It is widely acknowledged that a process of structural transformation is under way in advanced societies. It stems from the combined impact of a major technological revolution based upon information-communication technologies, the formation of a global economy, and a process of cultural change whose main manifestations are the transformation of women’s role in society and the rise of ecological consciousness. The recent transformation of the world political order and the demise of communism and of the Marxist-Leninist ideology are also fundamental trends of our historic epoch. Yet, I argue that the collapse of the Soviet empire is also a consequence of the strains generated by the transition to the informational society.
A number of social theories and interpretations have tried to grasp the essence of the current structural transformation (Beniger, 1986; Miles, 1988; Monk, 1989; Martin, 1988; Williams, 1988; Lyon, 1988; Katz, 1988; Salvaggio, 1989; Cawkell, 1987; Forester, 1987; Hage and Powers,1992). They all agree on the centrality of knowledge generation and information processing as the basis of the new sociotechnical paradigm (Porat, 1977), as the technological-social revolution based on the generation and use of energy constituted the foundation of the industrial society (Kranzberg and Pursell, 1967). This is why I choose to name the new society “information-al,” in order to indicate that the social attributes of information generation and information processing go beyond the impact of information technologies and of information itself, as the industrial society could not be simply assimilated to the diffusion of industrial manufacturing.
Yet, the brightness of the rising star often blinds the observer. Few theories are specific, comprehensive, and rigorous enough to provide an interpretive framework for the understanding of the new history. To be sure, there is a considerable amount of research on the social and economic impacts of new technologies, but these are partial aspects whose fundamental meaning has to be integrated into a broader system of social interaction. The systemic character of the theory is more necessary than ever to understand this new society, because one of the central features of such society is the tight interdependency between its social, political, and economic spheres.
There is also an abundance of pop sociological pseudotheories, confirming the fact that prophecies and ideologies quickly fill in the lack of scholarly research in any situation of historic transition. Overall, there is little systematic, rigorous theory enabling us to understand the actual contours of the social structure of contemporary societies as informational societies. Indeed, the best-constructed analyses of such process of transformation of the social structure are still based on the earlier, great sociological analyses of the postindustrial society. This is why we must return to the sources to build up from there, while contrasting the hypotheses on postindustrialism with the actual evolution of societies in the past twenty years.
It is a striking paradox that the theory of postindustrial society was formulated, in its essential nucleus, in the late 1960s (Touraine, 1969) and early 1970s (Bell, 1973), just before the full blossoming of the revolution in information technologies. Yet, today’s social theorizing of structural transformation of our societies is still dominated by these early theoretical constructions, harbingers of a broader set of social and economic interpretations elaborated approximately in the same period (Richta, 1969; Fuchs, 1968; Porat, 1977). All these theories were based on the common idea that industrial society (not capitalism) has been historically superseded in its logic and structure. The fact that the theory anticipated the major technological transformations to come (the microprocessor, 1971; the personal computer, 1975; the recombination of DNA, 1973) shows that information technologies are an essential component of the overall social transformation, but it is not the only determinant factor. These technologies are the result of social and institutional demands for the tasks they can perform as well as the source of a series of fundamental transformations in the way we produce, consume, manage, live, and die.
In its essence, the theory of postindustrialism starts from a major empirical observation, that productivity and economic growth still organize societies around their logic, both in the work process and in the distribution of the wealth thus generated. In this sense, the theory is in line with the Marxian tradition. Furthermore, the engine for change to postindustrialism is an innovation in the productive forces; throughout the first half of the twentieth century, science and technology became the main sources of productivity. And in the post-World War II period, knowledge and information became the fundamental elements in the generation of wealth and power in society. This is the foundation of the theory. However, an immediate specification of such a statement makes things more complicated. Technology is not just science and machines; it is social and organizational technology, as well.
Indeed, in the first econometric analyses that founded the theory of postindustrialism (Solow, 1957; Kendrick, 1961) it was clear that the combination of production factors (basically labor and capital) and the efficient use of energy, all through organizational technology, were the basis for the hypotheses on the sources of productivity. According to these econometric analyses, the growth of productivity in industrialized economies did not come from the quantitative increase of capital or labor in the production process. It came from somewhere else, from a mysterious, unidentified, statistical residual that appeared in the equations characterizing the aggregate production function. It was hypothesized that such residual was the empirical expression of science, technology, and management.
