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Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 19:35:41 +0200
From: Ken Ducatel <Ken.Ducatelat_private>
The Information Society in Europe:
Work and Life in an Age of Globalization
edited by Ken Ducatel, Juliet Webster, and Werner Herrmann
http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com/
Table of Contents
* Information Infrastructures or Societies?
Ken Ducatel, Juliet Webster, and Werner Herrmann
* Part I: Space, Economy, and the Global Information Society
* Regional Development in the Information Society
James Cornford, Andrew Gillespie, and Ranald Richardson
* The Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Large Firms:
Impacts and Policy Issues
Mark Hepworth and John Ryan
* Small Firms in Europe's Developing Information Society
Mark Hepworth and John Ryan
* Part II: Work and the European Information Society
* New Organizational Forms in the Information Society
Gerhard Bosch, Juliet Webster, and Hans-Jurgen Weissbach
* Today's Second Sex and Tomorrow's First? Women and Work in the
European Information Society
Juliet Webster
* Toward the Learning Labor Market
Ken Ducatel, Hanne Shapiro, Teresa Rees, and Claudia Weinkopf
* Part III: Life in the Information Society
* Health and the Information Society
Jorma Rantanen and Suvi Lehtinen
* Information and Communication Technologies in Distance and
Lifelong Learning
Gill Kirkup and Ann Jones
* Information and Communication Technologies and Everyday Life:
Individual and Social Dimensions
Leslie Haddon and Roger Silverstone
* Computer-Aided Democracy: The Effects of Information and
Communication Technologies on Democracy
Pierre Chambat
* References
Reviews of The Information Society in Europe
Prof. Luc Soete, Maastrict Economic Research Institute on Innovation
and Technology, Maastrict University
"This book illustrates neatly the broadness and pervasiveness of
the concept of Information Society by bringing together a variety
of contributions on social and societal aspects of new information
and communication technologies (ICTs). The flexibility of ICT use
remains a characteristic emphasis of the European debate, which has
been particularly rich in insights applicable to the global context.
This timely volume brings to the forefront the underlying social
and societal choices that face policy makers -- and, for that matter,
businesses -- in this information age."
Prof William H. Dutton, University of Southern California, author of
Society on the Line
"An important collection that demonstrates why European scholars have
taken a leading role in the debate about the social dimensions of the
revolution in information and communication technologies. Looking
beyond the technology of the day, the contributions address enduring
issues of significance to policy and practice in Europe and the
world."
Chapter 1: Information Infrastructures or Societies?
Ken Ducatel, Juliet Webster, and Werner Herrmann
Information Society Policy: A Prehistory
The idea of an information society is hardly new. By the early
1960s Fritz Machlup (1962) had made a serious attempt to map out the
production and distribution of knowledge sectors in the economy of
the United States and to demonstrate their already great significance.
In time, these observations developed into the notion that a
transition was under way in the organizing principles of society from
an industrial to a postindustrial model, and then to an informational
model. Japanese efforts along these lines came as early as the 1960s
(see Masuda 1981; Ito 1980). By the late 1960s and early 1970s, these
ideas were gaining wider currency, especially through the ideas of
Touraine (1969) in France and Bell (1973) and Toffler (1980) in the
United States.
As the 1970s gave way to the early 1980s there was a growing
recognition of the convergence taking place between computing and
communications to form information and communication technologies
(ICTs). On the one hand, the digitization of communications channels
was heralding the possibility of "adding value" to radio, television,
and telephony by offering computerized communications services.
On the other hand, successful large-scale integration of circuits
on silicon chips had created the possibility of a widespread
computerization of society -- the so-called microelectronics
revolution (see Forester 1980).
During this period, a number of influential policy statements and
initiatives were made on this anticipated "ICT revolution," which
can be seen as launching a first wave of information society policies.
In Japan there was the Fifth Generation Computing Initiative, as well
as the Wired Cities and the HDTV programs. In Europe the specter of
the American challenge to European competitiveness in high technology
(Servan-Schreiber 1967) and the rising sun of Japanese high technology
eventually gave birth to European programs to support precompetitive
research capacities. These were launched in the mid-1980s with
support for information technologies (through the ESPRIT Programme)
and subsequently in support of a digital and later a broadband
telecommunications infrastructure (Research in Advanced Communications
for Europe, RACE).
