Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

NETWORK SOCIETY
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inculcating ‘transferable skills’ in students precisely so that graduates might be
able to offer what appeals to employers: communicative abilities, team working,
problem-solving capability, adaptability, commitment to ‘lifelong learning’, and
so on. It can be no accident that the age participant ratio in higher education is
now in all advanced capitalist countries around 30 per cent and rising. Castells’s
treatment of the theme of informational labour reminds us of meritocracy because
of its insistence that success in the occupational structure requires not (inherited)
economic capital, but informational abilities, most of which are the sorts of thing
students gain from a university education. In so far as employees enter the elite
arena of informational labour they must have the credentials that come from a
university degree (though, for continued success, they will of course require
a track record). Castells endorses a meritocratic principle in so far as he insists
that capitalism today is led by those with informational capital, while possession
of economic capital is no longer sufficient to control the levers of power.
Unavoidably, then, the gates are opened for those who attain academic credentials,
and then continue to build an impressive portfolio. Conversely, they are
closed to those who, no matter how advantaged their origins, are incapable of
achieving the qualifications to be an informational worker.
A correlate of this position is that the stratification system of informational
capitalism is unchallengeable since it is deserved. Reflect on how this contrasts
with the traditional picture of capitalism, where the workers created the wealth
which was then expropriated by the rich not because of any superior qualities of
the owners, but simply because capital ruled and kept the working class subordinate
by economic exigency.
Critique
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Castells’s argument, whatever its meritocratic implications, presents several difficulties.
Most striking is its familiarity, and therein are grounds for suspecting the
novelty of the substantive phenomena on which it is based. Castells’s emphasis
on the transformative capacities and characteristics of informational labour recalls
a host of earlier claims that the world was changing because of the emergence of
‘experts’ of one sort or another. André Gorz (1976), Serge Mallet (1975), Kenneth
Galbraith (1972), Daniel Bell (1973) and, to go back even further, Henri Saint-
Simon (Taylor 1976), each had their own emphases when it came to describing
the features of the educated in society. Some stressed their technical skills, others
their cognitive capabilities, and still others their formal education. But at root they
present the same argument: educated elites of one sort or another are the key
players in society. Such positions are unavoidably technocratic to a greater or
lesser degree. They hinge on the presupposition that either or both the division
of labour and technology carry with them an inevitable hierarchy of power and
esteem, resulting in a ‘natural’ form of inequality that is supra-social although of
inordinate social consequence (Webster and Robins, 1986, pp. 49–73). Perhaps
this is so, but there is much evidence of continued inequality, where those with
the most privileged origins continue to dominate the privileged destinations,
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