Because both science (and its technological applications) and social technology (including, at some level, social science, along with managerial expertise) were considered to be the critical forces in the steady growth of productivity over time (above 2 percent per year in the United States), all social processes and institutions were to be involved in the productive forces. The various dimensions of society become more interdependent, and the worlds of economy and technology depend more than ever on government and, therefore, on the political process. Postindustrial societies, organized around social choices, are more political than agricultural societies (organized around survival against a hostile nature) and than industrial societies (organized around processes of economic accumulation).
Thus, the occupational structure of society becomes more diversified in terms of activity. The expansion of “services” means simply an ever-growing extension of human work beyond the sphere of direct, material production. Postindustrial societies are characterized, and even defined in the thinking of some authors, by the shift from goods-producing to service-handling activities. This is the hard empirical trend repeatedly used by social theorists as evidence of postindustrialism. The decreasing weight of manufacturing in employment and in its contribution to gross domestic product is cited as the critical indicator for the fading away of the industrial society.
Expansion of services is at the same time required and permitted by the new productive forces. It is required because information processing, knowledge generation and distribution, and their supporting tasks are critical for the generation of the economic surplus in an advanced, information economy. But it is also the productivity generated in the information economy that allows for the expansion of “service” activities, some of which (e.g., social services) are linked to the social demands of society rather than to the direct requests from the economy (although they also have second-order effects in enhancing productivity). Thus, as a consequence of economic imperatives and of social-institutional demands, a growing proportion of human activity and resources is devoted in our societies to information processing and other non-goods-producing activities.
The transformation of the occupational structure is characterized by the rise of highly educated social groups, in particular managers, professionals, and technicians. Among them, scientists and managers are of foremost importance. From the perspective of postindustrial theory, these groups are predicted to increase substantially in absolute number, in proportion to total employment, and in strategic importance in organizations and society.
Social change is not limited to the transformation of social structure. A new social structure is also linked to a new social dynamics, structurally opposing certain interests and creating new centers of conflict and power making (the situses, in Bell’s terminology). In this regard, the theory offers two different, but not mutually exclusive, hypotheses:
Theories of postindustrialism insist that the defining structural principle of the new society be placed on a different axis than the one opposing capitalism to statism. They deal with the technical relations of production not with the social (property-based) relations of production. The two axes should be considered in understanding any specific society.
In assessing the theory of postindustrial society more than twenty years after its initial, pathbreaking, formulation, several questions have to be dealt with in order to understand our societies and, thus, twenty-first-century societies:
But what about the rest of the world? Bell does identify the problem but declares it to be “the outer limit of our trajectory—a problem for the twenty-first century” (p. 486). Touraine (1988) extensively, and probably more thoroughly than any one else, analyzes the contemporary dynamics of dependent societies. However, in both cases (a fortiori in other, less relevant, theoretical formulations of postindustrialism), the new social structure is analyzed as specific to the dominant, Western societies. With some rare exception (most notable, that of the work by Katz, 1988) less advanced societies are considered external to the system, and their effects on postindustrial societies are not taken into consideration, while the impacts of such new informational processes on the nonpostindustrial societies are not considered either. This approach reduces the explanatory power of any theory, not only because it leaves most of the planet out of its scope but also because it misses essential points of the dynamics of the most advanced societies.
Critical examples that justify my assertion are the following:
In sum, a theory of the information society that does not place the world’s new economic interdependence at its heart is simply irrelevant for the purpose of understanding the new social structure of our societies. It is certainly easier to think of our societies as starting from their own internal logic, but such easy intellectual foundation misses a key point about our historical specificity. These are major issues to be addressed in shifting from the early theories of postindustrialism to a preliminary theorization of the informational society.
Technological determinism is in essence the negation of social theory. Thus, we must reject from the onset any attempt at placing technological change at the roots of historical change. Yet, it is as important to acknowledge the extraordinary social change represented by new information technologies. In an obvious historical parallel, the steam engine did not create the industrial society by itself, but without the steam engine there would not have been an industrial society. Without the microprocessor and without the recombinant of DNA there would not be an informational society.
