Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
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a greater role in his or her life, first because consumers must find out about what
is available to consume and, second, because in the individualised present they
are eager to make statements about themselves through their consumption. Both
factors promote information, the former because it concerns advertising and
promotion of goods and services (information to reach the consumer), the latter
because it involves the symbolic dimensions of consumption, people using
objects and relationships to make statements about themselves, thereby generating
more information.
Reichism
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Much of this sort of thinking was drawn together by Robert Reich (1991) in his
book The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism. This work
was important not only because it cogently articulated a new post-Fordist
consensus which took hold in the 1990s, 4 but also because it was written by a
scholar who was soon to serve as Secretary of State for Labor from 1992 to 1996
in the Clinton administration and who was noticeably influential in the then emergent
thinking in the rise of New Labour and ‘Third Way’ politics more generally.
By the end of the millennium Reich’s influence was such that New Labour’s
policies could accurately be described as Reichian. The argument proposed is
that recent developments, especially globalisation, have placed an onus, not so
much on ICTs, as on capabilities of people for information processing, analysis
and distribution.
This intriguing suggestion revolves around Reich’s claim that the ground
rules of economic behaviour have changed. Reich suggests that what was once
good for American corporations was indeed good for the United States since their
production was concentrated inside the country (and hence provided jobs for
Americans), but that globalisation has transformed this satisfactory situation.
Today it is no longer possible to refer with any accuracy to distinct national
economies. Such is the fluidity of capital and production that nowadays ‘the very
idea of an American economy is becoming meaningless, as are the notions of an
American corporation, American capital, American products, and American technology’
(Reich, 1991, p. 8). Now the economy operates irrespective of national
frontiers, held together by what Reich describes as a ‘global web’ of relationships
between, within and even across corporate organisations that are owned by
myriad and dispersed shareholders.
Impelled by globalisation, corporations are vertically disintegrating, undergoing
a delayering of bureaucratic levels. This process has been evidenced in a
host of ‘downsizing’ cases that have stripped middle-management layers from the
‘re-engineered’ corporation. The long-held dogma of sociology, as well as of businesses,
that bureaucratic organisation was a requisite of efficiency since rules and
procedures, combined with a distinct hierarchy of command, were essential for
smooth operation has been undermined. The globalised economy is too fastpaced
to allow for such cumbersome arrangements, and too competitive to
allow the luxury of layers of bureaucracy. The upshot is that these are cut away
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