Meanwhile, in France Nora and Minc (1978) launched the term "tele-
matique" (English "telematics") to describe the coming computerization
of communication services and even of society. The French state
telephone authority (DGT) took up Nora and Minc's challenge by
investing massively in telematics, most remarkably in the Teletel
service that by the middle 1980s had already reached mass market
proportions with one in five French households on-line with
connectivity through Minitel terminals (see Berne 1997). Other
countries picked up the challenge. For example, in Denmark the Hybrid
Network Act was passed to stimulate the development of a broadband
infrastructure that would unify television and telecommunications
into a single infrastructure for the future. The Danes also launched
a series of community-level social experiments to try to foster the
take-up of the information services (Cronberg 1997). Likewise, in
Germany, there was a plan for state telecommunications operators to
invest DM 300 billion to provide broadband access to all subscribers
over a twenty-five-year period (see Kubicek and Dutton 1997).
Similar "first wave" information society policies were also present
in the United Kingdom and the United States during the 1980s but
were colored by the rule of liberal politics. In contrast to the
Danish, German, and French accent on public investment and leadership,
the United Kingdom under Thatcher emphasized a market-led approach
to the information society. Government efforts concentrated on
raising awareness of the need to act early to capitalize on the
United Kingdom's productive capacity in computing and software and
to commercialize information services (e.g., ITAP 1983). Public
relations were prominent, and in 1979 a minister for industry and
information technology was appointed, with 1982 being declared the
Year of Information Technology. There was also significant funding
in precompetitive industrial research (such as the Alvey program),
schemes for the use of computers in schools, and even funding for
research into the socioeconomic aspects of ICT (through the PICT
program). But it is hard to argue that an effective information
society was established through these efforts. Rather, the real
ICT item on the policy agenda was liberalization and competition
in telecommunications services, involving both the privatization of
British Telecom and attempts to stimulate a second communications
infrastructure through the digitalization of cable TV systems. The
second of these two initiatives stalled due to the short duration of
franchises offered to operators and restrictions of the carriage of
voice telephony. But the telecommunications liberalization policy
became a prototype for subsequent deregulation efforts around the
world.
The United States, also under conservative political control
throughout most of the 1980s, had a similar emphasis on market-led
development, and partly for this reason there was no overall political
program aimed at the information society. This is not to say there
was no debate and no action. Here also, despite the now obvious
strengths of the United States in computers and communications, there
was a keenly felt threat of a loss of competitiveness in advanced
technologies, especially semiconductor, computer, and peripherals.
For the Americans, though, the challenge emanated from the Far East
and Japan and promoted a great deal of high technology trade disputes
and diplomacy (Tyson 1992). We can see these worries in the tone
as much as the substance of books such as Made in America (Dertouzos,
Lester, and Solow 1989) and the Competitiveness of Nations (Porter
1990). The possible economic and social benefits from the wiring
of society into digital broadband infrastructure were also discussed.
But the idea of a single infrastructure (the hybrid network) was
ruled out because the main policy focus was on liberalization and
competition, following the breakup of AT&T. United States policy
action operated mainly through public-private cooperation in areas
of technology research such as high performance computing and
communication (HPCC) and the semiconductor road mapping exercises of
Sematech.
The Second Wave
It is now generally agreed that the current wave of "information
society" policies was actually launched in the United States by
Senator Al Gore during the 1991-1992 presidential campaign. This time
the wave swept quickly eastward to Europe, with the establishment of
the European Commission Action Plan on the Information Society and
into national programs within Europe and subsequently globally, with
the 1995 Summit on the Global Information Society.
With its U.S. origin, albeit from the Democratic party, it carried the
North American conviction that private sector leadership is the way to
get things done. This is enunciated well in the four principles that
Gore outlined for the Global Information Infrastructures in Buenos
Aries in 1994 (see Gore 1996):
* Private investment and robust competition are the best ways to
create growth.
* Regulation should be flexible, discarding the out-of-date while
remaining true to the underlying ideals of that technology.
* Access should be open.
* Universal services should be guaranteed.
These themes -- competition and business leadership balanced
with accessibility -- were echoed in European Commission documents,
although the terminology shifted. Rather than talk about an
information infrastructure or information superhighways, the documents
introduced the much broader concept of an "information society".
Whether this shift in terminology reflects any substantial change
is debatable. Kubicek and Dutton (1997), for instance, suggest that
from the U.S. perspective, reference to infrastructures and highways
offered a more sympathetic hearing, thus avoiding, perhaps, the taint
of governmental interference.
The European situation is rather different. At that time,
most European governments were still in direct control of
the telecommunication operators and were wedded to traditional
interventionist policies in regard to industrial and technological
affairs. But these were times of ideological change toward a more
liberal political economy and greater political acceptance of market
leadership. Also, on a very pragmatic level, the scope for expensive
interventionist policies had been narrowed by the very tight
constraints on public deficits associated with the convergence
criteria for establishment of a single European currency: the Euro.