There is now general acceptance that in the last quarter of the twentieth century a technological revolution of historic proportions has taken shape (although, as always, the scientific foundations of such a revolution can be traced back much earlier, for instance to the 1912 discovery of the vacuum tube by De Forest at Stanford). Two basic features characterize the current technological revolution:
How does this technology revolution affect society? To be sure, there is an interactive relationship between technology and society. Indeed, from the perspective of social theory, technology is a component, and an essential one, of society. The origins and trajectory of major technological changes are social. The application of technology is socially determined, as is the feedback on technology of the social consequences of its applications. Having granted all these crucial points, I think it is still important to focus upon the specific effects of this specific technological revolution on the social structure to understand the new, emerging social system.
The first distinctive feature is that, because information and knowledge are deeply embedded in the culture of societies, culture and symbol processing become direct productive forces in the new society. This blurs the traditional distinction between production and consumption and also supersedes the metaphysical debate about productive and unproductive labor. If symbol manipulation by a highly skilled, creative, and increasingly autonomous labor force becomes the fundamental source of productivity and competitiveness, all factors that contribute directly to the enhancement of such capacity are forces of production. The mental capacity of labor is certainly linked to education and training, but in an open, complex society, it depends as well on a variety of cultural and institutional conditions: health, communication, leisure, conditions of habitat, cultural recreation, travel, access to the natural environment, sociability, and so on. Thus, the processes of production and consumption, and beyond them the spheres of economic and social life, become increasingly intertwined.
A number of important institutional consequences follow from such observation. For instance, the welfare state cannot be seen simply as an unproductive, redistributive institution. By improving conditions of social life and cultural capacity, the welfare state, in its broadest sense, can be a decisive productive force in the informational society. The major distinction from the economic point of view is between types of welfare state institution, depending upon its role: enhancing social life for the majority of the population versus bureaucratic redistribution and stigma-prone charity. By ending the secular distinction between production and consumption in the social system, the new technological paradigm forces theory to analyze societies in terms of social relations, cutting across institutional spheres of social action.
A second major effect of new information technologies is that they link processes of production, distribution, and management across organizations and across types of activity. Thus, manufacturing or agriculture cannot be conceived independently of the information and service activities embedded into the production of goods. And the employment and occupational structure cannot be considered to follow the linear, historical succession from primary to secondary sectors and then to tertiary activities. Instead, there is a fundamental change from a techno-organizational division of labor to a complex matrix of linkages of productive and management activities that command the logic of the entire occupational system.
To test this analysis, I studied, with my assistant Yuko Aoyama, the evolution of the employment and occupational structure of the G-7 countries between 1920 and 2005 (Castells and Aoyama, 1993). The findings unveil some surprises for the postindustrialist dogma. Japan and Germany, while having become the most competitive and technologically advanced economies, display a much higher level of manufacturing employment than the United States or the United Kingdom and a much lower level of information workforce. It does not follow, however, that information is not important in Japan. What appears to happen is that the linkage between information processing and material production takes different organizational forms in different institutional and managerial structures (e.g., Japanese and German manufacturing firms internalize a higher proportion of their own services; also, a much lower proportion of Japan’s and Germany’s industrial production is done offshore).
In sum, information technologies allow different types of activity to link up according to the organizational form that suits the strategy of the firm or the history of the institution. The flexibility of new technologies allows for a diversity of organizational arrangements, which make it possible for people to work together in different firms, in different locations, in different sectors of activity. It follows that the traditional distinction between agriculture and services and between manufacturing and services, as well as the enormous diversity of “service activities,” does not make sense any more.
Furthermore, new information technologies allow for the constitution of a production and management system spread all over the world yet working on real time and working as a unit through the combination of telecommunications, fast transportation, and computerized flexible production systems. This worldwide production system does not concern only the multinational corporations. Networks of firms, and the ancillary networks of suppliers and distributors, also gravitate around global production and management flows (Castells, 1989). The process is most obvious in the case of the global financial markets (Sassen, 1991). Three critical concepts emerge from such fundamental transformation in the way the new production system operates: linkages between activities, networks made up of organizations, and flows of production factors and of commodities. Together, they form the basis of the new economy and will force the redefinition of the occupational structure and, thus, of the class system of the new society.
