BUSINESSES IN INFORMATION

AGE
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 Information Age

 Concept was formulated by sociologist Manuel Castells

 Information age; product of information technology

revolution that occurred around 1970s

 Information technology led to creation of network society

“The Information Technology Revolution DID NOT create
the network society. But without Information Technology, the
Network Society would not exist” 2
 Facets of network society

 Information economy: “an economy in which sources of

productivity and competitiveness for firms, regions,
countries, depend, more than ever, on knowledge,
information, and the technology of their processing,
including the technology of management, and the
management of technology”

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 Global economy: “not the same as world economy… it is
an economy whose core, strategically dominant activities
have the potential of working as a unit in real time on a
planetary scale. This is so for financial and currency
markets, advanced business services, technological
innovation, high technology manufacturing, media
communication.”

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 Network enterprise: “a network made either from firms
or segments of firms, or from internal segmentation of
firms…the network enterprise is the specific set of
linkages between different firms or segments, organized
ad hoc for a specific project, and dissolving reforming
after the task is completed, e.g. IBM, Siemens, Toshiba.
This ephemeral unit, The Project, around which a
network of partners is built, is the actual operating unit
of our economy, the one that generates profits or losses,
the one that received rewards or goes bust, and the one
that hires and lays off, via its member organizations.”
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 The transformation of work and employment: “variable impact
of technology on jobs depending on a much broader set of
factors, mainly firms' strategies and governments' policies…new
technologies allowed business to either automate or offshore
production or outsource supplies or to subcontract to smaller
firms or to obtain concessions from labor or all the above. The
development of the network enterprise…translates into
downsizing, subcontracting, and networking of labour, inducing
flexibility of both business and labour, and individualization of
contractual arrangements between management and labour. So,
instead of layoffs what we often have are layoffs followed by
subcontracting of services on an ad hoc, consulting basis, for the
time and task to be performed, without job tenure and without
social benefits provided by the firm” 6
 Social polarization and social exclusion:
“The processes of globalization, business networking,
and individualization of labour weaken social organizations and
institutions that represented protected workers in the
information age, particularly labour unions and the welfare
state. Accordingly, workers are increasingly left to themselves
in their differential relationship to management, and to the
market place…. Skills and education, in a constant redefinition
of these skills, become critical in valorizing or devaluing
people in their work. But even valuable
workers may fall down for reasons of health, age,
gender discrimination, or lack of capacity to 7
adapt to a given task or position.”
 The culture of real virtuality: “…emergence
of a similar pattern of networking, flexibility, and ephemeral
symbolic communication, in a culture organized around electronic
media, including in this communication system the computer-
mediated communication networks…But the new media system is
not characterized by the one-way, undifferentiated messages
through a limited number of channels that constituted the world of
mass media... Media are extraordinarily diverse, and send targeted
messages to specific segments of audiences and to specific moods
of the audiences. They are increasingly inclusive, bridging from
one to another, from network TV to cable or satellite TV, radio,
VCR, musical video, walkman type of devices, connected
throughout the globe, and yet diversified by cultures, constituting 8
a hypertext with extraordinary inclusive capacity”
 Politics:
“ Political marketing is the essential means to win political
competition in democratic politics. In the information age
it involves media advertising, telephone banks, targeted
mailing, image making, image unmaking, image control,
presence in the media, staging of public appearances etc.”

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 Timeless time: “defined by the use of new
information/communication technologies in a relentless
effort to annihilate time, to compress years in seconds,
seconds in split seconds”

 The space of flows: “…new forms of spatial

arrangements under the new technological paradigm”

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 Evolution in digital technologies and their impact on
business, society and governance challenges

 New technologies in data processing have made possible

analysis and combination of vast of amount of
information possible

 Knowledge about individuals available;

 Threat of profiling, security, privacy etc.

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 In general, digital technologies have transformed social,
political and economic life
 Searching for information, staying in touch with friends
and family; social media, proliferation of various video
and audio based calling apps through phones and
computers
 Navigating cities through maps
 Online shopping
 For businesses, digital technologies have created new
possibilities of optimizing work and organizing activities
within organizations (Can you think of recent example?)
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 On the one hand there is rising importance of digital
technologies in social and economic life

 On the other hand, growing focus on data collection and

privacy has made internet a salient issue in public domain

 Increased awareness amongst governments and

corporations over to the governance of the internet and
adjacent technological spaces raising a host of ethical,
political, legal and rights related issues. Examples: threats
of surveillance by state, usage of data for commercial
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purposes by organizations
 Two ways to conceptualize digital transformations:
1) Digitalization
2) Datafication

 Digitalization involves the process of moving or converting

information into digital formats; progression from analog to
digital operations; conversion of paper files and objects to
digital formats that can be copied stored and circulated;
commercial and other financial transactions via digital
systems; advertising and public relations activities through
digital media platforms
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
 Implications of digitalization

 Transformation of production processes, the management of information,

and demands for human resources and capacities.

 Rise of phenomena such as outsourcing, the deterritorialization of

production and the emergence of virtual, amorphous value chains became
possible and advantageous

 Chips and bar codes, and other forms of monitoring and managing
production flows have been central to the digitalization of commerce and
enterprise.

 Information remained a sparse and costly resource, and the extraction of 15

actionable insights remained complicated and labor-intensive
 Datafication: the masses of digital traces left by people
and technologies in online spaces and the proliferation of
advanced tools for the integration, analysis, and
visualization of data patterns for purposes of decision
making and commercialization

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 Implifications for datafication

 Data generate by interactions, user generated content and

other digital activities provide for valuable resources to
companies

 Combined with automated sorting mechanisms, such as

algorithms and artificial intelligence, these massive
streams of digital traces can be used to show important
patterns and inform a growing number of decisions about
consumers, diseases, or criminal activities
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 Overall implications of digitalization and datafication of
businesses and society
 Internet companies and digital platforms shape our views
of the world by managing, editing, and controlling
information in ways that have important consequences
for individuals, organizations, and societies alike
 Processes of digitalization and datafication create novel
conditions for corporate activities, societal governance,
and fundamental issues such as how we understand and
view the world around us.

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 For instance, new forms of capitalism, new modes of
production, the editing of social realities, and emergent
forms of governance

 Some of the issues to be considered

 Questions over internet governance
 Profits made over data economy
 Overall implications for society and responsibility for
businesses

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