information economy , is the increasing importance of owning knowledge and information - intellectual property. While Reich suggests that the
issues of old capitalism - law on property and so on... are no longer really appropriate. The key assets of new capitalism are not defined as physical property but intellectual assets, many embedded in people... 63
it is my contention that the interest and importance given to intellectual property actually reinforces the issues of 'old capitalism', centred on property relations, and does not indicate a new capitalism (and thus a new politics). Indeed, the confusion lies in the emphasis on the new resources of the information society (what they are, how they function, what will be owned) at the expense of extensive consideration of the social relations of this emergent 'new' era. The property relations which underlie the information economy, based as they will be on intellectual property, need to be brought into the analysis.
I have argued elsewhere that the incidence of justificatory schema based on the similarity between property and intellectual property is the result of the structural power of particular groups over knowledge. 64 Without the protection of property rights over their products it is hard to imagine capitalists coming to market with primary knowledge products. (If in the short term some software companies have accepted pirated copies of software as a way of increasing market penetration, this should be seen as something similar to 'loss-leaders' and not their dismissal of property rights.) Parallel to the move towards a global information society, the intellectual property rights regime has been increasingly globalised through the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Most recently, and supporting the further expansion of the global information society's property regime, the knowledge industries played a major role in ensuring that a very specific (and broadly successful) position was taken by the US negotiating team in the recent Trade Related Intellectual Property agreement (TRIPs) under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation. 65 The requirements (and interests) of intellectual property owners (which is by no means necessarily the same group who originates such intellectual property) where those that were foregrounded.
It is also necessary to bear in mind that the need for 'protection' does not exist in isolation. Without the technologies to exploit and reproduce various types of knowledge, there would be little need for them to be governed by an intellectual property regime. Avoiding crude technological determinism, it seems to me that capitalism and technology intertwine through the continued desire to find new resources which can be utilised within the capitalist process of accumulation, driving technological adaptation and innovation. However, the most important aspect may not be the actual innovation itself, this may happen outside the realm of primary economic actors, for instance under the guidance, or funding, of the state. 66 The link between accumulation and technology depends on the ability of capital owners to recognise the opportunity which an emergent technology may represent for the widening of the prospective sector of marketable commodities. Thus, it is possible that technologies may languish before a new market is recognised (or developed) within which they can be used to commodify that which was previously uncommodifiable . 67 Alternatively, potential markets may be recognised and technologies developed to access the resources that would be exchanged in this new market. But these new markets and technologies while changing the superficial form of capitalism, do not fundamentally change the substance of the underlying (power and property) relations of the system.
If information society is as dependent on the institution of intellectual property as previous forms of capitalism have been on the institution of property, then wide or open access remains a necessary but not sufficient condition for the claims made on behalf of information society. Even accepting the argument that with access and the provision of education the problems of social exclusion can be lessened, if the question of property rights remains central to the socio-economic relations of this new capitalist era, then the change may not be as significant (or seismic) as the claims for post-capitalist or post-industrialist society suppose. Indeed it is even possible that the demand for education (while in itself fully legitimate and supportable) represents merely a supply side measure, regarding the skills required in the workforce by knowledge capitalists, that will do little to alleviate inequality (both national and international) within the information society. If the social relations indicated by the incidence of property in the information society are examined, as opposed to the shifts in technologies, then it is my contention that there is considerable continuity between the information society and industrial society, rather than extensive disjuncture.
A lack of discontinuity
The claim that the decline of manually skilled jobs and the heightened value put upon 'symbolic analysts' has produced a division between the information (or knowledge) rich and poor is increasingly commonplace. 68 However, in trying to define quite how capitalism in an information society might differ from its predecessor, industrial capitalism, the difficulty of sustaining this notion of a substantive transformation is revealed.
The problem is that if the use of information and knowledge is limited to only Porat's primary information sector, then the knowledge industries can hardly be said to characterise the whole global political economy. Many of these industries are essentially producer services rather than profitable industrial sectors with no link to the material economy. For instance, Quah claims that in "a weightless economy, success comes from knowing how to locate and juxtapose critical pieces of information, how to organise understanding into forms that others will demand". 69 But such critical information is only relevant to operators in the material economy - at some point knowledge needs to be operationalised (through conversion into something, even if undergoes a number of transactions prior to such final conversion). Thus, "those making the greatest contributions in the weightless economy and achieving its highest rewards will be those with the skills to mesh with realities ". 70 Though its immediate form is 'weightless', without potential materialisation there is unlikely to be any effective demand. Thus, as Porat recognised, to limit the definition of the information economy to primary information/knowledge products fails to recognise the vast amount of information and knowledge manipulated in other sectors.
But, defining the knowledge economy to include Porat's secondary information sector then starts to become a definition of modern capitalism itself. All companies utilise some form of knowledge and informational resources: the skills mobilised by their workforce; their own market and/or product research; their manipulation of sales information for planning purposes; and other areas where information and knowledge impact on organisational success. If knowledge is understood in this way - to be the aspect of the value-added of any product or service that is not strictly materially based - then all economic relations have been made up of a constellation of knowledge related industries (differing only in levels of knowledge utilised). No product has ever merely existed as a material thing. Thus including both sectors detracts from the novelty of information society, and throws claims back onto the issue of organisational practices.
However in the relations between the holders of knowledge relative to the companies and other actors who profit from it, as well as the way such knowledge is deployed through links with material goods, based as it is on (intellectual) property relations, the substance of the information society is characterised by continuity. Indeed labour relations within the knowledge industries remain remarkably familiar in substance (if not in form). 71 And, though the knowledge industries are presented as the paradigmic new employers, it may be the case that the substantial expansion of employment in the era of the information society may actually be in the 'personal services' sector. 72 Thus knowledge-based employment needs to be recognised as only a partial characterisation of employment in the emerging 'new age'. Indeed, as Kumar has pointed out much of the claim for the increasingly professionalised workforce (the rise of the knowledge workers) has been predicated on a statistical sleight of hand. 73 Only by accepting the renaming of employees with more professional sounding titles as evidence of functional change, as well as supposing all those involved in the putative knowledge sector are professionals, could claims for a substantive change in employment patterns be supported. This is not a robust proposition.