The same logic applies to the fundamental process of organizational change under way, a third major distinctive effect of information technologies. As complexity and uncertainty become essential characteristics of the new environment in which organizations must operate, the fundamental needs for the management of organizations are those of flexibility and adaptability (Benveniste, forthcoming): flexibility to gear the external system of the organization toward the requests of a rapidly changing world, adaptability to modify the internal system of the organization in accordance with each new pattern of strategic guidance. The demands for such organizational changes have existed for some time in the marketplace. But it was only with the spread of affordable information technologies that firms and institutions were able to decentralize and become flexible without undermining their control and guidance systems. Thus, small and medium firms were able to link up, relate to a broader market, and become suppliers to large firms, adding substantial flexibility to the system. Multinational corporations decentralized their units to the point of forming constellations of quasi-independent entities.
Major firms formed strategic alliances, joint ventures, and partnerships in different product lines and in different markets and functions, often becoming competitors of their own allies in specific areas. While the concentration of wealth and power in major conglomerates has continued in most countries and at the world level, the structure of the economy and of social institutions has become increasingly decentralized and diversified, with a growing number of units making their own decisions, while relating to a complex system of hierarchies, alliances, and competitions. Overall, and as a general trend, multidirectional networks are substituting for vertical bureaucracies as the most efficient, archetypical form of the new system, on the basis of flexible, affordable, and increasingly powerful information and communication technologies.
The direct impact on the media—and thus on the formation of images, representations, and public opinion in our societies—is a direct, obvious impact of new communication technologies. This has been the object of endless studies and interpretations, to the point that it seems hardly necessary to further elaborate on the issue. And yet, new communication technologies have made obsolete the “classic” television era, forcing us to reconsider the new interaction between communication and communication technologies. What is new in the new media, as they have been affected by satellite transmission, cable, VCRs, portable communication devices, and eventually microwave transmission, is the simultaneous tendency toward globalization and individualization of image making, sound making, and broadcasting.
On the one hand, the whole planet is (unevenly) connected in global networks of the information and images that travel throughout the world instantly. On the other hand, the media are less and less mass oriented. Markets and audiences (ultimately the same) have been segmented and specifically targeted. The emergence of specialized networks, through cable television or satellite transmission, depending on the society, is not only a challenge to traditional TV networks, it is a new form of image distribution and reception. Together with specialized radio stations, they are forming a new media system that looks for specific audiences or specific moods and tastes of general audiences. VCRs are also becoming powerful instruments of individualization, since they are decreasingly used to view rented films and increasingly used for videotaping films and events, thus selecting available images while preserving the time and conditions of image consumption. The Walkman device (that will shortly have its video equivalent, beyond the current primitive wrist TV sets) reaches the ultimate individualization for the reception of messages, moving from mass media to individual consumption and to the segmented distribution of a flexible, global production of audiovisual messages. To some extent, now, the message is the medium, since it is the message that determines the medium to be used as well as the how, where, when, and for whom.
In a related development, the rapid diffusion of virtual reality representation in computer networks creates the possibility of individualized, self-programmable, image representation and perception, which will increasingly disconnect individuals from the mass media, while connecting the individualized communication expressions to the individuals’ mental world. The social consequence of such technological developments is the growing tension between globalization and individualization in the audiovisual universe, bringing about the danger of a breakdown in the patterns of social communication between world information flows and personal experiences.
Last but not least, the strategic character of information technologies in the productivity of the economy and in the efficacy of social institutions changes the sources of power within society and among societies. The mastery of the science and technology of information technologies becomes a source of power in itself. Granted, the state, because it still holds the institutional monopoly of violence, remains the source of power in society. But a state incapable of keeping up with the rapid, endless process of technological change will become a weak state both internally (its economic basis will deteriorate) and externally (the coercive means of its institutional monopoly of violence will become technologically obsolete). This is a fundamental development, because the ability to foster technological change under the new conditions of information technology revolution are directly related to the ability of a society to diffuse and exchange information and to relate to the rest of the world.
