Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

NETWORK SOCIETY
so much so that any unqualified acceptance of meritocratic assertions must be
questioned (Heath et al., 2005).
A second difficulty is that Castells’s concept of informational labour is extraordinarily
multidimensional. By turns he emphasises education, communicative
skills, organisational abilities and scientific knowledge, in this way lumping
together a wide range of disparate activities and capacities under one blanket
designation. At times it seems that Castells is saying little more than that
dispersed activities require people with organisational skills or management
training to co-ordinate them, or that organisations tend to be headed by actors
who possess communicative abilities. A host of thinkers have long since said
much the same thing. Consider Robert Michels’s ([1915] 1959) classic Political
Parties, in which the qualities of oligarchic leaders appear to be much like those
of Castells’s informational labour: organisational knowledge, media capabilities,
oratorical skills and the rest.
Castells’s catholic definition of informational labour leaves the term short of
analytic power. At one and the same time he can describe as informational labour
those possessing technical knowledge sufficient to use ICTs with ease; those with
scientific knowledge such that theoretic principles are embodied in the brains
of educated actors; and management as a generic category, embodying those
qualities which facilitate organisation of institutional matters, writing skills and a
capacity for strategic planning. There is surely a host of differences between
stockbrokers working in the City and a water engineer maintaining reservoirs in
Cumbria, yet to Castells they are both informational labour. Similarly, the journalist
on a daily newspaper is to Castells an informational worker in much the
same way as is the surgeon in a hospital. But all that these people may share is
a high level of educational attainment, and no amount of labelling can merge
them into a homogeneous group. Indeed, one can with just as much credibility
argue that the jobbing carpenter, perhaps self-employed, belongs to the same
informational labour category as the manager of an import–export business. Both
need to communicate effectively, analyse, calculate and co-ordinate their activities.
So elastic is Castells’s notion of informational labour that it stretches far
enough to encompass just about any group of people in even minor leadership
roles, even in relation to classically ‘proletarian’ organisations such as in trade
unions and working-class parties.
The historical development of informational labour
Accepting for the moment that there is an increased representation of informational
labour in the workforce, one may ask questions of its novelty, its size and
its significance. Historian Harold Perkin’s book The Rise of Professional Society
(1989) is a useful source, since it maps the rise to prominence of professional
occupations not, as with Castells, in the recent past, but over the past century.
The history of England since at least 1880, argues Perkin, may be understood
as the emergence of ‘professional society’ that claims its ascendancy especially
by virtue of ‘human capital created by education’ (p. 2). Professionals are
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