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For four decades now, information and communication technologies have been seen as principal drivers of socio-economic change. Recent developments in the OInformation SocietyO have raised concerns about the effects of these technologies on the everyday lives of citizens. This volume examines a wide range of issues at stake in the European Union, from employment and the labor market, to the domestication of technologies in households, to larger implications for political processes and democracy. Extending comparisons to other industrialized countries, it demonstrates that the Information Society is far too diverse and rich to be typified in simplistic dichotomies such as information OhavesO and Ohave notsO and that simple upbeat or pessimistic responses to the new technologies are surely false messengers for the future. This book helps broaden and inform communication technology debates worldwide and will be of interest to academics, students, industrialists, policymakers, and anyone who wishes to better understand the impacts of the new Information Society in Europe and beyond.
List of contents
Chapter 1 Information Infrastructures or Societies? Part 2 Part I: Space, Economy, and the Global Information Society Chapter 3 Regional Development in the Information Society Chapter 4 The Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Large Firms: Impacts and Policy Issues Chapter 5 Small Firms in Europe's Developing Information Society Part 6 Part II: Work and the European Information Society Chapter 7 New Organizational Forms in the Information Society Chapter 8 Today's Second Sex and Tomorrow's First? Women and Work in the European Information Society Chapter 9 Toward the Learning Labor Market Part 10 Part III: Life in the Information Society Chapter 11 Health and the Information Society Chapter 12 Information and Communication Technologies in Distance and Lifelong Learning Chapter 13 Information and Communication Technologies and Everyday Life: Individual and Social Dimensions Chapter 14 Computer-Aided Democracy: The Effects of Information and Communication Technologies on Democracy Part 15 References
About the author
Ken Ducatel is currently seconded to the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Sevilla, Spain, from his post as senior lecturer in the Management of New Technology at PREST, the University of Manchester, UK. Juliet Webster is a research fellow in the employment research unit at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Werner Herrmann is unit head in the directorate general for education and culture of the European Commission, Brussels, Belgium, and visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
