Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
accelerates changes in the here and now and promises continuous change and a
consequent need for ongoing adaptation among the workforce. Further, the
extension of telecommunications around the globe means not only that it is easy
to contact friends and relations pretty well anywhere in the world, provided they
are near a phone, an Internet café or a computer terminal, but also that economic
and political strategies can, and indeed must, be developed and instigated with
a sensitivity towards global factors.
Quite how much information and information technologies are causes or
rather correlates of the tremendous changes taking place is a difficult matter to
judge, but there are few dissenters from the view that change is deep-seated, that
it is taking place on a broad front, that it has been accelerating in recent decades,
and that information is an integral part of the process.
Moreover, change is much more than a matter of coming to terms with
events and exigencies. It is easy enough to recollect times that were more challenging
than those we face today. For instance, the uncertainty and upheaval
of the years 1939–45 put anything today in the shade for most people. Yet the
key difference nowadays is surely that changes are not just a matter of encountering
crises of one sort or another, but of almost routine challenges to our ways
of life. Thus after the Second World War nations could reconstruct themselves,
aiming to improve on what went before, but by and large endeavouring to
create a world that was familiar to most people. Factories would be reopened,
former jobs taken up, old habits renewed. The pace and reach of change today
challenges us on all fronts, from the obliteration of once-secure jobs (and occupations)
to reproduction of the species, from confidence in national identity to
alarms about health and safety, from assaults on religious beliefs to questioning
of moral values.
There are numerous attempts to understand the major forms of these
changes, some of which we have already encountered and others that I shall
discuss in later chapters. To some scholars we are amidst a transfer from an industrial
to a post-industrial society, with Daniel Bell and others suggesting it is much
to do with a shift from a manufacturing to a service society; to such as Zygmunt
Bauman it indicates the transition from a modern to a postmodern world; to Scott
Lash and John Urry (1987) it represents a move from organised to disorganised
capitalism; while to Francis Fukuyama (1992) it reveals nothing less than the ‘end
of history’, the triumph of the market economy over a bankrupted collectivist experiment.
Each of these scholars endeavours to explain much the same phenomena,
though with different emphases and, of course, strikingly different interpretations
of their meaning and significance.
In this chapter I want to concentrate on thinkers who may be divided, at
least for analytical reasons, into two interlinked camps, one suggesting that the
way to understand contemporary developments is in terms of a shift from a
Fordist to a post-Fordist (for some neo-Fordist) era, the other arguing that we are
leaving behind a period of mass production and entering one in which flexible
specialisation is predominant. These approaches have been, in my view, among
the most systematic and influential accounts of contemporary social, economic
and political change.
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