For Kumar, the claims for transformation are completely unwarranted. Though it is clear that there has been an information revolution, in that the supply and use of information goods has both widened and accelerated, this is not the same thing as information society. Kumar sees no reason to accept the claims of
theorists of information society that we have entered a new phase of social evolution, comparable to the 'great transformation' ushered in by the industrial revolution. That revolution achieved a new relationship between town and country, home and work, men and women, parents and children. It brought in a new ethic and new social philosophies. There is no evidence that the spread of information technology has caused any such major changes. On the contrary, the bulk of the evidence indicates that what it has mainly done is to enable industrial societies to do more comprehensively what they have already been doing. 74
Though there is little evidence of the transformation of society which is continually asserted by the information society ideologues, this has not compromised its usefulness as a justification for (re)introducing certain employment practices. And it is here that the continuity with previous forms of capitalism is most marked.
One of the main issues within the literature of transformation has been the need for flexible work practices and structures to deal with the (supposed) transformation. If, as a recent European Commission Expert Working Group Report argues, flexibility,
frequently requires less strict and definitive regulations and more social dialogue and negotiated solutions. Then the major problem here is to ensure the equality of the social partners at all levels. If this cannot be done, then the various interests cannot be equalised and no balanced compromises achieved. Under these circumstances, flexibilisation becomes a weapon used by the stronger against the weaker and is associated with declining social solidarity and considerable risks, particularly for more vulnerable workers, who are unable to articulate their own interests. In such a situation it remains the duty of the state to lay down minimum standards. 75
Thus, the same issues of inequality and power relations which have characterised previous forms of capitalism may continue to turn up in the 'flexible' information society. This shift to a new form of economic organisation was originally identified by Piore and Sabel. The decline of mass markets as an exploitable avenue for further business expansion resulted in the development of new work practices to cope with these new circumstances. 76 They presented the history of the American economy as a series of institutional blocks to further expansion, which needed to be overcome to allow further economic growth. They argued the saturation of mass markets had to be tackled if growth (a major political problem in the early 1980s) was to be renewed.
One method for meeting this particular block was a move to flexible specialisation, which is to say, the move towards what would later be termed 'Japanisation' (small batch, fast and repeated innovation). Piore and Sabel suggested two methods to advance flexible specialisation, one within the company and one outside. Within the companies, they suggested hierarchies should be flattened and responsibility devolved to those best able to respond to changes in consumer demand (and who were most able to construct knowledge regarding the possibilities for product diversification). 77 The other was the "re-emergence of the industrial district", which rather than merely a geographical designation would produce highly interpenetrated networks between companies enabling production to be more flexible and responsive to changing market demands. 78 Here I will concentrate on the first of these issues.
A further element of the transformation literature (under the rubric of 'globalisation') argues that the state itself is either unable, or unwilling, to continue to play a protective role in labour relations. This reinforces the centrality of power relations in the flexible workforce. 79 In the knowledge industries and other service sectors the posited rise of the 'portfolio worker' reflects a certain distribution of power between capital and labour. 80 In the 'personal service' sector this may mean un-skilled, or semi-skilled workers holding a selection of part-time jobs (with the possible work-condition problems that might involve, given the lack of social 'protection' for part timers in most national economies). In the knowledge industries, this is meant more positively to indicate a professionalisation of labour, and the increase of project driven, contract work, for all but the tight core of any particular company. 81
The increasingly flexible network basis of employment (a central characteristic of the information society) has transformed the "potentially permanent and protected worker status into a flexible arrangement generally adapted to the momentary convenience of management" which while it increases "tremendously the flexibility and thus the productivity of the firm, undermines the collective status of labour vis-à -vis capital". 82 This has led to 'new' ways of organising the role of labour inside the firm as well as how firms decide what should be conducted inside the firm, and what should be 'outsourced'. This move to networking, outsourcing, or flexibility is not an unprecedented strategy. Ford and Farmer point out that such networks of companies working together to produce end-products was also evident in the early years of the industrial revolution. 83 During the Nineteenth century there was a move to vertical integration and conglomeration, but earlier the practice of putting out enabled the use of cheap and flexible labourers. 84 Thus, it is mistaken to suggest the organisational forms emerging in the knowledge industries are novel, they are a return to modes of organisation well known within the capitalist system of production.
Castells, like Reich, suggests that such moves in the overall labour force have led not to a move to the wide spread incidence of 'knowledge working', but rather a 'decline of the middle'. While there are still highly paid (relatively) secure jobs available, "the bulk of new jobs pay lower wages and enjoy less social protection than in recent historical experience". 85 This move to organisational cores and outsourced employment (not limited to the local districts of Poire and Sabel, but stretching out across borders) has become the mantra of the new flexibility. This has been emphasised by the moves to project based knowledge utilisation and production - such as the decline of the studio system in Hollywood. 86 Castells has referred to this trend as the 'individualisation of labour in the labour process', which he suggests is the "reversal of the historical trend of salarisation of work and socialisation of production" which characterised the industrial era. 87 Again, this would seem to argue for an intensification of capitalism (a return to previously successful practices) rather than its replacement.
Fragmentation of labour
The transformation of work in the information society may be less than might be presumed. By devolving certain management functions to the project groups, but retaining overall strategic control, new organisational strategies have given the appearance of a partial transfer of control to the workforce (a quasi-empowerment). However, such empowerment is strictly limited to the parameters set by management. When sub-units are removed from the core of the company (which is to say that they come together for the duration of a project), control revolves around the ability of the units to deliver certain set outputs (leaving some element of discretion only over the means). Also, as Carchedi points out, the use of information technologies limits the choice of working practices through the need to work with already supplied, complex software which channels both effort and output. Despite the seemingly more powerful and 'open' nature of these tools they actually set quite limited parameters to the possible methods of knowledge work. And, with such technology the monitoring of work (and 'down time') can be carried out continually and more importantly, unobtrusively. 88 There is a dichotomous movement towards a further social division of labour alongside the enhanced possibility for central control through surveillance represented by information technology. This is evident at the global level as well as the direct or local level.
Early characterisations of a post-industrial economy was also predicated on the implicit argument that not all of the global system would become post-industrial. While some economies can move to become information societies, manipulating knowledge resources, providing services of one sort or another, it must also be the case that other economies continue to produce the food and material goods on which such 'symbolic analysts', 'knowledge workers' and other service providers depend on. In the past it might have been presumed that the 'core' states (the Group of Seven, G7, perhaps) might have become post-industrial on the back of a continuing agricultural and industrial periphery. But as Castells has explored at some empirical length, even this is not the case. 89 While there is certainly a rise in those sectors of the economy which may be seen as knowledge dependent, this will not be a totalised move to an information society. As important as knowledge resources may be, even within the manipulation of physical/material resources, there will always be vast sectors of industrialised production alongside the knowledge centred sectors.