However, the tradition of governmental leadership remained. The
recession of the early 1990s had brought significant industrial
restructuring, high unemployment, and general doubt and insecurity
over the future of jobs and welfare. A stress on the softer side
(society) rather than the harder side (infrastructure and highways)
seemed to have political mileage.
Scratch the surface, though, and more similarities than differences
appear between these programs. First, both policy frameworks were
launched on the back of "challenge visions" that emphasized the need
to seize the day or be left behind and, simultaneously, the enormous
potential benefits to be gained by the nation from the information
revolution (IITF 1993; CEC 1994a).
Second, the top issue for both approaches was the promotion of
further reregulation of the telecommunications and media sectors.
In the United States this culminated in the Telecommunications Act
of 1996, which brought to a close the concept of a local monopoly in
telecommunications provision, removal of barriers to market entry by
operators, and relaxation on broadcasting licenses, cross-ownership
and so on. In Europe, the Bangemann Report (Europe and the Global
Information Society), the information society keystone document,
was used to animate the sluggish progress toward communications
liberalization, an agenda that was finally implemented at the start of
1998.
A third similarity lies in the subsidiary topics to be found in the
early statements. Both U.S. and E.U. documents stressed the need
to establish appropriate regimes for intellectual property rights,
privacy, and security. The national information infrastructure (NII)
program also placed strong importance on stimulating technological
development and innovation (not least through a continuation of the
high performance computing and communication program, which Gore had
sponsored in 1988 while still a senator). In parallel, the European
Union effectively rebadged under the banner of the "information
society" much of its fourth research and technological development
framework programs in the areas of computers (the ESPRIT program)
and broadband communications (RACE and ACTS [advanced communications
technologies and services]). This trend has continued to the extent
that by 1999, with the launch of its most recent Fifth Framework
Research Programme, the European Union has now even merged these
activities under the term "information society technologies".
A fourth crucial similarity concerns the benefits of timing. In
retrospect, it is clear that the NII and the information society
initiatives were swept along by the rising tide of public and press
interest in the Internet and the World Wide Web. The growth of the
Internet has been something unique in the history of the information
society but was not fully anticipated in the earlier policy statements
of the second wave. The initial U.S. idea was a vision of high-speed
infrastructures, now rather dated, offering five hundred channels
of interactive television, video on demand, and multimedia. In
this sense, the Gore plan was just a facelift of first-wave European
information society policies, but with the private sector footing the
bill. However, it turns out that the carrier of the second wave has
actually been the commercialization of the already large Internet,
with a supporting cast of innovations in the form of HTML and Web
browsers that make the Web less difficult, more interesting, and
highly graphical.
Finally, despite its "tangible as concrete" name, the NII did include
a social and economic dimension, for instance, in the Telecommunication
and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program, which provided
support for community-level activities (NTIA 1995). However, it
can be argued that, unlike the European information society, these
structures were never a central part of the overall policy activities
(Catinat 1998). By contrast, the European information society
(CEC 1994a) stressed the development of services and usage through
stimulation of content of information flows and applications
(i.e., telework, distance learning, university networks, the use of
telematics by small firms, air and road traffic management, health
care, public administration networks, and urban information services).
Launching the Information Society
The immediate follow-up to the Bangemann Report was the launching of
an action plan including explicit social action lines, including the
setting up of the High Level Expert Group on the Information Society,
for which the chapters in this book were first developed (HLEG 1996,
1997). On the heels of the Gore and Bangemann initiatives, a series
of national-level information society strategies were produced.
In Europe examples include the French Information Autoroutes Report
(Thery 1994), the Danish Information Society 2000 (Ministry of
Research 1994), the U.K. Information Society Initiative (DTI 1996),
and Info2000: Germany's Path to the Information Society (BMWi 1996),
and the Irish Information Society Steering Committee (ISSC 1997).
Meanwhile, in Asia there were antecedents such as Singapore's
Intelligent Island strategy (which actually predated the NII
Agendafor Action by more than one year) and Malaysia's Vision 2020
(dating from 1991). But there were also fast follow-ups in the form
of Taiwan's NII 2005 (in 1994), South Korea's NII 2003 (1994), the
Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in Japan's launch of a high
performance information infrastructure plan (1994), the Philippines's
creation of a national information technology plan, Smart Philippines,
for 2000. Even Vietnam had an IT 2000 plan (1995) and China a series
of Golden Projects known as NII 2020 (see Wang 1997 for an overview of
the Asian initiatives).
