Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

NETWORK SOCIETY
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undoubtedly ‘information workers’, yet they have been on the rise, according to
Perkin, for over a hundred years. This continuous and long-term growth of informational
labour over the century must lead one to doubt its novelty – and the
argument that places weight on the expansion of the category.
In addition, one might query the novelty of knowledge-intensive industries.
Biotechnology and software engineering excite commentators today, but
there are equally obvious examples of important knowledge businesses in the
past. Petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, electrical engineering and
even banking are industries with roots in the early decades of the twentieth
century, ones which have made a significant contribution to GNP as well as to
employment. It ought to be remembered that developments such as solid-state
physics, nuclear energy, radar, the jet engine, plastics and television are important
industrially (and, indeed, in everyday life), and each has an important knowledge
input, yet all date from at least the inter-war period.
Perkin also states that higher education of itself does not lead to a privileged
position. At least of equal weight is one’s location in the market and, notably, a
profession’s capacity to gain leverage over that market. A look around at the
turbo-capitalism of today suggests that most information workers are subordinate
to the marketplace, far removed from the picture of the powerful brokers envisaged
by Castells. Since the mid-1970s there has been an assault on many
professions (university teachers, architects, researchers, librarians and doctors,
for example), a huge expansion of higher education, and a manifest decline in
the returns on higher educational certification. A great deal of this testifies to the
power not of ‘informational labour’ but of the market system, which – whatever
the intellectual capacities of the employee – appears to be the most decisive
factor. The rise of informational labour appears to have done little if anything to
limit the determining power of capital in the realm of work.
It is worth commenting here on the rapidity with which commentators move
to assert that greater participation in higher education of itself demonstrates the
spread of informational labour. Awkward questions need to be asked as regards
changed standards demanded in an expanded higher education system, as well
as regards the fit between occupations and educational attainment. There are
serious questions to be raised about standards in higher education as participation
rates have burgeoned, and while these are matters of debate (Phillips, 1996)
there can be little doubt that there has been serious inflation of demand for
qualifications from employers even while occupations themselves have not
necessarily been upskilled. For instance, there are signs that a degree is exhibiting
the classic symptoms of a positional good: the more students who achieve a
degree, the less valuable a degree becomes in terms of attaining a prestigious
job, and the more valuable becomes the relative exclusivity of the institution from
which the degree was awarded.
This raises the question – especially pertinent given Castells’s emphasis on
merit in the creation of informational labour – of access to the most prestigious
universities, entry to which opens the way for careers in the highest-level informational
occupations, those found at the hub of informational capitalism. In
Britain the signs are that the most exclusive universities, Oxford and Cambridge,
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