On both counts, military and secluded empires cannot compete with open societies and market economies in the fostering of new technologies. Nuclear power is in fact the last, most destructive, technology of the industrial era. Communication technologies can indeed be used for purposes of military destruction and police control, but the potential of an institutional system to develop communication technologies depends on a number of social conditions that found serious obstacles in closed societies and military-oriented apparatuses (Guile, 1985). The surprising collapse of the Soviet empire is the most striking evidence supporting this hypothesis. The inability of the Soviet system to compete with the West in information technologies decisively undermined its military power, opening the way for a last-ditch attempt at reforming the system—which eventually precipitated its demise (for a tentative analysis of this process, see Castells, 1992).
A fundamental feature of the new society is the transformation of women’s condition in the most developed countries. At the roots of such transformation, which has taken place at an accelerated pace since the 1960s, are two interrelated phenomena: the massive entry of women into the labor market in most advanced economies and the social movements based on the defense of identity that nurtured the development of the women’s movement and of feminism in general. Both structural change and social mobilization are important to understand the transformation of women’s roles and values in society. But because feminist and women’s movements had already taken place in earlier historical periods, I am inclined to attribute the greatest weight in the process of change to the transformation of the labor market and the subsequent access of women to paid jobs, even though under conditions of structural discrimination. Thus, the transformation of the employment structure under the conditions of the rising information economy is directly related to the change in women’s position in society.
Whatever the causes, women engaging in a lifelong perspective as workers found themselves in a better bargaining position at home, while the social division of labor between the breadwinner and the homemaker lost its basis of cultural legitimation. At the same time, having to cope simultaneously with four tasks (working for pay, keeping the house, rearing the children, and managing the husband) stressed women’s everyday life to the limit in a context in which society was not matching the incorporation of women into the workforce with the provision of services for the functioning of the household. There followed among women a great deal of receptivity for the feminist values debated in the media at the initiative of social movements and ideologists. Thus, while most women in most societies would not call themselves feminists, a dramatic change in the values of society, and particularly in the values of women, took place in just one generation. Equal rights became an institutional goal for most women. But more important, the overwhelming majority of women of advanced countries in the 1990s do not accept the values underlying the social institution of the patriarchal family. Gender discrimination is still a fact in all societies, and the true sharing of housework is still negligible in the population at large. But the structure of legitimation of patriarchalism has been fundamentally shaken. Women do not accept men’s authority any more. The power game has to be played out now on an interpersonal basis—the institutions of society cannot come to the rescue of patriarchalism. The penetration of women’s demands in the media and the rapid political mobilization of women have made substantial inroads in the structure of power of all societies, signaling unmistakably the historical trend toward gender equality.
Granted, thousands of years of patriarchalism will not disappear easily. The ingrained reflexes of gender domination will remain alive for generations, transmitted by some of the most fundamental cultural values of society. Yet, the economic need to incorporate women into the labor force, the political interest in appealing to women voters, and the pressures of a powerful, if diffused and divided, feminist movement combine to create a new historical ground that has already had a fundamental impact on the overall social system.
The first and most important impact has been on the family. The patriarchal family has been called into question, and a period of institutional crisis has followed, as in all historical transitions. Women’s demands in their partnerships find strong resistance from men, who see their interests threatened and their values called into question. Separatism between genders has been on the rise, with the divorce rate rising in most societies and the number of single households exploding. In the United States, for instance, more than 50 percent of marriages end in a divorce. Also, the traditional family, formed by a married couple with children, is today the exception in the United States: only 25 percent of households fit that model. Single-parent families are the fastest-growing category, followed by singles, then by couples without children. Although patriarchal nuclear families resist the trend better in Western Europe (and still thrive in Japan), the trends toward the disintegration of such model are similar in all societies. For couples who stay together, there has been a fundamental transformation of family roles. Dual-career households have become the norm, and constant negotiations are needed to accommodate each member’s professional life.