Most of these initiatives followed a similar format: establishing
an expert group, producing a policy statement, and attempting to
initiate an action program. There have been wide differences in how
this process was managed (Moore 1998). The U.S. and E.U. model has
external bodies of experts providing advice to the executive, which
then formulates policy. At the national level Sweden, Australia, and
Canada appointed external advisory bodies with the power to directly
develop policies in an affected area. Other countries, such as
Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Japan, and Singapore, have
taken the process into the executive branch, with committees operating
under ministerial (sometimes even prime ministerial) control.
Despite these operational differences there is a high level of
commonality in the outcomes in terms of the definition of the
general problems and issues and the kinds of solutions being offered.
As noted above, core issues were introduced right from the start,
including intellectual property rights, security and privacy, and
decency. These issues continue to feature strongly in information
society debates, as can be seen in recent E.U.-U.S. debates over the
jurisdiction of international data protection rules, and access to
and control over encryption technology (see the discussion in Ducatel
et al. 1999). These debates time and again underline a difference
in approach between the self-regulation philosophy in the United
States versus the tradition of trying to lay down norms in Europe.
Also, and this is a key distinction from the first wave of information
society plans, there was an immediate concern about a possible
polarization of society into so-called information haves and
have-nots. For instance, the U.S. National Telecommunications and
Information Administration (NTIA) early on produced an analysis of
access to rural services (1995, updated in 1998). This was also an
issue that was signaled in the Bangemann Report and strongly taken up
in some of the national-level reports, such as the Danish Information
Society 2000. On one level, the polarization debate reflects the
continuing struggle (still not resolved) to find a new formula for
universal service provision (USP). Needed are new definitions of
both universality and service. They should be written in a way that
keeps faith with the underlying principles and is flexible enough to
respond to rapid technological change and the wide variety of needs
and services that are offered, while recognizing the consequences of
greater competition (i.e., forbidding the cross-subsidy of services).
However, polarization and access issues are more than just USP. They
also raise questions about who gains in the new market-led information
society. To make headway on this on a North-South level was a theme
for the so-called Global Information Society Summit of the G7 in
Brussels during 1995. Relatively little progress seems to have been
made in addressing the issue in the follow-up work on the global
information infrastructure (GII). Rather the most productive follow
up of the GII summit seems have gone into the arena of international
trade, and into the ambit of organizations such as GATT (General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), WTO (World Trade Organization), and
WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) (Catinat 1998).
The list of direct GII follow-up projects is restricted to attempts
to create a resource base for some types of global service and/or
a new impetus to electronic or on-line public services. The
"global" projects included a global marketplace for SMEs (small
and medium-sized enterprises), global health care applications,
andglobal emergency management as well as global interoperability.
The "electronic" projects were electronic libraries, museums, on-line
education, and on-line government.
This listing is useful as it gives a rough guide to the types of
rather limited aspirations of the social aspects of the information
society. Very often, despite the armory of panels and action plans,
most of the ground-level action has been confined to a limited range
of applications of ICTs in the form of small-scale demonstrators and
test beds plus so far mostly unenacted proposals for more far-reaching
changes. This is particularly true in relation to areas such as
on-line education in which the inertia of existing institutional
formats seems very high. There have been many programs. Most
countries have computers-into-schools programs. There are the
so-called Net days (with central sponsorship in both the United States
and Europe) to raise public involvement. National-level resource
centers such as the Center for Technology Supported Learning in
Denmark have been set up to support development and experimentation.
There have also been changes in curriculum to try to introduce ICTs
more centrally into school life. These piecemeal efforts, however,
hardly add up to the revolutionary advances predicted in the challenge
statements of Gore and Bangemann.
Similar accounts can be made of slow progress in other fields of
application such as public administration. Some countries, especially
the United States but also Finland and the Netherlands, have made
outstanding efforts to put government information on-line and create a
more open governmental structure. But mostly the developments are in
providing information instead of introducing new relationships between
the people and the state. In addition, the more ambitious plans
for the electronification of government, the use of electronic data
interchange, data sharing, and electronic filing have moved ahead much
more slowly than many government plans had hoped (Friis 1997)
Actually, the global information infrastructure projects themselves
turn out to be more an attempt to inventorize and thereby consolidate
existing (mainly public sector) telematic applications efforts
than to launch integrated policy initiatives. Moreover, the global
information society remains organized at a national level (even
within Europe). It can be argued the global rhetoric is an attempt
to impose Western values on the rest of the world in order to open up
communications and content markets to U.S. and European operators and
producers (Masuda 1996).
