Who identified information society as post

Restructuring International Climate Negotiation

The western developed countries have been moving forward to the postindustrial society, together with the economic crisis, the increasing speed of energy demand slowdown after it came close to the peak, and in recent years the total amount has declined. In 2000–2010, the total annual energy consumption of North America, Europe, and the CIS increased by 0.2%, well below the world average of 2.67% and the Asia-Pacific of 6.34% [12]. In 2005–2015, total energy consumption in North America, Europe, and the Commonwealth of Independent States increased by 0.26% annually, with an average growth of 1.85% in the world and 4.02% in Asia-Pacific region in the same period. In developing countries, energy demand has increased dramatically as a result of accelerated industrialization, population increase, and economic growth. In 1999–2009, the growth of energy consumption in developing countries was 72.9%, accounting for 31.9%–44.7% of the world in total. China’s oil consumption increases 1.7 times more than that in 2005–15.

According to BP’s forecast, in 2010–2030, the developing country’s primary energy consumption will have almost stopped growing (an average annual growth of just 0.2%), with the world’s average growth rate of 1.6%. The non-OECD countries have an average annual growth rate of 2.7%, which will account for 54%–65% of the world total consumption. Asia-Pacific Region becomes the center area of global energy demand growth. The International Energy Agency forecasts that Asia’s non-OECD country’s oil imports will rise from 50% in 2010 to 80% in 2035. Exxon Mobil predicts that by 2040, Asia-Pacific energy demand will account for 43% of the world’s energy demand. BP forecasts that India’s energy demand growth will account for 53% of global growth by 2030, and India will overtake Japan as the world’s third-largest oil importer by 2020.

In the 1990s, emission by the developing countries was less than 30% of the world total emission, and in terms of emission and emission reduction potential, the developed countries accounted for an absolute majority, so it is the global consensus for the developed countries to take the main responsibility for emission reduction and provide financial support for developing countries, with the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” as the keynote of international climate negotiations at that time. After more than 20 years, there have been great changes in greenhouse gas emission, emission reduction capacity, and potential and economic strength in the world. The growth of energy consumption in the emerging markets, especially in the Asia-Pacific region has continued to increase greenhouse gases, while the emission of the western developed countries has declined significantly under the influence of economic structure upgrading and financial crisis.

At present, the total emission of developed and developing countries is basically equivalent, and the overall emission of developing countries will surpass those of developed countries in the future. It is predicted that carbon emission of the developing countries will reach more than 70% of global emission by 2050. This rise in greenhouse gas emission has led to significant changes in the status of developed and developing countries in international climate negotiations, especially developing countries, where carbon emission has been growing rapidly and gradually, become the focus of global emission reduction. Since Kyoto Protocol, three-legged climate negotiation structure shaped by the umbrella group led by EU and the United States, and the “Group 77 plus China” has been strongly impacted, with the main contradictions and the conflicts gradually transferred from the developing countries with the developed countries to the more-mission countries with less-emission countries. In international climate negotiations, the challenges are intensified for the newly emerging markets, especially, the Asia-Pacific countries in increasingly passive status.

The contradiction between more-emission and less-emission countries has been highlighted, which indicates that global climate negotiation will gradually transit from “the north–south pattern” to “the pattern of large–small emission country.” The United States first put forward the division of big and small emission countries and actively promoted the concept of “emission reduction in big emission countries” in various occasions, and gained support from the European Union and some other countries. This division is based on emissions, emission reduction capacity, and potential, which aims, in essence, to highlight the responsibilities of “advanced developing countries” such as China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. Prior to the Copenhagen conference, the United States proposed the concept of “E8” (eight big emission countries), including China, India, the United States, Japan, and so on. The EU has positioned America and the developing world as big emitters that need to quantify their emission, that is, the so-called “three large emitters” (America, China, and India). After the Durban conference, Europe and the United States further emphasize that the way in the past, in which the countries taking the burden of emission reduction is divided into the poor and rich, should gradually be replaced by the division of large and small emission countries.

From post-industrial to knowledge societies

Research into the changing nature of the US economy in the postwar period identified an increase in knowledge work – those occupations which deal explicitly with the production, processing or manipulation of information (Machlup 1962). This shift in the economic activity of many advanced nations has been described as ‘the coming of post-industrial society’ (Bell 1973). Bell’s assertion was that this change was a significant transformation in the nature of society, that the raw driving force of the post-industrial society was no longer energy, as it had been during the industrial period, but information.