As Sayer and Walker suggest,
the economy can still be characterised in classical terms as a system dominated by industrial production, whose outputs come mostly as tangible goods: goods circulating primarily as commodities, accompanied by the circulation of money; produced by human beings with the help of machines, technical knowledge, and rational organisation... and the proliferation of so-called service sectors and service occupations can be explained in terms of burgeoning social and technical divisions of labour throughout the industrial system. 90
Which is to say, the emerging knowledge industries are not so much the result of new types of enterprise (though the commodities they produce may be novel in the form in which they are presented) or of a new form of society, but are the result of the continuing fragmentation of the social division of labour. And, the management of the division of labour in the economy (local, regional and global) is not a process that is neutral, rather it flows from the power of capital to configure the process of production and exchange. 91 The forms of this division may be new, tasks may emerge and be sub-divided or aggregated with the aid of new technologies, however the underlying power relations of capitalism remain remarkably familiar.
The atomised, computer using individual may be increasingly disengaged and distanced from society through the potential decline of face to face interaction. In the discourse of information society this is presented not as a problem but as a liberation. As Kumar points out this home based interaction with a globalised 'cosmopolis', via the Internet, is very appealing when the immediate experience of 'outside' may be both threatening and dangerous, stressful and uncontrollable. 92 But, the notion of the atomised consuming individual (as well as worker) has always been part of the neo-classical economic models of capitalism. That this is becoming more 'real' in the material world, is not so much a transformation, but the shift of reality towards an existing analytical model. While there may be new fields of economic activity in the information society, the overall organisation of society represents a victory for a particular abstract analysis as a model of society, rather than the organic or 'natural' development of human innovation and technological progress theorists of information society suggest.
In one sense, then, the information society is a fragmented world, where atomised individuals interact through the medium of information technology. Information flows allow them to free themselves from location, and due to the speed of transfer produce a single global information society. As I noted above, there will still be substantial non-informational sectors of the global political economy needed to serve the informational core. And, though these 'outlying' sectors are not informational, they are controlled (their production manipulated) by the use of information (in a direct sense through economic organisation, or in an indirect sense through the use of the derivatives markets to develop 'futures' and related financial instruments) - a control that has itself become centralised in a vast multi-nationals. Thus, beneath, the fragmentation of labour which is evident in the claims for an information society, there is the increasing potential for control that such information flows represent.
The post-industrial view of capitalism as an emerging globalised information society fundamentally mis-reads the nature of the capitalist process. While there is a freedom for some, the introduction of increasingly sophisticated information technologies permits increased control over the many. This may be control in the workplace, control of information that impacts on the markets for material goods, or the control of information flows in the knowledge industries themselves. Though there are new forms of economic organisation, this does not mean that the substance of relations between those who own capital and those who have only their labour (physical or mental) to sell have dramatically altered. Therefore, my central argument is that the claims for an emergent information society mistake the form for the substance of capitalist activity.
The Universalisation of Capitalist Logic
In one sense the 'information society' literature correctly reflects a change in the way the relations within the modern global political economy are organised. But while the forms of relations may change and this may give the appearance of a shift in organisation, when the underlying reliance on property relations and capitalist accumulation is revealed, the relationship between actors has remained remarkably similar. This is not to argue that capitalism is unchanging, only that there is a need to identify what is changing and what is not. Much has been written on what has changed, and this has over-emphasised disjuncture, so here I make no apology for concentrating on continuity.
To understand this continuity of capitalism while recognising that specific technologies of economic organisation may have been transformed, it is fruitful to first make a distinction between capitalism and modernity. Wood suggests that if we recognise capitalism as parallel to modernity rather than merely part of on overall characterisation of the modern period, then while allowing that modernity and capitalism are intertwined, there is no longer the need to suggest shifts in one are necessarily shifts in the other. 93 Wood identifies a common perception that the link between modernity and capitalism is rooted in what is often termed the 'Enlightenment project'. However,
much of the Enlightenment project belongs to a distinctly non -capitalist society, not just pre -capitalist but non-capitalist. Many features of the Enlightenment, in other words, are rooted in non-capitalist social property relations. They belong to a social form that is not just a transitional point on the way to capitalism but an alternative root out of feudalism. 94
And where those property relations did lead to the emergence of capitalism, through the central ideology of 'improvement' adopted in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England, this is something separate from the improvement of humanity, the former being directly related (through John Locke) to property and exchange. 95 It follows then that changes in the uses of knowledge are separate from the development of property relations in knowledge in the information society.
This leads Wood to suggest that rather than an epochal change from capitalism to some sort of post - capitalist; Fordist; or industrial - economy, it is more plausible to suggest that capitalism has been undergoing a period of universalisation. While accepting that capitalism has widened itself geographically (usually discussed under the rubric of globalisation) Wood argues that it has also deepened its penetration into previously non-commodified social relations. 96 The notion of universalisation rather then transformation flows from her emphasis on
the logic of capitalism , not some particular technology or labour process but the logic of specific social property relations. There certainly have been constant technological changes and changes in marketing strategies. But these changes do not constitute a major epochal shift in capitalism's laws of motion. 97
Thus, Wood makes clear the distinction between the form of capitalism (its technology or process) and it continuing logic or substance. To reinforce this argument for continuity it is also useful to recall the distinction between the economy (the market) and capitalism itself, between the 'economic life' and the activities of capitalism, suggested by Braudel.
Though this distinction is an analytical one only, as "it is very difficult to draw a line indicating what... is the crucial distinction between capitalism and the economy", 98 it is nonetheless useful. For Braudel a form of economy is operating "when prices in the markets of a given area fluctuate in unison... and in this sense, there was a market economy well before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries". 99 An economy is a device, embedded within society, for the co-ordination of demand and supply which produces prices which enable exchange mediated by money of goods that have been socially produced. This contrasts with capitalism, which intervenes in the economy by producing goods or services specifically for profit, that is speculatively. Thus the capitalist earns a socially recognised (and legitimated) return on investment (enabling capital to be reproduced and accumulated) when items are brought to market and successfully sold. 100 Market economies can exist without capitalism, but capitalism cannot exist outside a market economy.