Because society continues to consider providing child care for the whole working population a nonnecessary service, the caring for children has become a fundamental element around which family life revolves. Different societies adapt differently to the child care crisis. In Western Europe extended family relationships cushion the crisis, with grandparents doing a share of family work—which interestingly leads to the revitalization of extended family relationships. In the United States, in what I would expect to be the general norm as other societies reach the same high rate of women’s participation in the labor force, two main avenues are taken to care for children, depending on social class. For the professional middle class, women subcontract their child care to domestic workers, mainly from Third World countries. For working-class women, they rely on support networks that socialize child care on the basis of the neighborhood. In both cases, the patterns of socialization of children are fundamentally affected. In addition, while men continue to participate very little in domestic work, they do take more care of the children, because of the emotional rewards involved. The net result is that the new generations are being socialized out of the traditional pattern of the patriarchal family and being exposed from an early age to the need to cope with different worlds and different adult roles. In sociological terms, the new process of socialization downplays to some extent the role of the patriarchal family and diversifies the roles within the family world. As a result, we would expect to see more complex personalities, less secure yet more capable of adapting to changing roles and social contexts (see Hage and Powers, 1992, on this subject).
The increasing individualization of relationships within the family tends to emphasize the importance of personal demands beyond the rules of the institution. Thus, to some extent sexuality becomes, at the level of social values, a personal need that does not necessary have to be channeled and institutionalized within the family. With the majority of the adult population living outside the boundaries of the traditional nuclear family, the expression of sexuality concentrates on interpersonal relationships and becomes an open dimension of the new self. The socialization of teenagers in such new cultural patterns leads to a dramatically higher degree of sexual freedom in comparison to that of preceding generations. This is why even the threat of contracting AIDS has not reduced promiscuity among teenagers.
The open expression of sexuality and the slow but growing acceptance of sexuality by society have allowed the expression of homosexuality, fostered by powerful gay and lesbian movements that have become major agents of cultural change. Indeed, the gay movement, at least according to the findings of my study on San Francisco’s gay community, is not only a movement for the defense of gay rights but also a movement for the legitimation of sexuality in society, without boundaries or controls relative to kind of sexuality.
Thus, the revolt of women against their condition at home, induced and allowed by their massive entry into the information labor force, has called into question the partriarchal nuclear family. The crisis of the traditional family has increased the separation between the dimensions previously held together by that institution:
The difficulty in coping with all these dimensions, once they are not fixed in formal structure such as the patriarchal family, explains the difficulty in maintaining stable social relationships within the family-based household. It is obvious that for families to survive, new institutionalized forms of social relationships, in accordance with the new social roles and functions of women, will have to emerge.
At the same time, technological change in reproductive techniques has allowed the possibility of dissociating the reproduction function from the social and personal functions of the family. The possibilities of in-vitro fertilization, of surrogate mothers, and of laboratory-produced babies open up a whole new area of social experimentation, which society will try to control and repress as much as possible because of its potential threat to our moral and legal foundations. Yet, that women can have children on their own without having to even know the father and that men can use surrogate mothers to have their children break down the fundamental relationship between biology and society in the reproduction of the human species, thus separating socialization from parenting. Under such historical conditions, families are being redefined in terms that are still unclear.
Because family and sexuality are fundamental determinants of personality systems, the calling into question of known family structures and the coming into the open of sexuality bring about the possibility of new types of personality that we are just starting to perceive. My hypothesis combines Jerald Hage and Charles Powers’ views (1992) with a more adventurous speculation. I agree with them that the key ability to respond to current changes in society at the individual level is the ability to engage in “role redefinition,” what they consider to be the “pivotal micro-process” of postindustrial society. While this is a fundamental statement, it is too general: it does not allow us to specify the social dynamics emerging in the new historical context. Let us try a complementary approach to their analysis of new, emerging personality systems.
If we dare to introduce some elements of psychoanalytical theory in this excursus, we could say that the open recognition of individual desire would lead to such an aberration as the institutionalization of desire. Because desire, is, by definition, constant transgression, the recognition of sexuality outside the family would lead to extreme social stress. As long as the transgression consists merely in expressing sexuality outside the family boundaries, society could easily cope with it, channeling it through coded situations and organized contexts (e.g., prostitution, tolerated sexual harassment, etc.). But the patriarchal family is not there any more to be betrayed, the transgression will have to become an individual act against society. The bumper function of the family is lost, which opens the way to the expression of desire in the form of irrational violence. The breaking down of the traditional family (the only one existing until now) is indeed giving way to the normalization of sexuality (pornographic movies during prime-time television broadcasting) and to the spread of senseless violence in society through the back alleys of uncontrolled desire.