The work of researchers such as Machlup and Bell has provided the foundations for the theory of the Information Society; the idea that we have moved into a new form of social organisation which is based around the production, processing and manipulation of information as central activities. The proliferation and ubiquity of networked information and communication technologies are significant factors in conceptualising the Information Society. Manuel Castells, a prominent proponent of the theory, prefers the term ‘the network society’ (Castells 1996). While there is significant debate in academic circles as to the validity of various conceptualisations of the Information Society (Webster 1995; Robins and Webster 1999), the notion that information, knowledge and the tools to enable their possession, manipulation and communication are of heightened significance has permeated modern thought and policy. For anyone living and working in one of the modern world’s advanced nations it would be hard to deny the significance of information and technology in one’s daily life, although their ubiquity may conceal their very presence and impact.

The terminology has changed over the past three decades; from post-industrial or information society to networked or knowledge society, with similar descriptions of the economy – knowledge, new and even the weightless economy. What are the features of this networked, information intensive society? With her conception of the ‘informated organisation’ Soshana Zuboff describes the impact of this social and economic environment on business corporations, yet her comments might be applied across all organisations:

The informated organisation is a learning institution, and one of its principal purposes is the expansion of knowledge – not knowledge for its own sake (as in academic pursuit), but knowledge that comes to reside at the core of what it means to be productive. […] To put it simply, learning is the new form of labor (1988, p.395).

In the post-industrial society that Bell and others describe, education, skills and professional accreditation are important determinants of social success. Castells emphasises changes in our perceptions of time and space, the globalising of our outlook that is encouraged by the speed at which flows of information collapse geographical distance. John Urry (2000) tries to encapsulate this complex global flow by talking about ‘mobilities’ – of people, commercial products, information, images and technologies. What is common to these accounts is the idea of change that is rapid, constant and intense.

II The Post-Industrial “Information” Society

Bell identified major trends in what he called the “coming” post-industrial society, focusing on the United States as the exemplary case. The principal trends he tied to the development of an information society included the growth of employment in information-related work; the rise of business and industry tied to the production, transmission, and analysis of information; and the increasing centrality to decision making of technologists, that is, managers and professionals skilled in the use of information for planning and analysis (Table I).

Table I. Trends in the Development of an Information Society

1. The growth of employment in information-related work;2. The rise of business and industry tied to the production, transmission, and analysis of information, including theoretical knowledge, and the systematic organization of basic research programs and scientific activities—the codification of knowledge—to support social and technical innovation;3. The increasing centrality to decision making of technologists—managers and professionals skilled in the use of “intellectual technologies” such as modeling, simulation, and decision support systems for planning and analysis.

Source: Adapted from D. Bell (1999), The coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. Basic books, New York; and W. H. Dutton (1999), Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age, by permission of Oxford University Press.

The most significant trend has been the shift in the majority of the labor force from agriculture (the primary sector) and manufacturing (the secondary sector) to services (the tertiary sector). Growth in information work, primarily white-collar occupations, has contributed to growth in service sectors. Information work includes a broad array of jobs involved with creating, using, distributing, or otherwise working with data, information, or knowledge. Therefore, information work can encompass a wide range of jobs, from computer programmers and software engineers to teachers and researchers. In addition to Machlup, Marc Porat and others have tried to define information work and measure trends, generating debates over issues such as whether or not government employees are “information workers” because they essentially process information.

New information industries, such as the providers of online data and communication services, account for some of this growth, but information work has also become more central to every sector of the economy, including agriculture and manufacturing, as more work within these sectors involves the use of networks and other ICTs. In this respect, the occupational shifts associated with the information society do not necessarily imply a decline in the relevance of primary or secondary sectors to local, national, or global economies, as some critics have argued; rather, they may imply a diminishing need for labor within these sectors as computing, telecommunications, and management science techniques are used to redesign the way in which work is accomplished. Bell himself emphasized the point that information infrastructures overlay, rather than substitute for, existing infrastructures of eras based on agricultural or industrial economies.