A separation of the notion of market from capitalism enables the analysis of changes in the form of market relations (most specifically the sorts of commodities and services brought to market) to be distinguished from the driving organisational logic of capitalists acting in the market itself. If we accept that markets pre-exist capitalism (capitalism is arguably predicated on the marketisation of labour 101 ), then while they are inter-related, changes in the market's character do not indicate necessary changes in the 'laws of motion' of capitalism, though both must be socially legitimated to survive. The character of the economy may change due to technological or social changes, and this may expand or contract the possibilities for capitalistic intervention, but it does not change the substantive conditions required for the reproduction of capital itself. On the other hand, capitalist interventions (through new technologies, new products) will transform the form of the economy, and may also require new patterns of social legitimisation on behalf of these new forms.
This suggests that while the technologies and practices of capitalism in the market have changed in form, their underlying property relations - those between labour owning and capital owning groups - could remain in substance unaltered, though obscured through the presentation of new 'ideas' about economic organisation. Indeed, it is this continuity of the capitalist logic required for successful intervention in the economy that seems to be wilfully hidden by much of the legitimising discourse regarding the emergence of an information society. Thus, while it is
entirely possible that the origin of surplus in the era of capitalism has gradually moved... What is significant is that the allocation of this surplus to the capital-owning class has not been affected by the alteration in its sources. 102
Therefore, if Heilbronner's characterisation of the nature and logic of contemporary capitalism is correct, new technologies do not seem to indicate a profound change in the underlying substance of the relations of production or its organisation.
The defining movement of capitalism is the need for reproduction of capital through the accumulation of surplus from productive activities. 103 This does not indicate a particular technology through which surplus may be produced, only that such surplus is produced and can be captured. This accumulation of surplus, either for reinvestment or for social use (the exercise of power through the ability to influence outcomes) is at odds with those whose efforts are merely rewarded as labour contractors (however organised), whose property in their work is alienated. The accumulation of capital is dependent on the constant transformation of money into commodities for exchange which are converted back into money (the M-C-M' circuit) producing a surplus. While dependent on the construction of alienable property (to separate labour from its product and to allow products to be exchanged in a market) the forms of property are not limited except for their legal existence qua property. 104 The process is driven by the need to earn a profit, for capital to be reproduced, and not by particular forms of property.
The commodification of new areas of social existence expands the opportunities for accumulation, as for instance with knowledge resources, however this does not necessarily transform the logic of accumulation itself. Indeed, much "of what is called 'growth' in capitalistic societies consists of this commodification of life". 105 But, it may be more accurate to propose that given the need for the generation of continuing surplus under conditions of competition, the expansion through commodification is part of the logic itself. Once the resource has been subsumed within a regime of property rights, and is subject to capitalistic production, the form of capitalism may have changed - the commodities produced - but the substance remains the same.106
One further aspect of the 'logic' of capitalism is of interest when considering claims regarding the transformation wrought on capitalism by the information society. This is the move to disaggregate skills, enabling those that can be incorporated into machines to be separated off from the original skill-holders. This deskilling, is actually a transfer of skills - from labour to capital.107 New technologies may introduce new skills that will be required by capital, but usually technologies continue developing. Technology's central rationale is to transfer control of the 'tool' out of human hands, from the operator to machine in the next generation of the technology.108 Technological unemployment will lead therefore to new (differently skilled) jobs, but continually endangers even these new jobs.109 However, with these new jobs the relationship between capital and labour remains broadly similar even if the actual division of labour has changed quite extensively.
On one level "all economic activity is by definition purposive... and requires control to maintain its various processes to achieve its goals".110 Once the division of labour emerged it required the co-ordination of diverse activities and a need for controlled organisation. Beniger suggests that prior to the Industrial Revolution this could be based on interpersonal relations between agents, and only the acceleration of economic activity that accompanied industrialisation produced a 'problem' of control.111 However, industrialisation increased the need to mobilise diverse streams of information to co-ordinate successful capitalistic economic activity. As noted above, one of the problems with much of the information society literature which has grappled with the problem of definition of the information sectors proposed by Porat, is that information has been important for a long time, it is not a recent development.
The twin need to control thorough better information, and also to co-ordinate the information that was produced led to what Beniger terms the 'control revolution'. This revolution was a response to the industrial revolution and as such can be traced back to the Nineteenth century. Whereas, with earlier technologies the level of skill that could be encompassed within the machine was essentially mechanical, recent developments have enabled machines to mimic more intellectual (or critical and perceptual) human skills, in the service of productive capital. However, what concerns me here is not the new forms which control might take, the development of faster and more powerful technologies of information manipulation, but rather the continuity that such developments exhibit relative to capitalist and industrialised social relations.
To be specific, the relations between knowledge capital and the knowledge worker remain essentially the same as under 'modern' capitalism. This is to say that capital controls and deploys the knowledge outputs in a similar way to the products of its more materially oriented workers. Employment contracts routinely assign the intellectual property rights of workers' knowledge outputs to the employer, much as they would for materialised production. Innovations belong (in most instances) not to the knowledge workers but to their employers. Service contracts may forbid (for a period of time) the transfer of internalised 'skills' to competing firms (through the taking of a new post). Companies may also define the knowledge of important workers, not as the workers' skills and abilities, but as the trade secrets of the employer.112 Work practices may have changed, as have working conditions for the 'symbolic analysts' but the ownership of their outputs is still allocated through the capital/labour relation. And, as I pointed out above the potential for control may actually have been enhanced through developments in information technology.
The idea of an Information Society
The information society may represent a new form of capitalism, inasmuch as the appearances that the relations of production take may change and be concerned with differing sorts of resources. However, this is not the same as a substantive new era. Indeed, far from being a new sort of capitalism, the emergence of the knowledge industries, and the information society as an idea of economic organisation, indicates an intensification of capitalist social relations. Previously developed methods of governance, regulation, state involvement, and of social alternatives should not be dismissed as no longer relevant. There may be a need to reform particular mechanisms in response to these new and emergent forms, but the underlying logic that has driven responses to capitalism is as useful and relevant today as it was in the past. The ideological argument to the contrary reveals an opening into which intervention and change can flow - bluster and invective do not so much reveal the strength of capital's changing dynamic, but rather are being mobilised to obscure its weakness during a period of upheaval and formal shifts. The 'information society' is not so much an analytical construct as a discourse of disciplinary intent, which alongside 'globalisation' is meant to suggest the role of the state must ipso facto decline freeing capital from its paternalism.
