Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
1
1
1
2
1
1
that of supply a rapid, versatile and sophisticated information network is the sine
qua non of everything.
It follows from these trends that we may observe in the post-Fordist era the
decline of mass production. In place of huge and centralised plant, what emerges
are globally dispersed – but very high-tech – units employing in any one place
only a few hundred people at the most, though worldwide the organising corporation
is likely to have many more locations than before. In metropolitan centres
opportunities for transnational corporations to reorganise internationally have
exacerbated this trend, leading often to the movement of production to offshore
and out-of-town locations, while occupations such as those in banking, insurance
and business services have mushroomed (in Britain they have more than
doubled since the 1970s) since they offer crucial information services in key
urban locations.
What this signals is profound changes in the sorts of job available in countries
such as Britain. The male industrial worker is becoming increasingly
outdated, factory work beginning to take on a museum-like character, replaced
by part-time females on fixed-term contracts in the service sector. Manufacturing
jobs have, since about 1970, been in steady and seemingly irreversible decline,
and it is especially women who have entered the ‘flexible workforce’ (Hakim,
1987). By the 1990s little more than a quarter of all jobs were left in industry,
while services now account for over 70 per cent, where the majority of tasks are
performed by women. Associatedly we have experienced the undermining of
much unionised labour, certainly a collapse in its efficacy when trying to organise
a new type of employee. Furthermore, in many organisations there appears
to be a pattern of downsizing to a core group of permanent employees, and
increased flexibility introduced by drawing on a large pool of peripheral labour
(part-timers, those with insecure tenure). This has been described as the ‘contingency
workforce’ (those employed only when circumstances are favourable – and
dropped as soon as they are not), which has been estimated at 25 per cent of the
US labour market. Within work, the emphasis is increasingly upon the versatile,
information-orientated employee, at the upper levels in managerial groups whose
numbers have burgeoned with restructuring and globalisation, but even lower
down ‘information jobs’ are on the increase in the clerical, sales and secretarial
realms.
The emergence of post-Fordism transforms geographical areas, too, breaking
up regions formerly distinctive in their work, class and political outlooks. The
decline of manufacture and the rise of service occupations have been a story both
of gender shifts and of a transfer of opportunities from the north. The pattern is
more pronounced in the United States, where the ‘rustbelt to sunbelt’ trend is
much observed, but even the UK has seen occupations and firms grow in the
south of the country while other regions have undergone comparative decline.
Accompanying this is a shake-up of political and social attitudes. The mass
industrial workers, their solidaristic unionism and their collectivist presumptions,
have little appeal to the post-Fordist citizen. Instead we have a revitalised enthusiasm
for individualism and the ‘magic of the market’ that replaces the discredited
planning of the post-war years. Historian Kenneth Morgan (1990) goes so far as
81