A second trend identified in post-industrial information societies is the increasing importance to the management of social and economic institutions of knowledge, including theoretical knowledge and methodological techniques, and the codification of that knowledge. Bell posited that central problems of the post-industrial era would revolve around knowledge and techniques such as systems theory, operations research, modeling, and simulation that are viewed as critical to forecasting, planning, and managing complex organizations and systems. Bell referred to such systems as “intellectual technologies,” while others have defined the convergence of computing, telecommunications, and management science techniques as “information technology.”

ITs, like expert systems or simulation software, codify knowledge logically and systematically. It is this codification of knowledge that Bell saw as new to the emerging information society, separating it from the use of information during earlier eras. According to Bell, the complexity and scale of emerging social and economic systems requires systematic forecasting and foresight rather than a previously trusted reliance on common sense or reasoning based on surveys and experiments. Intellectual technologies are required to manage increases in scale and complexity at the same time that they contribute to these increases in this potentially virtuous cycle.

A third set of trends involves power shifts, particularly the growing prominence of a professional and managerial class—the knowledge workers. These are the individuals who have the understanding and know-how to work with knowledge, information systems, simulations, and related intellectual technologies. They will become increasingly vital to decision-making processes in situations of growing complexity. Thus, the relative power of experts should rise with the emergence of an information society and with its greater dependence on intellectual technologies.

2.36.7 Summary

Clinical psychology has changed noticeably since the 1970s. Post-World War II shifts to a postindustrial society, in which the economy was based largely on the provision of services and an increased dependence on scientific and technical knowledge, brought with it an explosion of opportunities for professional psychology (Howard et al., 1986). The numbers of graduates have grown, tripling between 1975 and 1995 from 20 000 to almost 70 000. Recognizing opportunity, women flocked to psychology. Schools of professional psychology have been established that award a doctor of psychology (Psy.D.) rather than the Ph.D.

Primary employment shifted from organizational or institutional settings to private practice, nudged along by legal changes, increasing acceptance of psychological services and favorable reimbursement policies, and the psychologist was located most often in urban areas, near concentrations of population necessary to support a practice.

Questions about imbalances between supply and demand can be answered a number of ways. If one maintains a fairly limited view of what constitutes practice), then there appears to be an overabundance of practitioners and the supply is greater than the demand. This has negative consequences for the full employment of clinical psychologists. Indeed, data indicate that shifts in the health care delivery system in the USA have had negative impacts on health service providers in independent practice who must try to develop new niches.

Additionally, it is important that organized psychology takes some time to address the master's issue in a reasoned and grounded manner. Perhaps gathering data on the actual content of training at both levels would be a start. Revisiting the frequently mentioned rift between the science and practice of psychology is a needed exercise.

As many have argued, professional psychology must explore alternatives and expand its understanding of what constitutes an appropriate scope of practice. This shift from an “illness” model to a prevention model from a largely passive and reactive stance to one that is positive, proactive and in control—offers many new opportunities for professional psychology. Supply does not exceed demand and unemployment remains low. Above all, the benefits of such a shift extend beyond psychology, to society and individuals, by identifying healthy behaviors and the ways to practice those behaviors.

Although the goal of adopting a prevention approach has been discussed many times and is, from all appearances, a welcome outcome, a critical stumbling block remains. That is that the majority of the education and training systems in the USA have not begun to revise their training to meet the needs of a changing system. As a consequence, students in the health service provider subfields are not learning the knowledge and skills necessary to function effectively in the evolving health care system. The next challenge to reaching the goal of a prevention or human services model is to work with the education and training systems in psychology to design curriculum to meet this need.

Collegiality and Organizational Culture

Burgan, basing her argument on Drucker's concept of the place of ‘knowledge workers’ in the postindustrial society organization, suggests that:

Sophisticated, independent minded and highly trained workers require modes of participation within organisations if the benefits of their initiative and imagination are to be realised. Further, the complexity of the organisations requires more rather than less discussion from within … Thus decisions that seem right in the short run may never be assessed in the light of long range developments. (Burgan, 2006)

An organizational study of Bletchley Park, the wartime base for ‘Enigma’ which was crucial to winning World War II concludes, contradicting the argument that it was ‘anarchic and amateurish,’ that:

whilst the multiple lines of command and employing institutions and the highly compartmentalised organisation were in some sense problems, they gave rise to meritocratic, problem solving groups with a strong sense of group identification. Intriguingly, Bletchley Park seems to conform to many of the tenets of what are nowadays called ‘knowledge intensive’ or ‘post-bureaucratic organisations’. (Grey and Sturdy, 2007)

This could just as easily be a description of a highly ranked twenty-first century university.