The idea that communications technologies are propelling a convergence
toward some common model of culture is hardly new but has reemerged as
a key feature in the information society debates of the 1990s. We can
see this in the observation that the Internet was and remains almost
entirely a U.S. anglophone environment. Meanwhile, it also runs on
U.S. hardware and software (chips, operating systems, servers, and
routers) and is controlled by a corpus of mainly U.S.-based interests
(e.g., the Internet Engineering Task Force).
Thus, despite the similarities, information society programs at the
national level are often couched in terms that stress the importance
of developing approaches that support national values (see, e.g.,
Friis on the Danish case). In addition, not all countries have
completely bought into the hands-off approach to the development of
the information economy.
Putting the "Social" into the Information Society
Overall, then, the challenge statements from the United States and
the European Union that launched the new wave of information society
activity display an axial tension between the vision of technologically
driven progress and the supposed social and economic gains that will
result from embracing change. Undoubtedly, the references to social
and economic gains are well intentioned, but the inspiration was
fundamentally technological (see Garnham 1997 for a skeptical view of
the previous record and likely outcomes of such technicist policies).
The creation of the European Commission's High Level Expert Group on
the information society, from which this book stems, can be seen as an
attempt to redress this balance. It aimed, as do the chapters in this
volume, to place social considerations in the center of the frame and
to devise social policy responses, which are more than just creative
applications of ICTs to society.
This is not a simple task. The relationship between technological
change and social transformation is now acknowledged to be a complex
one, and the simple notion of technological changes having social
effects, which in turn can be simply controlled by appropriate
policies, has now been shown to be false. In particular, given
that private and public sector organizations alike are under pressure
to reduce their costs by restructuring their activities and the
goods and services that they offer, the ways that ICTs are deployed
tend to reflect these objectives and do not necessarily cause them.
This brings an added complexity to policy making; it is not enough
to develop and implement appropriate technology policies in isolation.
Technology policies and social policies have to be developed in a
complementary way and strive for complementary objectives.
It is necessary, if we want the "society" in information society
to be more than a rhetorical device, to develop a more sophisticated
appreciation of these social issues. To this end, while acknowledging
the compelling rapidity of change in ICTs and their remarkable rates
of diffusion in the past few years, we still have much to learn from
consolidating the experience with previous attempts to introduce new
ICTs. As Cronberg (1997) has argued, there is a tendency to reject
the lessons -- and especially the failures -- of the past because of
the feeling that "this time it really is different". In reality, it
is different every time but also remains much the same. The social
and economic milieu in particular provides a constancy from which even
the greatest technological enthusiast could draw instruction.
The debate needs to be informed so that we can gain from our past
investments and experiments in ICTs. To do this, to take stock of
the existing socioeconomic knowledge about a range of the core social
issues of the information society and to present them together, is the
aim of this book. The chapters in this book can be grouped into three
broad parts, each dealing with a different aspect of the information
society debate.
Part 1 looks at the processes of economic development and job creation
related to the adaptation to and adoption of ICTs. Chapter 2 by James
Cornford, Andrew Gillespie, and Ranald Richardson and Chapters 3-4 by
Mark Hepworth and John Ryan pick up particularly on the geographical
polarization of opportunities for economic growth and job creation
in the information society. With the new wave of information society
interest, the idea that ICTs mean the "death of distance" by shrinking
time and space has experienced a resurgence (Karvonen 1997). In
chapter 2 Cornford, Gillespie, and Richardson challenge this notion,
showing that ICTs clearly affect spatial relations but do not dispense
with regional disparities and may actually accentuate them. Some
regions and cities may become even more favored because they are
firmly ensconced at the head of the global league tables as global
cities. Other regions have to scramble, as Hepworth and Ryan argue
in chapter 3, to attract the investments of global firms, which are
thecarriers of the information society. But this is not easy. The
global information society has had a strong sense of slash-and-burn
to it. Global firms have considerable geographical mobility and seem
to be adopting practices of permanent revolution, with large-scale
downsizing being a feature of the new wave of ICT-led growth.
Meanwhile, a regional information society based on the growth of local
firms is not an easy option. Mark Hepworth and John Ryan, in their
second contribution, chapter 4, show that in terms of the polarization
debate, disadvantages tend to multiply. Less favored regions often
have more small firms that are lagging behind, with an inferior
information infrastructure. These are the indicators of regional
polarization in the information society. Chapters 2-4 all argue
that the treatment for polarization depends crucially on building
up innovative capacity in local institutions, managers, and workers.
