Information Society

• Definitions

• Questions

• Daniel Bell

• Post industrial society (Daniel Bell)

• Network society (Manuel Castells)

Definitions

• Technological

• Economic

• Occupational

• Spatial

• Cultural

Technological

• New technologies lead to social change (Toffler, 1980; Negroponte, Gates, De Hond)

Questions

• How much technology

• Technologically determinist

Economic

• How much is the economic worth of informational activities

Question

• Defining (e.g. R&D)

Occupational

• How many people work in the industry (Bell, Castells)

Question

• Definitions (repair of a copier)

Spatial

• Information networks influencing organisation of time and space

Question

• What is a network

• Why now (networks have been around)

Cultural

• Information in life

General questions

• Quantity: more information is not information society (e.g. Food)

Daniel Bell: The coming of the post-industrial society (1973)

• Dominant mode of employment (pre-industrial, industrial, post-industrial)

• Effiency and increases in productivity make it possible (3% of the population taking care of 50% of the food production)

Consequences

• White collar employment• Central position for the professional• Greater role for the intellectuals• More person-to-person employment

• Less laissez-faire, more planning• Game between people (doctor does not see a

patient as x amount of income)• From economising to sociologising

Problems

• Technological emphasis for social changes• Emphasis on rationalisation (Weber)• Is there a shift from industry to services (only in

UK)• Wealth creation in industry -> services• Definition of services• Services within a sector (intra-sector versus

inter-sector)• Increasing division of labour, oriented at

production

Results

• Decline in industry workers• Increase in industrial output• Increase of wealth• Creation of jobs in services (never

ending)

• Services can not be automated (Internet?)

Manuel Castells: The Information Age

• Development of networks (ICT enabled)

• Informational capitalism

• Not: information or knowledge society, but network society

Consequences

• More transnational companies

• Hierarchies pulled down, power to “movers and shakers”

2007 © Wolters-NoordhoffOrganisation and Management

From Ford to Cisco

• “The logic of the network is more powerful than the powers in the network”

(ICTs have reduced the effectiveness of global corporations and empowered people and organisations who are entrepeneurial and effective in terms of netwerking; Webster, 2006; p. 105)

The decline of the working class

• Knowledge and information are the essential materials of the new production process

• 30% participant ratio in higher education

Questions

• What is a network

• What is information

• Is the capitalist class gone

Herbert Schiller (1919-2000)

• IT and enabling technologies make transnational companies possible

• Information networks link companies

IT revolution

• Companies (e.g. AT&T)

• Privatisation in Europe

• Media dominated by US

Market criteria: Research & Development

• Philips Nat Lab

• KPN Research Centre

Market criteria: The consequence

• Public mask of progress and the private face of conservatism (Sharpe)

• The Television: (video, cable, computer games); the new box??

To summarise: What is called the “Information Society” is, in fact, the production, processing, and transmission

of a very large amount of data about all sorts of matters….. Most of the data are produced to meet very

specific needs of super-corporations, national goverment bureaucracies, and the military

establishment of the advanced industrial state

(Schiller, 1981)