Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
The argument is that work is increasingly a matter of horizontal rather than
vertical relationships. In the Fordist era most people worked for the company
and edged their way up the career ladder over the years, in return for their loyalty
getting an annual increment and a guaranteed pension at the end of working life.
Today, however, corporations have de-layered corporate hierarchies for reasons
of cost saving (and because ICTs allow them to do this), as well as to improve
competitiveness, but as they have done so they have necessarily empowered
those who guide and initiate innovation (and thereby provide market edge). These
latter are well educated and highly skilled, and not as a rule much concerned
with bureaucratic niceties. They have loyalty not to the company (which anyway
has dismissed much of this in search of efficiency and competitiveness), but to
the project on which they happen to be working. Their identities, moreover, are
much more attuned to the colleagues – who are widely spread geographically –
who work in the same sorts of area. Praise from them is a key motivator, not a
year’s increment on salary or an away day with the company.
Further, in day-to-day operations they rely heavily on networks of colleagues
who may be at a considerable distance apart. Nevertheless, so long as they are
on the ‘web’, they can be brought together expediently for the project. In a world
in which flexibility is a must for competitive advantage, these information
experts who are able to act rapidly and who possess a record of achievement
demonstrated by a series of successful projects are at a premium – though the
company has little to offer them on any long-term basis. If one imagines the work
practices of top-level software engineers, academic researchers or journalists,
then one may readily appreciate this phenomenon. Such people’s top priority is
rarely to a particular company, university or newspaper, but more often to the
esteem of their peers. Their main concern is the piece of software on the go,
the research project, or the story on which they are working, to which end they
routinely draw on the expertise of their own networks. Such employees routinely
reskill themselves, learning from peers and thirsting for the next project, and they
move readily from one project to another. They are, in short, flexible specialists
par excellence.
These ideas of flexible specialisation, with the suggestion of work being
information-intensive and of higher skill levels than hitherto, are understandably
appealing. The notion of a constantly learning worker evokes an image of ‘flexibility’
that has achieved considerable credibility. Still more attractively, one can
recognise the professionalised employee in the cultural industries, eagerly on
the lookout for new ‘ideas’ or ‘styles’ to take up and explore, dealing all the
time with information in a reflexive manner while searching out market niches
by constantly innovating. The writer of self-help books, the travel guide, the
producer contracted to Channel 4, the management consultant are all of this
type. It is possible, as we have seen, to suggest that those who take up such occupations
are driven in ways reminiscent of the Protestant work ethic, monetary
reward being inadequate to motivate these sorts of people (Himanen, 2001).
However, theories of ‘flexible specialisation’ have had to encounter a great
deal of hard-headed criticism. Prominent amongst these are the following. First,
with some of the advocates there is, often in spite of explicit disavowals, a strong
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