Such approaches are crucial both to develop indigenous growth and to
attract and then "embed" global firms in the local economy. Overall,
therefore, investment in socioeconomic networks is a necessary
complement and may actually be more important as a policy instrument
for the information society than investment in the information
networks and applications.
Part 2 is concerned with consequences of the information society for
workers. Here again evidence is provided of the uneven impact and
socially mediated nature of the ICT revolution on different categories
of worker. In chapter 5, Gerhard Bosch, Juliet Webster, and
Hans-Jurgen Weissbach are particularly concerned with developments
in flexible working in the widest sense as they are facilitated and
promoted by the implementation of ICTs. They show how "flexible"
systems of work organization such as teamwork, to work effectively,
imply and must be closely linked to innovations in working hours.
Rigidities in working hours are unhelpful to work systems in which
the tasks being done are handled on a more variable basis; examples,
particularly from Germany, show that flexible work arrangements can
be negotiated that offer advantages to both labor and management.
In this, they are picking up a set of concerns that are at the heart
of much current European social policy thinking on employment and work.
In chapter 6, Juliet Webster considers the particular dynamics of
women's work in the information society. Gender segregation in the
labor force tends to be overlooked in discussions of work in the
information society, yet women workers are often strongly affected
by ICTs. Webster is particularly concerned about the evidence of
increasing dislocation and what has been termed "temporization" of
work, that is, the increasing use of employment contracts that are
casualized (part-time, temporary, and so on). As another dimension
of "polarization," will women in such casualized forms of employment
will be able to take advantage of the potentially positive aspects of
the information society? In other words, how can policy ensure that
the "knowledge society" is a knowledge society for all?
Meanwhile, access to jobs, and especially "good" jobs, increasingly
depends on qualification levels. In chapter 7, Ken Ducatel et
al. point out that even with the growth of new ICTs, the new
skills that are in demand are not simply technical competencies.
Indeed, with high rates of technological change, the skills needed
to work with a specific technology quickly become outdated unless
they are built on a strong platform of cognitive, analytical, and
social-behavioral skills. The implication is that if we want to
give workers good labor market chances and provide an adequate supply
of workers to support the growth of industry, the answer is neither
narrowly technical nor short-term and quick-fix ICT skill courses.
The trends toward "flexibilization," "casualization," and increasing
knowledge intensity treated by these three chapters are three
interlocking trends affecting the workforce of the information
society. "Flexibility with security" is a central concept running
through these chapters. It implies a radically different approach
to work organization from the "hire-and-fire" approach to flexibility.
It implies the need for investment in workers by their employers
irrespective of the types of contract. It was suggested above
that there is a need for a serious commitment to building innovative
capacities to overcome the risks of "have" and "have-not" regions.
This can be extended to the people and particularly the workers,
implying a reorientation of labor market services toward a
long-term aim of providing not just lifelong learning but lifelong
employability.
It is clear that ICTs are implicated in these changes. In each of
these chapters the discussion is careful to show that ICTs are often
conduits of change rather than drivers of change in the workplace.
This is one of the most important messages about the information
society that should be transmitted to policy makers. It implies
that the information society is an expression of the economic, social,
and political drivers underlying it more than the exigencies of the
technologies. These are issues of scope that need responsible policy
decisions; to some extent we will get the information society we
choose.
As noted above, there has been considerable information society policy
interest in the promotion of ICT applications in areas such as health
care, education, services for the elderly, teleworking, and on-line
(or "open") government. Part 3 provides an account of the social
reality in these policy "targets". The four chapters in part 3 tackle
these areas one by one. First, in chapter 8, Jorma Rantanen and Suvi
Lehtinen give a detailed and expert overview of what is known about
health informatics. Their overall message is that the information
society will be safer, cleaner, and healthier. They are also
optimistic that ICT applications in the health area will support
already existing moves toward better (i.e., more seamless) care
services. But they caution against the hope that ICTs in health
will lead to an overall cost reduction in health services delivery.
They argue that, properly implemented, such services can raise quality
and make health services more cost effective, but reaping these
gains requires institutional change, not just bolting telematics
onto existing services. In addition, the use of computer networks
in the health sector raises significant new ethical and legal issues
such as guaranteeing the privacy of patient records, especially
once transborder data sharing takes place between administrations.
Also, in what ways does telemedicine transform the doctor-patient
relationship? Such issues clearly lie beyond the realm of technology
push and require extended negotiation and dialogue among professionals
in social and political circles.