However, as Kumar correctly points out
To call the information society an ideology and to relate that ideology to the contemporary needs of capitalism is to begin, not end the analysis. Capitalism has had many ideologies over the past two-hundred years - laissez-faire , managerialism, welfarism... Each has had its own kind of relation to capitalist society; each has contained its own distinctive contradictions... The 'information society' may be a partial and one-sided way of expressing the contemporary social reality, but for many people it is now inescapably part of that reality. 113
Following Kumar, I too stress that this ideology needs to be explored: in its origins and reproduction; and in its partiality. Though it obscures much, the notion of information society is not completely without foundation, and thus the contradictions that can be explored within its discourse can reveal sites of potentially successful contestation. This is the project for which this paper has been a preamble.
Finally, returning to Woods' five questions, 114 what might an initial response be in regard to 'information society' as an idea of economic organisation?:
Who does the idea blame for non-performance?
Those who resist or question the 'empowerment' of knowledge workers through outsourcing or project work, or resist the continuing deregulation of labour required to ensure the maximisation of flexibility. Groups who resist the expansion of flexibility in employment practices will likely be targeted as modern day organisational Luddites, who resist the transformation of productivity and 'freedom' new work practices bring. But as also been indicated by New Labour in Britain, the reinforcement of flexibility in the labour market is seen not so much as a policy choice but an imperative. Thus those who argue against this, if successful would be introducing rigidities that would lead to the information society being compromised and therefore unable to deliver the benefits promised (empowerment, leisure, wealth and so on).
Also those who maintain that there is still an important sector of the political economy that can be understood as existing to manipulate materials might also be blamed for anachronistic policy prescriptions. If the economy is weightless it is pointless to even consider 'traditional' materialised production as important. This also indicates an hostility to state regulatory activity, except for those interventions that directly support the information society, in the realm of intellectual property rights for instance. Thus, those trying to reinforce the role of the state in anything but a minimal ('ring holding') sense will also be to blame if the information society is compromised.
What is the vision promised by the idea?
The vision promised by the notion of the information society is one where individuals have responsibility for themselves and can avoid all unwarranted social contact if they so wish. It is a reaction to the 'nanny state', one that suggests all meaningful social interaction can be carried out on an individual basis by mobilising the immensity of knowledge and information that is accessible through the new information technologies and networks. It is a further expression of individualism, society is not required to supply the vital informational resources required for life, these can be drawn in from anywhere utilising the technology of the information society.
One of the key recurrent words is that of the network, both as information and social technology - individuals will be active in a panoply of networks driven by different issues. The networks will replace the old class antagonisms of the past and will free individuals from the limiting and suffocating group ties that previously stifled their creativity. These networks will be unlimited by geography or prejudice: in cyber space we are all equal and nearby. Most importantly these networks are not permanent of exclusive - individual (information) social embededness will by atomised and fragmentary.
What group (or groups) are created or bound together by the idea?
Those who benefit from and are able to manipulate knowledge resources profitably are most supportive of the idea - these are essentially the knowledge professionals whose working environment is increasingly cut off from the everyday existence of the mass of population. But there is also the question of the socially excluded, the non-literate, non-knowledge workers, and in this sense the idea of the information society produces the possibility of a division (or castes system) based on knowledge, on the differentiated ability to access these information resources. But given the fragmentation mentioned above, the major group which will be created is the non-group of atomised individuals.
That said, if the argument for an attendant centralisation of informational power is correct, then there will arise a sort of knowledge aristocracy based on their ability to manipulate and control the world through the use of informational resources. The sorts of groups that this might suggest are those like the Trilateral Commission that bring powerful individuals (from private and public sectors) together. Currently the most high profile group this might include would be the 'great and good' who appear in Davos every year.
What issues does the idea prioritise and address?
The discourse around the information society should really give precedence to educational issues and to some extent it does. However, politically much time is spent addressing intellectual property issues - the importance of informational and knowledge resources (their ownership and control) - as well as the promotion of flexibility (and its hand-maiden efficiency). Though, information society ideologues argue for the importance of education, practitioners are considerable more interested in seeking enhanced protection of Intellectual Property Rights, and stressing deregulation of labour markets to produce a flexible and 'freely contracting' work force. Overall information society writers stress the efficiency and desirability of the market as a forum for social decision making.
How does the idea contrast with contemporary, competing sets of ideas?
The idea of the information society contrasts with other ideas of economic organisation by stressing and building on an analysis of transformation. This is to say, it envelops both a discourse of naturalisation - the information society is an organic development driven by technology - as well as a normative political project that seeks to support the transformation through political, legal and social changes. These changes being required to ensure the organic development fulfils its potential. Thus, though the change is exogenous it also requires positive support.
Most importantly, it derides concern with the material economy as anachronistic, industrial production is outmoded, and suggests such social groupings as class are now irrelevant. The information society is presented as supremely individualistic, which contrasts with the post-war notions of welfarism and some form of social collectivity.
Conclusion
If capitalism is socially embedded though it can distinguished from the market, as Braudel suggests, then it requires some form of legitimisation to continue to intervene in socially existing markets. What I have suggested is that the discourse of information society is one way that the current changes in the organisation of capitalism are being presented, in an attempt to re-establish its legitimacy of capitalism. Capitalism has changed it is claimed, old criticisms are misplaced and no longer relevant. But while the tactics for confronting capitalism's trends of uneven development, exploitation, promotion of inequality and pauperisation may need to be changed, the underlying strategic thinking from which such tactics flow remains valid, useful and apposite. Claims to the contrary are not disinterested nor merely technocratic accounts of shifts in the global political economy. There is a need to resist the discourse of naturalisation which suggests the globalisation of the information society is an exogenous process. Given the paradigmatic character of the knowledge industries in the globalisation discourse, their political economy becomes of central import. But as I have argued, the presumptions about information society and the knowledge industries on which many studies rely, significantly misunderstand the nature of knowledge or information capitalism.
