Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
Information infrastructure
Each of the dimensions of globalisation requires and contributes towards an information
infrastructure to cope with the changed stresses and strains of worldwide
operation. That is, as globalisation grew and as it continues, so ways of handling
information and information flows have been put in place. We can identify major
elements of this informational infrastructure:
• The worldwide spread and expansion of services such as banking, finance,
insurance and advertising are essential components of globalisation. Without
these services TNCs would be incapable of operation. Information is, of
course, their business, the key ingredient of their work: information about
markets, customers, regions, economies, risks, investment patterns, taxation
systems and so forth. These services garner information and they also generate
and distribute it, having added value by analysis, timeliness of response or
collation.
• Globalisation requires the construction and, where necessary, enhancement
of computer and communications technologies. In recent years we have seen
the rapid installation and innovation of information technologies – from
facsimile machines to international computer networks – which are a requisite
of co-ordination of global enterprises.
• This information infrastructure has resulted in the growth of information flows
at a quite extraordinary rate. For instance, business magazine Fortune (13
December 1993, p. 37) reported that international telephone connections to
and from the United States grew 500 per cent between 1981 and 1991 (from
500 million to 2.5 billion). By 2002 it had been estimated (Lyman and Varian,
2003) that the world’s telephones (of which there are over 1 billion) were busy
for almost 4,000 billion minutes, meaning that for every person on the planet
there was 10 hours of telecommunication (though of course most traffic is in
the affluent areas and, indeed, the majority of the world’s people will never
get to use a phone in their lives). Elsewhere, there has been an astounding
expansion of financial traffic along the international information highways
(though these are strikingly concentrated in the major cities of the affluent
nations). Exchange rate trading, direct foreign investment patterns, and the
markets in bonds and equities have expanded apace, thereby underlining the
import in global markets of the flows of financial information.
The demise of Fordism?
Globalisation has meant that Fordism is increasingly hard to maintain. How could
things be otherwise when Fordism’s organisational premise – the nation state – is
undermined by the international spread of transnational corporations and the
constant flow of information around and across the globe? Fordism hinged
on the sovereignty of nation states, on governments’ capacity to devise and
implement policies within given territories, on the relative immunity from foreign
74