In the area of education there are rather similar worries that
exaggerated expectations about cost savings might be driving on-line
teaching. It is true that ICTs provide greater flexibility as
learning tools (e.g., allowing changes in the timing and location of
learning, new modes of delivery, different forms of engagement with
information, and even the possibility of improving people's ability
to balance work and learning with, for example, family commitments).
However, in chapter 9, Gill Kirkup and Ann Jones remind us that ICTs
are not "magic bullets" that will overcome the traditional problems
of distance learning. They are generally more expensive and complex
to produce, and it is not yet clear whether these new media are
actually more effective educationally. We have a long way to go
to diffuse what is known about good pedagogic practice with ICTs
out to the teaching professions. Although multimedia and hypertext-
based learning materials are very attractive in that they permit
self-pacing, as well as independent and exploratory learning, learners
first of all have to have the ability to undertake self-paced and
independent learning. These questions again point toward a lengthy
process of social and institutional adaptation to the information
society, in which pathways that build on existing experience are
likely to yield better results than, for instance, saturation
strategies with the sole purpose of building the mythical critical
mass.
Kirkup and Jones also make some important points about the role of
social processes in the take-up of on-line learning. They argue that
for the present the ownership and control of ICTs lies in male hands
in many households; one of the starkest examples of this is the gender
bias of the Internet, which they regard as predominantly a globalized
suburb of the male middle classes. As in chapter 6 by Juliet Webster,
the information society emerges as strongly gender differentiated.
This analysis is disturbingly absent from mainstream information
society policies and rhetoric. This theme is also taken up in
chapter 10, in which Leslie Haddon and Roger Silverstone show that
the household is not a "neutral" territory but is actually a contested
space with constant negotiation over domestic labor and the use of
time. The integration of domestic ICTs -- telephones, home computers,
videos, and so on -- into everyday life is a process in which the
significance of the technologies changes, as do the routines of
everyday life and patterns of social interaction.
Again, information society rhetoric and policy consistently fail to
address the fact that the transformation of everyday life is highly
uncertain and socially mediated. It often takes place over an
extended period. For example, the fact that Europe's population
is aging just as we are entering the information society is clearly
a major challenge. Strategies for promoting learning about new
technologies among older people are clearly important. Whether they
are correctly targeted, however, is unclear. For example, in chapter
10, Haddon and Silverstone make an important distinction between
policies relevant to the young elderly, many of whom are very active
and economically comfortable, and those relevant to the older elderly,
who are often on lower incomes. The younger elderly generally acquire
and use new technologies if they can be easily accommodated or seem
relevant to their lives. For the older elderly, the main relevance
of domestic ICTs is in their potential for supporting enhanced care
services. Haddon and Silverstone suggest that the level of acceptance
of ICT devices into the daily routines of the older elderly will be
very low.
Similar distinctions could be constructed for other potential targets
of ICT applications areas such as the disabled. However, it is vital
that different technologies be specifically designed and implemented
with the needs and requirements of different social groups in mind,
if these groups are to gain meaningful access and thus confidence
with the new technologies. People need to be able to exert their
own needs over the technologies -- and to have them met. Given the
very different situations and requirements of different people, it
is unlikely that "one size fits all" approaches to the development
of ICT systems will be effective. The design of the systems, the
way in which they are deployed, and the structure and timing of
their availability can all exclude (or include) various social groups.
The final chapter in the book, chapter 11 by Pierre Chambat,
reinforces much the argumentation above while broadening its scope
to the sphere of governance and political action. Chambat's analysis
is all the more salient given that the emphasis in the new wave of
information society policies on openness and accountability coincides
with attempts to cut back on state-provided services. In the policy
debates, ICTs figure prominently as solutions to both government
transparency and performance. However, as Chambat reminds us, the
technological revolution is part and parcel of wider processes of
liberalization and privatization. We need to bear in mind that the
market leadership -- despite its claims to greater transparency and
accountability -- may erode the European tradition of public service
and equal treatment. ICTs provide accounting tools that can monitor
and measure performance and thus serve as instruments for efficiency
drives and market substitutions for public services. But in many
cases these efficiency gains have been chimerical; and the greater
monitoring of our lives raises political questions in itself. For
example, ICTs can contribute to the undermining of civil society
by partitioning it, privatizing it, and fragmenting our shared
experiences.
It is important not to overdraw arguments about the speed, scale,
and direction of changes that new ICTs will induce. Each chapter
in part 3 emphasizes that social change is slower and less decisive
than it is portrayed by technological pessimists or optimists.