Though this discussion has not been explicitly pitched at the level of the global political economy, my intention has been to problematise a discourse that is evident at this level of analysis. Though I recognise the shifts of the last ten or fifteen years, I am concerned to deal with their underlying substance rather than fetishise their supposedly novel forms. If we are to be concerned with the inequalities in the global system, as I believe we should, then we need to recognise that continuance of property rights as the foundation on which capitalism is based. This would require us not to forget or dismiss the politics of property which have a long and violent history.
It seems to me that the discourses of globalisation and of information society have encouraged a supply side, technological deterministic view of the possibilities for the future of the global political economy. The issue of inequality should be at the centre of analysis, and I believe that if this is to be the case then the issue of property rights within the new forms of economic exchange need to be explored and revealed as constructed around a political project in the same way material property has been historically. Such work is required now, while the notion of intellectual property is still open to forms of contestation, in a way that material property no longer is. There is a continuity between the need for capitalism to make material resources property and the need to make ideational resources property. It does not suggest the emerging globalised knowledge economy is no longer subject to the same questions put to capitalism in the past. If knowledge is the resource of the future, then knowledge inequality and its alleviation must be the political concern of the next millennium. We should not throw away the analytical tools we may need at the beginning of such a struggle.
Note *: This paper originated in a discussion piece at the BISA Globalisation Working Group workshop in April 1997. More developed versions were presented at BISA December 1997 (University of Leeds) and in the Corporate and Global Governance Research Group(COGG) lecture series at UWE. I thank everyone who has commented on previous versions, but as this remains an exploration of some issues in preparation for a larger research project, further criticisms and suggestions are encouraged and welcomed. The shortcomings of this paper are of course the author's own. Back.
Note 1: Drucker,P Post-Capitalist Society (New York: HarperBusiness, 1993) p7 Back.
Note 2: Wood, E.M. 'Modernity, postmodernity or capitalism?' Review of International Political Economy Vol.4 No.3 (Autumn 1997) p558 Back.
Note 3: The view of Paul Krugman, paraphrased in 'Technology and Unemployment - A world without jobs?' The Economist 11.02.95 p26 Back.
Note 4: Perkin,H The Third Revolution. Professional Elites in the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1996), in which Perkin continues his history of the rise of the professions, and locates them as the paradigmic workers of the future. Back.
Note 5: Woods,N 'Economic Ideas and International Relations: Beyond Rational Neglect' International Studies Quarterly Vol.39, No.2 (June 1995) p175 and passim Back.
Note 6: These are usefully surveyed in Webster,F Theories of Information Society (London: Routledge, 1995). See also Kumar,K From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society. New Theories of the Contemporary World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), chapter 2 which goes over the same ground more briefly. Back.
Note 7: The seminal populist work is Tofler,A The Third Wave (London: Collins, 1980). There was a more austere version of this thesis made forcibly by Ivan Illich, which called for a post-industrial society based on 'conviviality', which is to say a step back from a massification of global society, back to a more individualised and local focus. This has survived in one sense in the notion of sustainable development. Illich,I Tools for Conviviality (Open forum) (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973). Back.
Note 8: From Ridly Scott's film adaptation of the Philip K Dick novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep'. Back.
Note 9: Curtis,T 'The Information Society: A computer-Generated Caste System?' Mosco,V & Wasko,J (editors) The Political Economy of Information (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988) pp95-107. This theme is also taken up with less pessimism in Lash,S & Urry,J Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994), and is married to a call for social policy action in Aronowitz,S & DiFazio,W 'High Technology and Work Tomorrow' Annals of the American Academy of Politics and Social Sciences No.544 (March 1996) pp52-67 which concludes that displacement by technology is slowly but surely moving up through the knowledge-worker hierarchy and thus may engender more calls for intervention as middle-class professionals are increasingly replaced by computers, which as cited above is also broadly the view of Paul Krugman. Back.
Note 10: To some extent the discussion of the logic of capitalism below does engage with these issues but this is not the central thrust of my argument and to elaborate on such issues here would lengthen an already over long paper. Back.
Note 11: In a parallel analysis Beniger has suggested that the emergence of an information society is predicated on the 'control revolution', which was itself a response to the forces unleashed by the industrial revolution. This analysis parallels my own in that it emphasises the continuity of the substance of economic relations and as such will be returned to below. Beniger,J.R. The Control Revolution. Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986) Back.
Note 12: Quah,D.T. 'Weightless economy packs a heavy punch' Independent on Sunday Business Section, 18.05.97 p4. See also Quah,D.T. 'Increasingly weightless economies' Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin (February 1997) pp49-56 where he concludes that "the term 'industrialised countries' no longer carries any resonance: now, no advanced and growing country is dependent on production industries". However as I argue in this paper, the services that these countries are now (in Quah's analysis at least) dependent on actually service a materialised industrial sector, which may indicate dependence has merely become indirect! Back.
Note 13: Smith,A Software for the Self. Technology and Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) p72 Back.
Note 14: Porat's mammoth nine volume work 'The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement', produced for the US Department of Commerce is discussed in Webster Theories of Information Society op.cit. , p10-16 and Hepworth,M.E. Geography of the Information Economy (London: Belhaven Press, 1989) p6/7. Back.
Note 15: ibid. p6 and Webster, Theories of Information Society op.cit. p11, respectively. Back.
Note 16: This brief account is drawn from Webster's discussion of Porat, ibid. p11/12 Back.
Note 17: Bell,D The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (London: Heinemann Educational 1974) p14 Back.
Note 18: There is a clear parallel with the modernisation thesis, see Rostow,W.W. The Stages of Growth (Cambridge University Press, 1960). The modernisation thesis' teleological views of social development have been critiqued elsewhere, not least of all in the extensive work on development and dependency. The widespread currency of such critiques, it seems to me, is one reason that the information society literature has endeavoured (though not always successfully) to avoid a formalised technocratic view of progress. Back.
Note 19: This became the central argument of evolutionary economics, see Nelson,R.R. & Winter,S.G. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982) Back.
Note 20: Bell, Coming of Post-Industrial Society op.cit. p30 Back.
Note 21: ibid. p44/45 (with my apologies to Zanussi). Back.
Note 22: For instance see the work of Foucault and Habermas, usefully collected together in Kelly,M (editor) Critique and Power. Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge,Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994), but also Foucault,M Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (edited by Colin Gordon) (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980) and McCarthy,T The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: Polity Press 1984). I also leave aside Bell's claims for the technical management of the increasingly complex global political economy, not least of all due to the often mobilised critique based on the increasing inability to manage in a chaotic or turbulent global system, for which see Rosenau,J.N. Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). Back.
