Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
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intrude into work relations and inculcate a ‘university’-like ethos in pioneering
areas such as the IT industry.
Scott Lash (2002) locates such trends in the even wider context of a shift
from a ‘logic of manufacture’ to a ‘logic of information’ that heightens unpredictability
and introduces an imperative to live with the ‘disorganisation’ that
accompanies an unstable economy revolving round knowledge-intensive innovation
and a culture that is equally insecure. This amounts to us living in a
‘disinformed information society’, one characterised by upheaval and ephemera,
a lack of fixity in everything that we do, that information at once enables and
undermines.
In such chaotic circumstances work can take one of two forms: either innovation
can be devolved to the shop floor and operatives allowed a larger role in
the process (in the manner of Hirschhorn), or it can bypass the shop floor altogether,
with its functions taken over by ‘professional-managerial workers’ (p. 122)
such as found already in the high-tech and advanced producer and consumer
services. Lash envisages radical alternative societies emerging in this milieu.
There may be ‘dead zones’ of deindustrialisation that fail to adapt to the information
economy and come to be marked by high unemployment while hanging
on to traditional cultures that are ‘tame zones’ in so far as they remain reasonably
orderly, traditional in outlook with some common ways of life. On an
opposite pole Lash perceives ‘live zones’ that thrive economically in knowledgeintensive
and innovative work practices, yet which also subscribe to established
culturally ‘tame zones’ (for example, the conservative habitus of lawyers and
accountants commuting from the shires to the City of London). Yet Lash can also
see ‘live zones’ that are commercially buoyant, being engaged in informational
activities such as fashion, music and media, yet which adopt a radical cultural
outlook, thereby inhabiting a ‘wild zone’ of innovative and challenging lifestyles
(e.g. as found in parts of metropolitan London such as Camden and Islington).
Against this, one might also identify areas of disintegrated and combative culture
in a ‘wild zone’ that is economically unsuccessful, perhaps where low-paid and
insecure jobs are accompanied by a collapse of common values and behaviours.
In this emerging world, whatever the cultural forms that emerge, there can be
little doubt that the best prospects are found in the highly skilled information
occupations that manifest ‘flexible specialisation’.
Web relations
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We may recall Robert Reich’s (1991) work here because its suggestion that
‘symbolic analysts’ have become the key drivers of the economy and organisers
of innovation readily connects with concepts of flexible specialisation. Reich suggests
that ‘symbolic analysts’ – those who do the thinking, analysing and planning
in the information age – rely on and develop ways of working which are best
understood, not as positions within a particular corporate hierarchy, but rather as
situated amid ‘global webs’. This idea has been endorsed by other influential social
scientists, not least Manuel Castells, whom I cover in the following chapter.
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