For instance, Haddon and Silverstone stress the considerable time
necessary to become "domesticated". ICTs are accommodated in the
home in an incremental way, as some members of the household accept
the technologies more rapidly and readily than others. Likewise, they
argue that information and communication technologies have uncertain
outcomes because of their "double lives". The same communication
technologies have the potential to connect people or to isolate them.
Arguably, as new technologies are incorporated into the social realm,
new social ties are established to replace the ones that are withering
away -- another lesson for policy.
Possibilities for Policy
The complexity and pervasiveness of the concept of the information
society means that the policy areas involved are very diverse. As
a result, it is often hard to discern a direct relationship between
generalized policy-relevant research and concrete policy actions.
Rather, research tends to contribute to an overall milieu in
which certain policy approaches become increasingly feasible, and
the policy-making process gradually shifts in its direction and
orientation to incorporate new thinking.
It is to be expected, therefore, that the work presented in this
volume will make an indirect contribution to policy thinking on
the information society. But if a single message comes through this
work, it is the necessity of understanding the social embeddedness
of technological change. Social factors should not be viewed as
"barriers to technological change" but as forces shaping technological
development and use.
A recognition of the transformative power of the human and social
relations of technological change underlies the emphasis that many
commentators place on "knowledge and learning" as defining features
of a European model of the information society. Well-educated and
trained people, and people who have opportunities to develop their
abilities and talents, whether they are employees, students, or
citizens in general, are in a much better position to respond in
a positive way to new technologies and to put them to work in their
own best interests. As Bosch, Webster, and Weissbach, as well as
Webster, argue in their chapters, contemporary developments in work
and employment -- and in the technologies that are applied in these
spheres -- could potentially be harnessed to ensure that learning,
expertise development, and knowledge acquisition takes place. The
potential for human development (and consequently economic growth)
is very powerful; we would argue that it is absolutely vital that the
information society be built with this objective. It is vital not
only in terms of Europe's competitive position in the global economy
but also in terms of the human and social sustainability of the
information society it builds. If the information society is to be a
"learning society" in a real sense, as opposed to a wishful rhetoric,
then much more than computer training or multimedia educational
software development is needed. A much more fundamental approach to
our social institutions and social practices is required in order to
handle the social and technological aspects of innovation processes
more holistically and for people to be able to find avenues for
self-development and therefore social development, which are supported
and facilitated by these institutions.
The observation that our institutions, especially our public services,
seem unresponsive to the risks and opportunities of the information
society is surely a particular challenge for policy makers. Yet
public services and public administrations are vast repositories
of information, which makes them potentially major drivers of
the European economy. Much of this potential is locked up because
of unhelpful and rigid structures, departmental divisions, the
constraints of bureaucratic procedures, and even entrenched attitudes.
As a number of European administrations are discovering, addressing
these problems is a process fraught with political difficulties.
Clearly, as Chambat points out in his chapter, it would be wrong to
sweep aside the public service ethos, the commitment to addressing
social inequalities, and the needs of the marginalized in favor of
the mechanisms of the market. Instead, we need to renew our efforts
to find new public service models that are much more service oriented
and much more responsive to real requirements than in the past.
Indeed, policy initiatives to develop locally attuned forms of public
service are necessities if the information society is to be built on
a civilizing vision.
The consistent message that emerges from this collection is the need
for social policy on the information society to privilege a "moral
economy". Up to now the main information society discourse has been
on competitiveness, efficiency, and economic growth, but there is
a growing recognition that such growth has a qualitative as well
as a quantitative dimension. A moral economy can be thought of as
a renewed and updated European social model -- with its emphasis on
social protection, social dialogue, and participation -- but designed
to meet the challenges of the "information society in Europe".
At the same time, we believe that there is a key challenge and role
for Europe in the information society at the level of discourse and
practical leadership. Rather than concentrate on how we can better
develop and apply new technologies, what we really need is to develop
a social model within which ICTs can be developed and applied so that
these new technologies are pressed into the service of what we believe
are essential civilizing social objectives.
If there is an opportunity here for European renewal and development,
we would see it as less about making a quick dash toward an ever
receding technological horizon and more about building a new social
and political vision. Thus, we would agree with most of the authors
of these chapters who take a broadly optimistic view of the potential
for the European information society to be socially progressive.
Undoubtedly, there are fundamental concerns about the future that need
to be addressed, if lessons are to be learned and the best pathways
identified. But the important thing is to build a humanitarian
information society in which the key dynamics are those concerned
with learning, social inclusion, community development, and democratic
participation. Perhaps the best way of achieving this vision is by
giving people the tools (ICT-based tools and more conventional ones)
and the support to build their own future in a productive and creative
European information society.
(c) Copyright 2000 Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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