Note 23: Bell, Coming of Post-Industrial Society op.cit. p15 Back.
Note 25: Reich,R.B. The Work of Nations. Preparing ourselves for 21st Century capitalism (London: Simon & Schuster, 1991) p177ff Back.
Note 26: This division between individualism and collectivity in knowledge production may be (at least in the early years of the information society discourse) a transatlantic division. The Europeans, for example Jenkins,C & Sherman,B The Collapse of Work (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979) arguing for collective approaches to the information issue while the Americans, typified by Tofler, Third Wave op.cit. are more concerned with how individuals could manage their integration into this new organisational dynamic. Back.
Note 27: Bell, Coming of Post-Industrial Society op.cit. p127 Back.
Note 29: see May,C 'Thinking, Buying, Selling: Intellectual Property Rights in Political Economy', New Political Economy Vol.3, No.1 (1998) for a discussion of the appeal to justificatory schema of property by writers on intellectual property, and the problems inherent in such claims. Back.
Note 30: Bell, Coming of Post-Industrial Society op.cit. p481 Back.
Note 31: Five years later Bell seems to have recognised this problem and suggests that the collective nature of knowledge production indicates that it should in the main be the responsibility of public bodies, as the market is unable to provide a "socially optimal policy of investment in knowledge" even with an intellectual property regime in place. Bell,D 'The Social Framework of the Information Society' in: Dertouzos,M.L. & Moses,J (ed.) The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1979) p174. Back.
Note 32: Webster, Theories of Information Society op.cit. p38/39, p49-51. Back.
Note 33: Tofler, Third Wave op.cit. p19 Back.
Note 35: Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society op.cit. p8/9. Back.
Note 37: see for instance, Lash,S & Urry,J Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage Publishers, 1994) and Morris-Suzuki,T Beyond Computopia. Information, Automation and Democracy in Japan (London: Kegan Paul International, 1988). Back.
Note 38: Castells,M The Rise of Network Society (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol.1) (Oxford: Blackwells Publishers, 1996) p18ff. Back.
Note 40: see for instance Levinson,P The Soft Edge. A natural history and future of the information revolution (London: Routledge, 1997) p141 Back.
Note 41: Lash & Urry, Economies of Signs and Space op.cit. passim which builds on the analysis they originally offered in Lash,S & Urry,J The End of Organised Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987) Back.
Note 42: Webster, Theories of Information Society op.cit. p218. See also Webster,F 'Information, urbanism and identity: perspectives on the current work of Manuel Castells' City No.7 (May 1997) p108/9 Back.
Note 43: Masuda,Y The Information Society as Post-Industrial Society (Tokyo: Institute for the Information Society, 1980) [reprinted as Managing in the Information Age: Releasing Synergy Japanese Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), from which page references are taken], p3 Back.
Note 46: ibid. p161 (emphasis added) Back.
Note 48: Handy,C The Empty Raincoat. Making sense of the future (London: Hutchinson, 1994) p71-74, p175ff Back.
Note 49: Masuda, Information Society, op.cit. p36 Back.
Note 52: Castells, Rise of Network Society op.cit. p374/5 and Castells,M The Power of Identity (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volume II), (Oxford: Blackwells, 1997) passim Back.
Note 53: see Castells,M The Informational City. Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) p350-353. To some extent such a concern is also recognisable in the implicitly normative approach adopted by Masuda. Back.
Note 54: Grint,K & Woolgar,S The Machine at Work. Technology, Work and Organisation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997) p138 (emphasis added). Back.
Note 55: 'Building the European Information Society for us all. Final policy report of the high-level expert group, April 1997, submitted to the European Commission, Directorate-General for employment, industrial relations and social affairs, Unit V/B/4' [available at http://www.ispo.cec.be. (downloaded 12.11.97)] Back.
Note 57: The Net Result. Social Inclusion in the Information Society (Report of the National Working Party on Social Inclusion) (London: IBM/Community Development Foundation, 1997) p64/65 Back.
Note 58: Barber,B.R. 'The New Telecommunications Technology: Endless frontier or the end of democracy?' Constellations Vol.4 No.2 (1997) p224. Barber's extensive critique of the claims for Internet based democracy run parallel to a number of issues in this paper. Back.
Note 59: Development of the Information Society - An International Analysis (A report by Spectrum Strategy Consultants) (London: HMSO, 1996) p4 Back.
Note 62: see Rapkin,D.P. & Avery,W.P (editors) National Competitiveness in a Global Economy (International Political Economy Yearbook No.8) (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995) especially the excellent editors introduction which notes the problem with the term 'national competitiveness'. Back.
Note 63: Lloyd,J 'Interview: Robert Reich' New Statesman 14.11.97 p36 Back.
Note 64: see May, Thinking, Buying, Selling op.cit. Back.
Note 65: Sell,S.K. 'Multinational Corporations as Agents of Change: The Globalisation of Intellectual Property Rights' in: Cultler,A.C., Haufler,V & Porter,T (eds.) Private Authority and International Affairs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) and Sell,S.K. 'The Origins of a Trade-Based Approach to Intellectual Property Protection. The role of industry organisations' Science Communication Vol.17 No.2 (December 1995) Back.
1 These issues are discussed in Coombs,R, Saviotti,P and Walsh,V Economics and Technological Change (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1987) where various perspectives on technological progress are explored. Back.
Note 67: 'The shock of the not quite new' The Economist 18.06.1994 p111 Back.
Note 68: Reich, Work of Nations op.cit. p177ff. For instance see also: Aronowitz & DiFazio, High Technology and Work Tomorrow op.cit. , Haskel,J & Heden,Y 'It's train or pain for the unskilled' Independent on Sunday Business Section 31.08.97 p5; 'Technology and Unemployment: A world without jobs?' The Economist 11.02.95 p23-26 as well as Gorz,A Farewell to the Working Class (London: Pluto Press, 1982) and Touraine,A The Post-Industrial Society (London: Wildwood House, 1974) for less recent contributions to this position. Back.
Note 69: Quah, Weightless Economy op.cit. Back.
Note 70: ibid. (emphasis added) Back.