The liberation of the family confronts the self with its own inflicted oppression. The escape to freedom in the open, informational society will lead to individual anxiety and social violence until new forms of control are found that bring together men, women, and children in a reconstructed family structure better suited to the taming of liberated women and uncertain men.
We live in a global economy. This is not the same as a world economy, a reality that has existed since the sixteenth century. A global economy is an economy in which all processes work as a unit on real time throughout the planet; that is, an economy in which capital flows, labor markets, markets, the production process, management, information, and technology operate simultaneously at the world level. This is not to say that nations and nation-states disappear. In fact, states become major players in the global economy on the basis of the defense of the specific national interests they represent. But the economic unit of operation (and of analysis) is the global system of interactions. There are no more national economies and national economic policies; they are nationally based strategies operating in a global system differentiated and articulated across and between national boundaries. In a book on the global economy in the information age, which I wrote with Martin Carnoy, Stephen Cohen, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Carnoy et al., 1993), we show the close connection between the globalization and informationalization of the economy and try to analyze the structure and dynamics of the new global economy. Thus, I will not elaborate further on the economic dimension of my analysis. What I want to emphasize here is the consequence of such analysis for the theory of the informational society.
If the economies across the planet are linked, how can societies be analyzed independently? Unless we assert that economies and societies are entirely autonomous systems, if there is a global economy, there must be a structural relationship among the societies integrated into such an economy. Thus, the theory of the informational society cannot concentrate exclusively on the most advanced societies. It must also account for the structure of dependent societies and for the interactive effects between social structures asymmetrically located along the networks of the global economy.
To be sure, information technologies have spread across the whole world, and the information workforce has increased in all countries. However, the study by Raul Katz (1988), the only existing study on the informational society from a truly international perspective, shows that the meaning of the information workforce in “developing” countries is very different from that in advanced countries. Its expansion is mainly linked to government employment and is concentrated on generally unproductive activities. Also, he shows a limited diffusion of information technologies in most of these countries, and that is generally under government supervision. Evaluation of the role of information technology industries in Third World development shows the gigantic gap between most countries on this planet and the OECD area. On the other hand, the ability of the newly industrializing countries to adapt, produce, and diffuse new information technologies has become the critical factor for their development.
Thus, there is not a necessary, single path that all countries must follow toward the informational society. But there is a comprehensive global structure based on the rules of the informational society that affects all countries in one way or the other. First, the ability to use (and to some extent to produce) information technologies has become a fundamental tool of development. It is the historical equivalent to electrification in earlier stages of development. But we know that the use of information technologies is not only a matter of hardware. Without the information capacity of society, that is without information labor, organizations, and institutions, there will be little chance for developing countries to develop. Technological dependency, in the broadest sense of the notion, becomes the fundamental obstacle for development in our world.
Second, the whole world becomes interconnected in its economic functions through information and communication flows. Access to such flows becomes critical for any economy and, thus, for any society. Being switched off the network is the equivalent of not existing in the global economy. The position in the network—that is, the function obtained in the new international division of labor—becomes an essential element in defining each country’s or region’s material conditions of existence.
Third, the information economy, while connecting the whole planet in a series of networks of flows, does so selectively. Because productivity and competitiveness rely less and less on primary resources and more and more on knowledge and information, cheap, unskilled labor and raw materials cease to be strategic inputs in the new economy. Large areas of the world are increasingly irrelevant for the global information economy. The exploitation of labor or natural resources becomes too costly for the benefit obtained. As the economy evolves toward higher value-added, information-based products, the accumulation of capital proceeds at the core, not at the periphery. The economic theories of imperialism are now doomed. In the new economy, markets, skilled labor, capital, and technology are increasingly concentrated in the OECD countries, with the addition of a few newly industrializing economies and the fundamental addition of China as a potential economic superpower. Beyond that, the incorporation of Eastern Europe and Russia into the core system will provide markets and the required natural resources (drawn from Siberia) for the system to thrive for a long time.