If managerialism is ineffective in managing institutions whose core business is teaching and research, where creativity and innovation are at a premium, does collegiality offer an alternative? The answer lies in the organizational culture of the particular university. In European countries where universities have operated as part of state bureaucracies, such as France and Spain, collegiality is often a force for conservatism and resistance to change. However, in universities which recognize the need to compete for talent, research rewards, and for the best students, management which combines the virtues of collegiality and the politics of consent with the disciplines of timeliness in decision making can create an organizational culture that is true to the institution's key functions. Clark, for example, sees no contradiction between collegiality and entrepreneurialism, and indeed would argue from his case studies that university transformation will occur only when “managerial and faculty values become intertwined and then expressed in daily operating procedures” (Clark, 1998). In modern conditions, however, senates/academic boards and governing bodies meet too infrequently and are usually too large and too inexpert to manage institutions effectively. Many institutions have therefore created what Clark has called “a strengthened steering core”; this may either be a senior management team – that is, a group of full-time managers answerable to the chief executive (common in universities which have gone down the managerialist route) – or a body comprising both academics and administrators which is constitutionally answerable to senate and the governing body. A critical element in this latter model is whether the deans are members of the group; if they are, academic management becomes a central concern and the deans have the task of both reflecting faculty opinion to the centre and representing central decisions to their faculties; if they are not, the group's decisions tend to become more centrist and managerial, and less academic, and the deans tend to become merely advocates for their faculties against central management, rather than key participants in institutional policymaking. The interrelationships between such a steering group and the senate and the governing body on the one hand, and the faculties and/or academic departments, on the other, will define the organizational culture of the institution.

Where does the vice-chancellor/chief executive's role sit in this new context of university management? Leadership can be expressed in various styles, but Collins, examining a group of companies which had radically improved their performance found that their chief executives were not charismatic leaders in the conventional sense and had no public profile at all (Collins, 2001). Goodall has found that: “The higher the global ranking of a university the more likely it is that the citations of its president will also be high … better universities appoint better researchers to lead them” (Goodall, 2006). This ensures that such presidents possess what Ramsden sees as a key university leadership skill: “an understanding of how academics work and an ability to enter into their world” (Ramsden, 1998). Leadership in collegially managed universities will be distributed and not concentrated in a single person and the task of a vice-chancellor will be to build robust structures and strong teams not to lead the charge (Shattock, 2003b). “It's about listening, then deciding and then leading forward” and not about managerial direction and confrontation (Midgley and Macleod, 2003). Indeed, the ideal is perhaps summed up in the Chinese Taoist saying:

The wicked leader is he who the people despise.

The good leader is he who the people revere.

The great leader is he who the people say, ‘We did it ourselves’. (Lao Zhi, quoted in Yihong, 2004)

Kogan and Hanney were equivocal about how far managerialism had become the dominant culture in UK universities but quoted one system leader as saying that “scholarly values are being to some extent suppressed in favour of business attitudes and criteria and … if we're not careful, that will mean the downfall of something that is rather precious” (Kogan and Hanney, 2000). Marginson and Considine writing about the Australian scene were more critical:

In recent years there has been a concentration of decision-making at the point of institutional management and leadership. Certain decisions once made by national or state governments, about research deployment, for example, have been transferred to the universities themselves. Other decisions once made by academic units are now determined from above by professional managers and technicians. Many see this concentration of nodal powers as overdue, as essential to the effective running of universities in the manner of government departments or business firms. Others see it as the primary cause of what they perceive as a crisis of university purposes and values. (Marginson and Considine, 2000c)

There can be little objection to the idea that, in the modern age, universities must be managed but by whom and in what manner are deeply contested questions. Managerialism, if it is defined as top-down nonconsensual management, is not an effective approach to running universities but collegiality without a corporate commitment to academic and other forms of success is not a reliable substitute.

6.1 The Information Age Thesis and its Critics

The American sociologist Daniel Bell wrote a seminal work on the information society, which he first called the ‘post-industrial society’ (Bell 1999). He said information would be the key economic resource in this new era—not raw materials, or financial capital as in earlier agricultural and industrial societies. Citing the US economy as an exemplary case, Bell identified major trends in the development of an information society (see Information Society).