Note 71: Sayer,A & Walker,R The New Social Economy. Reworking the Division of Labour (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992) for a wide ranging discussion of the continuity of industrial organisation beneath the 'service economy'. Also see Tomaney,J 'A New Paradigm of Work Organisation and Technology' in: Amin,A (ed.) Post-Fordism. A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) which offers a devastating critique of the emancipatory claims made for team working and other new organisational approaches to industrial work. Tomaney, at the level of labour relations stresses the intensification of capitalist practices in the 'new era' in much the same way that Wood does for the system as a whole (see below). Back.
Note 72: See for instance Handy,C The Future of Work. A Guide to our Changing Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) p7 and passim , and Sayer & Walker, New Social Economy, op.cit. Back.
Note 73: Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society op.cit. p25/26 Back.
Note 75: Bosch,G Flexibility and Work Organisation (Luxembourg: European Commission, 1995) p3/4 (emphasis in original). Back.
Note 76: Piore,M.J. & Sabel,C.F. The Second Industrial Divide. Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984) p165ff Back.
Note 77: ibid. p282. This element of their analysis has fed into and informed a burgeoning literature (and consultancy) in the field of team-work implementation on the shop floor, and various re-engineering strategies for ridding company's of 'inefficient' middle management. Back.
Note 78: ibid. p286ff. See also Kay,J Foundations of Corporate Success: How business strategies add value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) p80ff. Back.
Note 79: The Bosch report also looks at the problem of dismissal regulations and the impact on unemployment. Though an important issue for labour market flexibility (and unemployment levels) here space does not permit an exploration of this issue. See Bosch, Flexibility and Work Organisation op.cit. p26ff Back.
Note 80: Handy, The Empty Raincoat op.cit. p175ff Back.
Note 81: Pfeffer,J & Baron,J.N. 'Taking the Workers Back Out: Recent trends in the structures of employment' in: Staw,B.M. & Cummings,L.L. (editors) Research in organisational Behaviour. An annual series of analytical essays and critical reviews (Volume 10) (Greenwich,Conn.: JAI Press, 1988) pp257-303 Back.
Note 82: Castells, The Informational City, op.cit. p31 Back.
Note 83: Ford,D & Farmer,D 'Make or Buy - A Key Strategic Issue' Long Range Panning Volume 19 No.5 (1986) p55.See also MacMillan,K & Farmer,D 'Redefining the Boundaries of the Firm' The Journal of Industrial Economics Volume 27, No.3 (March 1979) pp277-285 which also notes that throughout the Nineteenth century the
preferred emphasis was on inter-organisational dealing and subcontracting. Even within the same factory, as the product moved from process to process, it was not uncommon to find each department under the control of an independent sub-contractor who employed his own workers... [and] therefore, such a form of business organisation could be viewed as a confederation of 'firms' in vertical relation to one another (p278) Back.
Note 84: see Landes,D The Unbound Prometheus. Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) p118/9, p188-190 Back.
Note 85: Castells, The Informational City, op.cit. p202. See also Gallie,D 'New technology and the class structure: the blue-collar/white-collar divide revisited' British Journal of Sociology Vol.47, No.3 (September 1996) pp447-473 Back.
Note 86: Lash & Urry, Economies of Signs and Space, op.cit. p114-116, and 116ff for further examples. Back.
Note 87: Castells, The Rise of Network Society op.cit. p265 Back.
Note 88: Carchedi,G 'Between Class Analysis and Organisation Theory: Mental Labour' in: Clegg,S.R. (editor) Organisational Theory and Class Analysis (Berlin: Walter de Gruyte, 1990) Back.
Note 89: Castells, Rise of Network Society op.cit. p201-310. Back.
Note 90: Sayer & Walker, New Social Economy op.cit. p104 Back.
Note 91: see Rueschemeyer,D Power and the Division of Labour (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986) for an extensive discussion of the power relations behind the division of labour (social and technical). Back.
Note 92: Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society, op.cit. p154-163 Back.
Note 93: Wood, Modernity, postmodernity or capitalism? op.cit. Back.
Note 98: Braudel,F Civilisation and Capitalism. 15th - 18th Century (Volume II - The Wheels of Commerce) (London: William Collins & Sons, 1982) p455 Back.
Note 101: see Polanyi,K The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Hill, [1944, reprinted], 1957), whose views on what constitutes a 'market' are different to Braudel's (Braudel, Civilisation & Capitalism, op.cit. Vol. II, p225/6). Back.
Note 102: Heilbronner,R.L. The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (New York: W.W.Norton, 1985) p75/6 Back.
Note 104: ibid. p57ff. The issue of the parallels between the possibility of materialised property and intellectual property are central, see May, Thinking Buying and Selling op.cit. Here, it is sufficient that it is recognised that there is a substantial legal sanction behind the acceptance of intellectual property qua property. Back.
Note 105: Heilbronner, Nature & Logic of Capitalism op.cit. , p60 Back.
Note 106: In one sense this is a parallel argument to Rosa Luxembourg's position on the need for capitalism to always be expanding into new areas, see Luxembourg,R The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951 [reprinted 1971]), especially chapter xxvi. However, the argument here for commodification is not necessarily spatial and may be likened to a deepening rather than a widening of capitalism's reach. Back.
Note 107: Braverman,H Labour and Monopoly Capital. The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974) p236ff and passim . See also, Carchedi, Between Class Analysis and Organisation Theory op.cit. Back.
Note 108: Rosenberg,N Inside the Black Box. Technology and Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) p41/42, p46/47 & p50 Back.
Note 109: cf. Technology & unemployment, The Economist op.cit. where, as usual The Economist argues that new employment will always eventually appear. Back.
Note 110: Beniger, The Control Revolution op.cit. p435 Back.
Note 111: op.cit. section II pp121-287 passim Back.
Note 112: See Di Fronzo,P.W. 'A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing' and Spanner,R.A. 'Beyond Secrets' Intellectual Property Recorder 1996. [Both available at the Recorder 's WWW site.] The question of 'inevitable disclosure' highlighted in these articles concerns the problem of employees revealing organisational trade secrets of their previous employer to their new employer (which might have previously been coded as 'transferable skills'). This issue was at the centre of the recent dispute between General Motors and Volkswagen over the employment of a high level manager by the later, who was using an approach to cost-cutting developed while employed by the former. Back.
Note 113: Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society, op.cit. p34 Back.
Note 114: Woods, Economic Ideas op.cit. Back.
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