The consequence is that many countries, and many regions of many countries, are being bypassed by the expansion of the global information economy. National, local, and regional societies are shifting from a position of dependent exploitation to structural irrelevance in the new economy. Such development is triggering several processes, all part of the new social structure characteristic of the informational society:
The separation between the dynamic of the global economy and the structure of the informational society is transforming the social fabric of both advanced and dependent countries in a fundamental way. The reintegration of both processes in an articulated historical practice requires a concerted body of institutional action, which does not exist today.
The process of historical transition to the information economy is likely to be dominated by the fundamental disjunction between, on the one hand, a global economy and a worldwide information network and, on the other hand, nationalistic civil societies, communal cultures, and increasingly parochial states.
After twenty years of efforts to describe, analyze, and theorize the “new society,” there is still a great deal of uncertainty about what this society is. The reconstruction of a theoretical paradigm suitable to the new social processes we are observing must start from a critical observation that should have become apparent in the preceding pages of this chapter. Our societies are fundamentally made of flows exchanged through networks of organizations and institutions. By flows I mean purposeful, repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors in organizations and institutions of society. The convergence of social evolution and information technologies has created a new material basis for the performance of the activities processed through the social system. This material basis is so historically specific that it imposes its inherent logic on most social processes, thus essentially conditioning the structure of society.
The determination of these networks of flows over the social structure operates at least at four levels:
Yet, the networks of flows tend to become largely independent of the power holders controlling the nodes of the network. The flows of power are easily transformed into the power of flows. This is a fundamental characteristic of the new society. An obvious example is that of financial markets: once a speculative movement is triggered in the international market, the reserves of the central banks of the wealthiest nations may be gobbled up in a few days while trying to go against the flow. Who are these speculators ? Many people and nobody. There are certainly organizations (actually network) living off the turmoil in the financial markets, but they have no real power by themselves. Their role is to trigger a dynamic of flows that surpasses by far any organization’s (or group of organizations) wealth and power. In some cases, the computers themselves, by the random effect of their programs being triggered at the same time in preventive buying or selling, are the “speculators.” Similar, although less powerful, examples may be found in the world of political images, of intellectual fashion, and of commercial music. In all cases, extremely important social, economic, and cultural consequences follow the formation of turbulences in the space of flows. I am not arguing that social action becomes random. I am arguing that a structural logic dominated by largely uncontrollable flows within and between networks creates the conditions for the unpredictability of the consequences of human action through the reflection of such action in an unseen, uncharted space of flows.
Under such conditions, we could predict a tendency toward the breakdown of the communication pattern between the dominant institutions of society, working along ahistorical, abstract networks of functional flows, and the dominated communities, defending their existence around the principle of irreducible, fundamental, noncommunicable identity. A society made up of the juxtaposition of flows and tribes ceases to be a society. The structural logic of the information age bears the seeds of a new, fundamental barbarianism.
The structural domination of the organizational logic of networks and of the relational logic of flows has substantial consequences for the social structure, consequences that are often considered as indicators of the new informational society. In fact, they are the manifestation of a deeper trend: the emergence of flows as the stuff from which our societies are made. I hypothesize below the main consequences of such a fundamental historical trend:
Politics that does not exist in the media, particularly in television, simply does not exist in today’s democratic politics. To the extent that other forms of political expression are relevant, they are also based on networks of a different kind: local networks or organizational networks, linked to a strong, historically rooted, political basis, such as local chapters of a party or labor union organizations under direct party influence. Indeed, the only political parties that still have a relevant function as parties, different from mere electoral machines, are those with widespread grassroots organizations that provide an adequate ground for a targeted deployment of a media-oriented political strategy (e.g., cheering, crowded political rallies have as their major function the portrayal of the image of popular support for the candidate’s personality and ideas).
The personalization of politics is a fundamental trend in all societies. Because the candidates are symbols, their personalities are scrutinized in the media, and the result of such scrutiny is often decisive for their political fate. Thus, flows of images and information are the critical ingredients of political power. Power does not lie any more along the barrel of a gun but lies, instead, in the editing programs of the television networks’ computers.
Thus, the materiality of networks and flows does create a new social structure at all levels of society. It is this social structure that actually constitutes the new informational society, a society that could be more properly named the society of flows, since flows are made up not only of information but also of all materials of human activity (capital, labor, commodities, images, travelers, changing roles in personal interaction, etc.).
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