The most significant trend towards an information society was the shift in the majority of the labor force from agriculture (the primary sector) and manufacturing (the secondary sector) to services (the tertiary sector), largely through the growth of ‘information work,’ defined to include a broad array of jobs related to the creation, transmission, and processing of information, ranging from programmers and software engineers, to teachers and researchers. Another trend has been the increasing importance of knowledge and its codification to the management of social and economic institutions. A third set of information society trends involved power shifts, particularly the growing prominence of a knowledge elite, which forms a professional and managerial class who understand and know how to work with data, knowledge, information systems, simulation, and related analytical techniques.

Changes in work, technology, and power posited by this thesis have all been challenged (Freeman 1996). Yet conceptions of the information society have increasingly defined the public's understanding of social and economic change tied to the computer and related ICTs. Public and corporate policies and academic institutions and journals have been built on the concept of information as a new strategic resource. However, this focus can mislead policy and practice, particularly by the way it has substantially shifted attention to the information sector and away from other parts of the economy.

More generally, the identification of information as the key central resource of the economy has also been widely questioned (Dutton 1999). For example, information has a highly variable currency: it is not always wanted or valued. As a resource, information can lose its value, such as in the case of a day-old newspaper, or retain its value after repeated use, as with a literary classic. If defined narrowly in the sense of being about ‘facts,’ the term ‘information’ becomes far too limiting as a depiction of the social role of ICTs. But if defined very broadly, for instance, as anything that ‘reduces uncertainty,’ then information seems to be so all encompassing that it becomes virtually meaningless.

Moreover, information can create, rather than reduce uncertainty. For example, those more informed about a topic are often less certain about its properties than many who are less informed. There is no linear relationship between information and certainty, but rather what MacKenzie (1999) has called a ‘certainty trough.’ And information is not a new resource. It has been important in every sector of the economy throughout history. Popular conceptions of the ‘information society’—like the virtual society, or the cyberculture—capture the social significance of the ICT revolution (see Information Society). While these concepts emphasize the increasing centrality of ICTs to society, they fail to provide insights about the role of computers and related ICTs in social change. Moreover, if taken literally, many prevailing conceptions of the information society are misleading. They suggest that information is a new economic and social resource, when there is nothing new about the importance of information (Castells 2000). What is new is how you get access to information, but also to people, to services, and to technology itself (Dutton 1999).

4 Accommodation and Persistence of the Concept

The successful emergence of other general concepts for referring to advanced societies in the most general terms (for instance ‘post-industrial societies’) either relegated or, in some cases, even drove out the use of the term ‘mass society’ from its frequent use by the mid-1970s. It did not disappear, however. The mass society conception was anything but a fashion, as its credentials in social philosophy, political theory, and the rigorous critique of civilization demonstrate. The predominant tendency, from the 1980s till the first years of the twenty-first century has seen the mass society notion finding accommodation within a number of other general descriptive concepts (and corresponding interpretations). Thus, along with such concepts as ‘post-industrial societies,’ we find ‘post-capitalist’ societies, ‘corporate’ societies, ‘consumer’ societies, ‘information’ societies, and several others.

These expressions are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they refer to different facets or dimensions of the same highly complex phenomenon. To give one example, the widespread interest in the development of corporatism, neocorporatism, and the so-called ‘corporate societies’ in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated that theories and interpretations produced by students of these phenomena were often highly compatible with the mass society theory. The latter's emphasis on administrative control, the rise of large transnational corporations, and anonymous social forces seemed to complement theories of corporatism.

The situation at the turn of the twenty-first century seems to indicate a certain decline, although a number of examples can be produced to demonstrate its persistence. Of all its several branches, the concept, research field, and theories of mass culture and the mass media have not lost—the contrary seems to be the case—any ground at all, either in the West or elsewhere.

More recent general interpretations, notoriously the ‘globalization’ literature, are not only compatible with the classical tenets of the mass society interpretation but are partly, it can be easily claimed, extensions of it. The notion of mass society always included a view of the expansion, interdependence, and general globalization of the supposed mass characteristics of late industrial Western civilization. The idea of world convergence of mass societies was explicitly built into it.

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