Actas da - Xunta de Galicia

Language planning and the information society
billion, Microsoft has a market capitalisation of $400billion and assets of
$30billion! People become the key to value. There is a reversal of the industrial
hierarchy which consisted of moneyideaspeople to a new value hierarchy
involving peopleideasmoney. Venture capital now involves money chasing
people who constitute the knowledge economy. The new production system
relies on a combination of strategic alliances and ad hoc co-operation projects
between corporations, decentralised units of each major corporation, and
networks of SMEs connecting among themselves and with large corporations or
networks of corporations. Producer driven commodity chains, and buyer driven
commodity chains are at the heart of these developments. For the firm to
operate in such a variable geometry of production and distribution, a highly
flexible form of management is required, one that is dependent on the flexibility
of the firm itself and on the access to communication and production
technologies suited to such flexibility.
This new global economic system is highly exclusionary, highly dynamic and
displays highly unstable boundaries. While dominant segments of all state
economies are linked into the global web, elements of countries, regions,
economic sectors and local societies are disconnected from the processes of
accumulation and consumption that characterises the informational/global
economy. Of course, it is impossible for these marginal sectors to lie outside of
the system, but their social and economic logic is based upon mechanisms
clearly different from those of the informational economy. All economic and
social processes do relate to the structurally dominant logic of such an
economy. This is the point of articulation of the Old and the New Economy.
The global economy generates its own, new, international division of labour.
The global economy emerging from informational-based production and
competition is characterised by its inter-dependence, its asymmetry, its
regionalisation, the increasing diversification within each region, its selective
inclusiveness, its exclusionary segmentation. The economy is distinctively
asymmetrical, involving a variety of centres and peripheries rather than a
simplistic typological distinction between a centre, semi-periphery and a
periphery. The association between the new competitive paradigm based on
technological capacity and an induced interdependency in the new global
economy reinforces dependency in an asymmetrical relationship, thereby
reinforcing patterns of domination created by previous forms of dependency
throughout history. Entire countries around the world, and large segments of the
population everywhere, are becoming irrelevant (from the perspective of
dominant economic interests) in the new pattern of international division of
labour, and thus they are being socially excluded. On the other hand this is no
longer a context wherein everything is determined by reference to the state.
Even marginalised economies have small segments of their directional functions
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