The Great Disruption

Zusatztext Andrew Ferguson The Weekly Standard The Great Disruption is a learned and impressive work! ranging easily across disciplines! combining fact and argument in subtle and unexpected ways. Informationen zum Autor Francis Fukuyama is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, and Mosbacher DIrector of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Dr. Fukuyama has written about questions concerning governance, democratization, and international political economy. His book The End of History and the Last Man has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent books are The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, and Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy . Klappentext In this provocative bestseller, Fukuyama examines the profound societal transformations of the last few decades and asserts that they have contributed to the breakdown of communities, the rise of violent crime, and the decline of morality. 24 graphs & charts. Chapter 1: Playing by the Rules After the Industrial Era Over the past half-century, the United States and other economically advanced countries have gradually made the shift into what has been called an "information society," the "information age," or the "postindustrial era." Futurist Alvin Toffler has labeled this transition the "Third Wave," suggesting that it will ultimately be as consequential as the two previous waves in human history: from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies and then from agricultural to industrial ones. This shift consists of a number of related elements. In the economy, services increasingly displace manufacturing as a source of wealth. Instead of working in a steel mill or automobile factory, the typical worker in an information society has a job in a bank, software firm, restaurant, university, or social service agency. The role of information and intelligence, embodied in both people and increasingly smart machines, becomes pervasive, and mental labor tends to replace physical labor. Production is globalized as inexpensive information technology makes it increasingly easy to move information across national borders, and rapid communications by television, radio, fax, and e-mail erodes the boundaries of long-established cultural communities. A society built around information tends to produce more of the two things people value most in a modern democracy: freedom and equality. Freedom of choice has exploded, whether of cable channels, low-cost shopping outlets, or friends met on the Internet. Hierarchies of all sorts, whether political or corporate, come under pressure and begin to crumble. Large, rigid bureaucracies, which sought to control everything in their domain through rules, regulations, and coercion, have been undermined by the shift toward a knowledge-based economy, which serves to "empower" individuals by giving them access to information. Just as rigid corporate bureaucracies like the old IBM and AT&T gave way to smaller, flatter, more participatory competitors, so too did the Soviet Union and East Germany fall apart from their inability to control and harness the knowledge of their own citizens. The shift into an information society has been celebrated by virtually everyone who has written or talked about it. Commentators as politically diverse as George Gilder, Newt Gingrich, Al Gore, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, and Nicholas Negroponte have seen these changes as good for prosperity, good for democracy and freedom, and good for society in general. Certainly many of the benefits of an information society are clear, but have all of its consequences necessarily been so positive? People associate the information age with the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, but the shift away fr...

Product details

• Authors: Francis Fukuyama
• Publisher: Touchstone USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.01.2000
• EAN: 9780684865775
• ISBN: 978-0-684-86577-5
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 215 mm x 20 mm
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Politics; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology