James Wickham
Employment Research Unit, Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2
e-mail: jwickham@tcd.ie
tel: +353 608 1875
fax: +353 607 1300
Paper presented to the conference
‘Ireland, Europe and the Global Information Society’
Irish Film Centre, Dublin April 24-25, 1997
Conference organised by Employment Research Unit, Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin COMTEC, Dublin City University
With financial support from DG V of the European Commission and the Faculty of Applied Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology
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Introduction
The new image of Ireland is that of the digital island or even of the intelligent island. Ireland - or at least the Republic of Ireland - combines high technology manufacturing and services industry with a vibrant cultural renaissance. The location of our conference here in Temple Bar, in the Film Theatre and the ArtHouse, in the middle of Ireland’s rejuvenated city centre, can be taken as exemplifying this new situation. One response of social science might be to ‘critique’ these claims. I suppose the obvious criticisms would be to dismiss high technology industry as an offshore service sector and the new culture as the commodification of national identity. On the one hand the International Financial Services Centre, on the other hand Riverdance. The usual whinging of sociology?
This paper takes a different approach. It begins by comparing information technology to other allegedly fundamental technologies. That will enable me to go on to argue that far from the global information society abolishing national differences, it highlights them, and Ireland’s relative success is precisely the story of its national specificity. Some of these features however are rather double edged, and I want to focus on two of them. Firstly, our much vaunted education system, and secondly, the position of the Republic of Ireland between the USA and the European Union. As we shall see, both features are increasingly raising rather awkward political choices: the Celtic Tiger is going to have to decide what sort of lair it has and where this lair is going to be.
This paper is also in part a response to the first attempt at an Irish ‘information society’ strategy: the document Information Society Ireland: Strategy for Action (ISSC, 1997). For reasons of space, and because this is dealt with by other contributors to this conference, I have not engaged in a detailed critique of the term ‘information society’. It should however be taken for granted that I understand the term as an image or a vision rather than a clearly defined and empirically validated social science concept.
We could start by developing some criteria by which to evaluate technologies. The rhetoric of the ‘information society’ assumes that information technology is both inevitable and benign. Once however we reject such a position for some form of social shaping or social embedding perspective (Webster, 1995; MacKay, 1995), then we need to actually evaluate the technology. What I am going to argue is very much influenced by some current work I am doing on a technology which we increasingly see as ‘malignant’ - car technology (Wickham and Tovey, 1997), and by the healthy scepticism of Clifford Stoll (Stoll, 1995). (1)
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1: This section owes much to discussions with Ronan O'Brien (Brussels) and Christian Friis (Roskilde): I am of course responsible for what has happened to their ideas.
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1.1 Functionality and hubris
The first question to ask of any technology is whether it is functional - does it actually achieve what it purports to? We are increasingly aware of the paradoxes of both technology and organisations, namely that they can often achieve the opposite of their explicit aims. Ivan Illich argued in the 1970s that large bureaucratic organisations become ends in themselves, so that their very existence exacerbates the problems they were created to solve: mass education creates functional illiteracy, prisons breed crime, hospitals produce doctor-induced illness, even social welfare systems create welfare dependence and poverty.
In the sphere of technology, the private motor car is a dramatic example of the same phenomenon. People buy cars as a means of mobility, yet once large numbers of people use cars, mobility turns into traffic jams, traffic speeds in urban areas fall to that of one hundred years ago. The technology of the car system has created not mobility but immobility. Just as one solution to welfare-induced poverty is to expand the welfare system, so one solution to technological crises is the technical fix. In its quantitative form the solution is just more of the same: the solution to traffic jams is to build new roads (‘building our way out of traffic jams’). Alternatively, the qualitative solution is the real technical fix: to make the technology more complex, perhaps by even adding another technological layer. Thus transport telematics create ‘intelligent’ road systems (electronic warning signs etc.) or ‘intelligent’ cars (satellite guidance etc.) so that existing roads are better utilised.
Similar arguments can be applied to information technology. For example, the ‘productivity paradox’ claims that the enormous investments in information technology in the advanced economies over the last twenty years have had no noticeable impact on productivity. And this despite all those claims that information technology would have unprecedented benefits in this area. Whatever the merits of the argument at the macro level, the development of information technology systems is littered with examples of individual systems that have clearly failed to deliver. And furthermore, one well known solution is to make everything more complex (Willcocks and Mason, 1987). At very minimum, some scepticism with regard to the apocalyptic claims of the information society prophets is in order.
This is perhaps particularly true in the case of education. In Ireland, the recent Information Society report sets targets of one computer in every school within two years. Quite what one school does with one computer is not clear. The Council of Europe proposes a minimum standard of one computer per 10 students in primary level, one per 5 students in secondary, and one per 3 students in third level. Equipping the Irish educational system to this standard would involve an astronomical cost. And remember, the normal useful life of a PC is assumed to be three years before it becomes out of date! The educational benefits of this expenditure are actually not specified. Of course, this may well familiarise students with information technology, but that is mere tautology. Are such students able to read, write, express themselves more clearly? Are they more knowledgeable, more imaginative, more hard working? Are they better citizens? All rather implausible...Such levels of expenditure have enormous opportunity costs, and it is in fact quite bizarre that they should be seriously proposed - often by the very same people - who advocate cuts in state expenditure (such as closing libraries, freezing teaching posts etc.).
1.2 The lock in effect
Another perspective on technology - or better, on technological systems - is the extent to which, once built into a society, the technology closes down choices. Again the analogy with the car system is instructive. Once personal transport becomes almost entirely by car, then people are constrained to use cars whether or not they actually want to. In an American suburb the only way to do your shopping is to take the car to the supermarket; in an American town centre (outside of the East Coast) it is often impossible to move from one shopping mall to another except by car, even if they are only 100 metres apart. The car system therefore compels those who have them to use them. Furthermore, those people who do not have cars are excluded from key areas of society - they cannot reach the supermarket, they cannot visit their friends, but this would not be the case if there was a functional public transport system.
Similarly with information and communication technology (ICT). It is not a question of whether they are more efficient than other methods, but the way in which users create excluded non-users: if you don’t use the technology, you’re outside the loop. Invitations to this conference were sent out by e-mail. One highly trained government special adviser is not on e-mail, and so did not receive conference details in time. Increasingly, university researchers without websites do not get asked to participate in international research projects.
This clarifies the argument of the previous section. To claim that ‘computers have not increased productivity’ is not to claim that ‘computers have not made any difference’. As ICT becomes socially embedded what we can do changes dramatically. The world has changed, but it may not have changed in the way the advocates of the technology claim. One way of evaluating a technology is therefore the extent to which it not only opens up choices but also closes them down.
Such lock ins occur at different levels, from choice of hardware or software to a whole technological system, and indeed, one firm strategy (exemplified by Microsoft) is to increase the level at which its proprietary lock occurs (not just the computer operating system but the whole internet). As the example makes clear, the beneficiary of the lock can be an individual firm or an entire, but still non-proprietary, technological system. One bizarre feature of much policy discussion is that such proprietary lock-ins are almost entirely ignored, as for example in the Ireland Information Society report. Information technology is presented as a non-proprietary technology, when in fact key areas are becoming increasing monopolised. (2)
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2: There’s nothing inherent here. Mainframe computer technology was dominated by a few small computer componies, whose lock-in was challenged in the 1970s by the mini-computer companies. The PC revolution was at first a battle of lots of Davids against a few big Golaiths, but most of the Davids have now cannibalised each other and Microsoft rules.
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1.3 Side effects and externalities
A technological system also may have negative and unintended consequences. To some extent such side effects are captured by the economists’ term ‘externalities’. Such costs are not borne by the users of the system and there is therefore no economic reason why the users should attempt to reduce them. The car system indicates the point: cars create road accidents and massive pollution, but the costs of this damage are borne by governments and not by the firms or individuals who directly cause them.
Part of the attraction of ICT is that such externalities appear rather limited. Compared to the car ICT appears a clean technology. Certainly there are issues of waste disposal and materials consumption. If the main products of the industry are replaced every three years, that produces waste which may contain materials which are very difficult to recycle. Furthermore, there are some environmental pollution aspects involved in the production processes, in particular wafer fabrication. It is all too easy to say these are minor - they may be, but more to the point is that the clean image of the industry has ensured they are not high on any environmental worry list - and so rather uninvestigated. Equally, there have been various ergonomic scares, such as VDU emissions and RSI, but these also seem relatively minor.
Such environmental issues are relatively easy to locate and measure - if anyone wants to. The side effects of ICT may be much larger, and not susceptible to measurement. Again, compare the car: car systems also destroy public spaces and even undermine citizenship. As cars spread, the road changes from a meeting place to a dangerous zone between buildings, public spaces are undermined and finally privatised. It is not surprising that the same Margaret Thatcher who claimed ‘There is no such thing as society’ could also have advocated ‘the great car society’. In certain key senses, car systems and society are antithetical.
As far as ICT is concerned the most discussed possible side-effect is that of social isolation. Extensive computer usage replaces social interaction and then undermines its infrastructures. However, a far more fundamental side effect is that ICT begins to change what it is to be human of normal social interaction. From communication being technically mediated links between humans, humans themselves begin to change into cyborgs (Haraway, 1985). (3)
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3: I am indebted to Ian Welsh for this point
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1.4 Social structure: marketization and inequality
Finally there is the relationship between the technology and the socio-political structure. For example, there may be a relationship between the technology and the political system. Winner (1980) took it as axiomatic that nuclear power requires a centralised political system in order to deal with the security issue, even though it could also be argued that political democracy contributes to nuclear safety. (4) The ‘information society’ is similarly assumed to be more democratic, participative and egalitarian.
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4: Just as today, famine is less where there is freedom of the press.
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The last point is fallacious. The current spread of ICT coincides with growing income inequality within virtually all OECD countries (Atkinson et al, 1995). The association may be merely coincidental, but it certainly negates any claim that the ‘information society’ is inherently more egalitarian that whatever preceded it. More precisely, Information Society Ireland, like most such documents, warns of the dangers of creating a divide between the information rich and the information poor but this mantra has little substance. It is not clear that access to ‘information’ is an independent dimension of social inequality. In other words, the powerful and the rich can, if they so wish, access more information than the powerless and the poor. However, it is unclear how access to information by itself makes the powerless powerful or the poor rich.
More plausible is perhaps the linkage of the information society and the market. Certainly, at the moment the conventional wisdom is that ICT broadens the reach of the market. Thus Bill Gates claims that the Internet will produce a frictionless market, in which perfect choice and perfect information are available to all. For him this will be a “shopper’s heaven” (Gates, 1995:158).
Yet the early proponents of the information society, such as Daniel Bell, linked advanced technology with the necessity of planning and once again the mechanisms whereby the market and the technology are linked are rather vague. It is quite clear that information technology can be used to expand the market, but that is totally different to saying that information technology requires or even causes an expansion of the market.
In fact this rather agnostic position applies to many of the ‘social consequences’ of technology. A society which includes ICT as one of its core technologies is certainly different to one that does not, but many of the key concerns of conventional sociology (the precise relationship between market and non-market institutions, social inequality, even gender relationships or skill) would seem to be much less ‘determined’ by the technology than its proponents claim. Consequently, we should perhaps talk not of information society but of information societies. And in that context, what sort of ‘information society’ is developing in Ireland? Indeed, what sort of ‘information society’ could develop in Ireland?
Any specification of Ireland’s position in the ‘global information society’ has to start from the particular success story of Irish ‘industrialisation by invitation’ - the strategy since 1956 of achieving economic growth by foreign investment.
Although the economic benefits of this policy have often been controversial, it is clear that Ireland has been remarkably successful in attracting mobile investment compared to any other peripheral area of Europe. The reason for this success lie not just in the favourable tax regime and generous grants, but also in a cluster of socio-political advantages. Compared to the regions of England, and even Scotland and Wales, Irish political independence ensured that regional policy was also national policy. The main source of foreign investment in manufacturing industry was Continental Europe and the USA, so that ‘opening up the economy’ did not involve subordination to the historic colonising power. The very weakness of the industrial base ensured that there was no substantial economic pressure group threatened by the new strategy. In the 1970s and early 1980s, when Irish trade unions still had major political power, the foreign sector offered substantially higher wages and single union recognition in exchange for abdication of traditional shop floor control (Murray and Wickham and Murray, 1982). Slightly less obviously, the new manufacturing industry also involved a social greenfield site. Foreign industry occupied an ideological and institutional space that was uninhabited: new institutions were created, but old ones were not challenged (Wickham, 1984). As the next section will show, this situation has now changed.
One frequent criticism of the policy was that the foreign industry lacked linkages to the local economy. This criticism was articulated from all points of the ideological spectrum. The debate was dominated by economistic concepts, so linkages have usually been only defined in economic terms (the proportion of inputs purchased in Ireland) and at most in terms of the spin-off of new indigenous companies from within large multi-nationals. Such a narrow focus under-estimates the impact of foreign-owned industry on the economy. Most of the original plants were primarily assembly operations, yet as studies elsewhere have shown, the management of such plants is hardly simple. However low grade assembly the plants may have been, they required managerial skills. Given that, with the exception of Japanese-owned firms, these plants were run by Irish managers as soon as possible, even an assembly operation involved the creation of indigenous management skills. As the managerial labour market developed through the 1980s, these skills became rooted in the local economy. This labour market was stimulated by the fact that ‘churning’ of firms was particularly pronounced within this sector. Multinational plants tended to have a clear life cycle: plants were opened, expanded, and then declined and closed. Growth in aggregate employment masked much larger numbers of new jobs created while old jobs were lost. At the same time, although linkages between the multinationals and indigenous firms were low, linkages between such branch plants increased, often on the initiative of local managers (see Wickham, 1989).
Furthermore, by the end of the 1980s the occupational profile of electronics manufacturing had changed. Over time the relative weight of qualified employees within the workforces increased as firms automated production processes and took on more ancillary activities which required more skilled labour than production itself. At the same time, new entrants tended to have a relatively higher skill profile than existing firms. While at the beginning of the decade the skill need was for technicians, by the end it was for graduates in both electronics engineering and computer science (Wickham, 1988). The rapid expansion of these areas in the universities laid the basis for the subsequent software industry. As O’Riain (1997) has shown, this unlike the hardware sector, has a significant number of indigenous firms. Even more intriguingly, the software sector seems to have a much greater institutional ‘thickness’, that is to say, there are more formal and informal links between firms and between firms and educational institutions.
The other major components of the Irish economic presence in the global information society are internationally traded services, ranging from call centres to international financial services and sections of the growing cultural industries (film, music). Almost without any public debate, ‘industrialisation strategy’ has become a strategy for economic growth in the epoch of the weightless economy. At the more conventional end the usual incentives apply: tax breaks and grants, access to the European market and the allegedly highly skilled labour force. Yet while these are important in all areas of the culture industries, there is also continual reference to something rather more intangible: ‘the creativity of Ireland’ (ISSC, 42). The hope is continually articulated that here we have reached the ideal marriage of God and Mammon. At last Ireland can make money out of its infamous spirituality, or to be more sociological, its culture can be successfully commodified. And this happy unity of opposites might even occur in the labour market: Ireland has the unique opportunity to combine its new technical skills and with more traditional cultural skills to lay the basis of an indigenous multi-media content industry. In the age of globalisation what can best be marketed is the specificity of place. And this paradox can be used to illuminate the last forty years - in an age of internationalisation and then globalisation, Irish success has been the utilisation of the particular features of Ireland - or at least of the Republic of Ireland.
‘Ireland - powered by people’ used to be the slogan of the IDA advertisement that greeted visitors at Dublin airport. More mundanely, a recent government minister’s election leaflet could claim without any fear of contradiction that the Republic’s education system is ‘the best in Europe’. (5)
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5: 'Newslines' leaflet issued on behalf of Finance Minister Ruari Quinn by Dublin South east Constituency Labour Party, spring 1997.
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Irish sociology of education has failed to interrogate such claims. We have useful studies of inequalities of class and gender in relation to access to education, but sociological studies of the relation between the content of education and economic growth are conspicuously absent. This section of the paper therefore raises some questions about the relationship between education and Ireland’s status as an intelligent island...
Formal education is particularly important because of the Republic’s unusual demographic structure. Compared to other European countries it has a relatively young population and a relatively young labour force. So long as education is understood as something which happens to people before they enter the labour force, then achieving any particular level of education is going to be relatively more expensive in Ireland than elsewhere, simply because a relatively higher proportion of the overall population will be involved. Conversely however, because the labour force is also relatively young, a higher proportion of the workforce is renewed every year. Expenditure on education therefore shapes the whole workforce more than in other European countries.
These demographic factors make Irish education participation rates especially important. Over the last thirty years Irish rates have first caught up with and then overtaken British rates, but also those of some other countries. In comparison with other EU countries Ireland is about average in terms of the proportion of the age cohort completing secondary level education and well above average in the proportion of the age cohort gaining a third level qualification. Furthermore, within third level we have an unusually high proportion of students studying science and engineering. And finally, although this is far more difficult to quantify, educational standards do seem to be relatively high. In the most recent international maths and science performance test (the Third International Maths and Science Study) Irish school students aged 13 score higher than both the US and German school students (Economist, 1997; OECD, 1996).
Irish graduates would seem to compare favourably with those from other European countries. Entry to third level is selective, and Ireland has avoided the experience of those continental countries where passing a school leaving exam confers an automatic right to university entry. Consequently, Irish universities have, so far at least, avoided the disasters of French and Italian universities.
These achievements should not be trivialised. Perhaps the most important is the one least noticed. Cultural commentators such as Professor Joe Lee have long lambasted the Irish professional classes for their lack of entrepreneurial drive and their obsession with entry into secure professions (law and medicine) rather than science and technology. Clearly over the last thirty years this very British pattern has been eroded. Equally, the expansion of technological education has undoubtedly made Ireland much more attractive for various forms of mobile investment, and O’Riain is probably correct to term the decision to expand technological education in the 1980s one of the most successful policy decisions of the 1980s (O’Riain, 1997).
Yet there is now a risk that public discussion becomes convinced by our own national marketing hype. Certain aspects of education and training in Ireland do not quite fit with this success story.
The ‘information society’ issue immediately highlighted the low level of provision of computing technology in most areas of Irish education. At primary level for example in 1996 only 65% of national schools had any computer at all, and only 26% had acquired these with Department of Education funding (ISSC: 38). Research undertaken for TCD’s Computer Applications for Social Sciences (CASS) programme has shown that at third level the number of PCs per student range from a high of 1 PC per every 10 students in DCU and UL to a paltry 1 to 30 in TCD all way below the Council of Europe recommended level of 1 PC per every 3 students (ISSC: 74). Typically, the recent government White Paper on education discussed the Irish language and equality of opportunity in great detail, but devoted not a single sentence to information technology. And this lack of strategy pervades the entire system. The CASS research has shown that not a single university computer facilities manager is able to identify a strategy for IT provision for undergraduates or identify the forms of usage of existing equipment.
And this is not just a question of computer fetishism. Research for the NESC (NESC, 1993) confirmed the impressionistic argument of the Culltion Report (Industrial Policy Review Group, 1992) that Irish industry suffers from the British disease of a low skill equilibrium. In other words, faced with a workforce with low skills, firms concentrate on products and processes that do not require high skills, so that there appears to be no need for more education and training (Finegold and Soskice, 1988).
In terms of the school system the introduction of free secondary education in 1966 was in one sense remarkably regressive. Because it simply made access to the academically oriented system easier, rather than changing the system itself, it ensured for the next thirty years Irish education would be marked by continual ‘academic drift’ (NESC, 1985). The high prestige ends of the curriculum are exclusively those that are oriented towards formal knowledges as required for university entrance, rather than vocational and workplace relevant knowledges. The only criterion of educational success is entrance to third level (the annual Leaving Certificate hysteria), and like a Japanese system this focuses on rote learning (hence the possibility of grinds culture). and this skews the content for all secondary level. Compared to Holland or Denmark for example, Irish school students are extremely unlikely to take vocationally relevant courses (NESC, 1993). In Japan the academicised rote learning of secondary education is counter-balanced by the Japanese employment system with its enormous amount of in-firm training. By contrast Ireland’s ‘Japanese’ secondary system leads to a ‘British’ in-firm training system (i.e. no training at all).
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6: These are of course simplistic stereotypes. They are also slightly out of date. British in-firm training appears to have been rising rapidly in the last few years: Japanese firms can decreasingly offer long-term employment which may in turn undermine their ability to provide continual general training in the workplace.
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Irish firms (and this includes firms in the foreign owned sector) spend 1.2% of sales revenue on training, while the European Union average is 3%. Equally most FÁS expenditure is concentrated on job creation schemes which do nothing to upgrade the skills of those already in work. Its main intervention for those in work is the Training Support Scheme, which as of 1996 was absorbing about 1% of its total budget.
The problems such an approach creates were exemplified in 1996 by the sudden crisis of skills for call centres. One of the major reasons why so many call centres have set up in Dublin is the labour force. This is not because of the language skills of Irish school leavers, which are very weak (and demand for Irish in global call centres is not very high). It is relatively easy to find Continental language skills in Dublin because, as a fashionable European capital, Dublin has a relatively large transient population of Continentals! Whatever else Irish secondary level is good for, it clearly does not produce such global skills.
And at third level too there are real problems. During the 1980s the immediate consequence of expanding engineering provision at third level was a rise in emigration. It appeared that the more money the government spent on education, the more graduates there were to emigrate. And within this general trend, the higher the expenditure on a particular course, the more likely those particular graduates were to emigrate (Wickham, 1993). Levels of graduate emigration are under-estimated. The only reliable data source, the Higher Education Authority’s annual First Destinations of Award Recipients survey, records the employment of graduates nine months after graduation. However, empirical research within both accounting and engineering firms (Hanlon, 1994; Wickham, 1993) has shown that many graduates take employment within Ireland as a stepping stone to subsequent emigration.
In many ways firms’ human resource management practices encourage emigration. In some areas of the Irish economy a spell abroad is seen as a desirable qualification for promotion. Tacitly therefore firms encourage ambitious employees to leave the country. In addition, because firms tend do little to develop the careers of even their most qualified personnel, ambitious graduates are likely to find that Irish employers cannot offer them the career prospects their education and qualifications have led them to expect. So high technology emigration coincides with recurrent skill shortages and indeed skill panics. For example, Ireland Information Society warns of emerging skill shortages in computer software.
Finally, claims that Ireland is now a learning society look rather absurd when confronted with the reality of university research within the state. Almost alone amongst OECD countries, the Irish third level budget provides no resources at all specifically for research, the Irish government spends less on third level research as a percentage of GNP than any other OECD country. And as the recent CIRCA report also documents, this disinterest in research pervades the third level system. Not only is there no national system of research evaluation, not a single university senior manager is able to identify his or her university’s research priorities or even identify its research strategy. Irish scientific researchers, just like Irish technologists, have to emigrate to build a career. CIRCA reports a US professor:
‘From time to time, one encounters Irish scientists of considerable talent - usually based in some other country. I suspect that one could assemble at least one more first class university in Ireland if only one could repatriate the best people who have gone abroad for the faculty’. (CIRCA, 1996: 37).
Certainly Irish universities do undertake research. Irish universities now receive substantial research funds from industry and above all from the European Commission; on the basis of bibliometric measures Irish academics are individually as productive as the OECD average.
This paradox would seem to suggest that an Irish national research strategy is not necessary. It suggests that Irish research is doing very well thankyou even though - and perhaps precisely because - it is not receiving any government funding. We have been intelligent enough to build an intelligent island on the cheap!
The Irish situation can be understood through theories of national innovation. According to its proponents (Lundvall, 1992; Edquist et al, 1997), a national system of innovation is a social network that links firms, government, voluntary institutions and educational organisations. The theory assumes that innovation is fundamentally an incremental process stemming from the interaction of producers, suppliers and education and training institutions. In other words the theory stresses ‘learning (and innovation) by doing’; it completely rejects any ‘technology push’ argument that innovation starts with scientific discoveries in pure research which then move ‘down’ towards the economy through technological applications. If the national system of innovation is strong, then not only are firms and researchers closely linked, but the links between firms ensure that firms can innovate through learning from their suppliers and customers. This in turn means that innovation is ‘path dependent’. Innovation does not follow a single pre-determined path, but instead develops in a particular trajectory shaped by the specific interaction in a specific institutional context.
The national system of innovation approach is closely linked to network theory and other developments within the sociology of economic activity. Writers such as Granovetter (1985) have stressed the embeddedness of economic action: market relations always occur within an institutionalised context; market exchanges are potentially themselves also social relationships in that much else can be exchanged apart from what is simply bought and sold; when the market relationships are long term and involve a high level of mutual trust, then these relationships are potentially rich in information. For example, scholars who have studied the resurgence of small firms in the 1980s stressed the way in which in some countries networks of small firms formed industrial districts, comprised of either ‘republics’ of small firms as in the ‘Third Italy’ of Emilia-Romagna or ‘kingdoms’ of small firms dominated by a single large firm as in Japan. Quite contrary to Anglo-American ideas of the small firm as the creation of the individualistic entrepreneur, such analysts stress the importance of co-operation and trust between firms (Howard, 1990).
From this perspective a particular topography of inter-firm linkages does not guarantee the content of the linkages. In other words, the existence of either a republic of small firms or a kingdom of small firms grouped around one large firm does not itself ensure innovation. Equally, long-term relationships between firms need not be trusting and can stultify rather than stimulate innovation. And when such networks are the locus of innovation, their very strength can often be their weakness. Networks stimulate innovation incrementally along a particular technological trajectory (Edquist et al, 1997); this means that they are unlikely to be the locus of fundamental innovations; they are very good at improving existing products and processes, but rather bad at radical invention. Just as Kuhn argued that scientific breakthroughs have to come from outside the social system of normal science, so major innovations come from outside firm networks. For example, Glasmeier (1994) has shown how the success of the Swiss watch industry in the Jura lay in the thick network of mutual subcontracting of a cluster of small firms with continual innovation. However, this innovation was occurring within the technological paradigm of the mechanical watch; the paradigm shift to the electronic watch occurred outside their industry. (7)
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7: According to Glasmeier, the Swiss were the first to develop an electronic watch, but the industrial structure based around the mechanical watch ensured that they were unable to move quickly into volume production.
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From this perspective, Ireland has been characterised as having a weak system of national innovation. In his study for the NESC Mjoset (1992) argued that the poor innovation record of Irish indigenous firms must be explained in terms of the innovation system within which they are located. Irish indigenous firms have weak links both to each other and to education and training institutions; innovation such as it is occurs within the foreign-owned sector. However, Mjostet is a curiously old fashioned study: he concentrates entirely on manufacturing industry and also does not really analyse the nature of the foreign-owned sector. This perspective is taken over by the government White Paper on Science, Technology and Innovation (Government of Ireland, 1996) which again concentrates solely on the indigenous sector. This ensures that some of the problems now developing in the politically powerful foreign owned sector are not addressed.
Given that Irish third level institutions do have close links to industry, the idea that the country has a weak system of innovation may appear surprising. The problem lies in the nature of the linkage. We have already seen above that there is no government funding for basic research. The recent White Paper justified this by assuming that the only economically relevant research is applied research and instrumentalises science policy as part of the needs of ‘industry’.
Since there is no tradition of any social studies of science within Ireland, it is hardly surprising that there is little social scientific analysis of science and technology research in Ireland (see Cooper and Whelan, 1973; Yearley, 1989). Impressionistically it appears that Irish universities have used European Union funds to carry out their basic research, and have been forced into an opportunistic dependence on largely foreign-owned firms for further funds. The problem here is that such research is oriented to the immediate competitive needs of firms; there is no institutional system that can push research towards either pre-competitive research or even more importantly, towards applied research that will benefit a series of firms within Ireland. The relative under-development of an indigenous innovation system can be seen in the bibliometric data: Irish researchers are as likely as colleagues abroad to joint author papers (joint authorship is a sign of collaboration), but they are less likely than colleagues elsewhere to joint author articles with other Irish authors (CIRCA, 1996). In other words, Irish researchers networks lead outside the country; their research bears relatively little relationship to activities within Ireland.
In a rather similar way, the lack of any institutional framework means that ‘the manpower needs of industry’ are understood in Ireland simply as those skills which firms consider they immediately require. There are rather obvious problems with such an approach. If education is understood as directly applicable skills, this ignores that there are potential conflicts of interest between the firm and the individual (Murray and Wickham, 1983). At its simplest, the individual wishes to maximise his/her position on the labour market, which means the individual wants a skill which can be utilised by different employers. By contrast, employers will prefer skills that are locked in, thus ensuring that their investment is not poached by a competitor.
The result appears that Irish education tends to be either too general or too specific. For example, the education of electronics engineering in the 1980s led to graduate engineers to regard themselves as over qualified for their employment in Irish firms in production engineers. Consequently, one reason for emigration was that firms were not able to provide them with access to the research work (R&D) for which they believed their education had fitted them. By contrast, universities and RTCs have become increasingly willing to adjust or develop courses in lines with the needs of industry’, but these needs tend to be articulated by single firms who simply instrumentalise third level institutions to carry out training in the particular skills they require. In neither case are firms under any pressure to carry out general training themselves. Accordingly as McGovern has shown in some detail (1995), high technology firms in Ireland operate a slash and burn approach to Ireland’s much vaunted technological educational system. Rather than training and developing their human resources, they use up the latest products of the educational system secure in the knowledge that they can easily be replaced by next year’s batch of graduates.
Irish education has contributed to the Irish success story by its good general standard and high participation rates in both secondary and tertiary levels. Furthermore, the very weakness of any national system of innovation has made it easy for some small sections of the educational system to be instrumentalised for the specific needs of individual firms in the foreign sector. Beyond that, the claim that Irish education is ‘the best in Europe’ is absurd hype.
For recent decades, the linchpin of Irish success has been that the Republic has been the point of entry for US firms entering the European market. The development of Europe as a single market has been crucial to Ireland’s attractiveness to US investment. Ireland has been where Europe and the US could meet; Ireland could move away from Britain and become closer to both ‘Europe’ and the USA. However, this geo-political position may soon be subjected to novel tensions, and one point at which they may surface is in relation to information society issues.
From a Continental perspective, in particular from a German perspective, ‘European’ and ‘Anglo-American’ capitalisms present different models of socio-economic development. In summary, the European social market economy recognises the existence of diverse interest groups, regulates the labour market to protect employment conditions, provides funds for enterprise through the banking system. By contrast, Anglo-American capitalism gives little role to organised interest groups such as unions, has a flexible labour market and relies on the stock exchange for finance. The Anglo-American model promises employment at the cost of widening income inequality, at least to date however the European model protects the conditions of those in work at the cost of high unemployment. Most fundamentally of all, the European model accepts both the state and civil society as areas of social life which are not and should not be organised on market principles. The ‘market’ is not seen as bad or wrong, as in socialist theory, but as only one component of social and economic life.
Both models are of course an over-simplification of complex empirical realities. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the New Labour victory in the UK, it is by no means certain that the ‘Anglo-American’ identity will be as self-evident as in the long years of Conservative rule. Will New Britain be a Trojan horse for US conceptions in Europe? Or will ‘American’ and ‘European’ versions of capitalism be finally located on different sides of the Atlantic?
The dominant vision of the ‘global information society’ is clearly closed related to the American model. It is often pointed out that the term global is hardly appropriate. Large sections of the globe’s population are completely outside the informatised world. Recall for example that there are more telephones within the M25 London orbital road than there are in the whole of the continent of Africa. But what is less obvious is that the term society is also a misnomer, for in the dominant vision of the ‘information society’ ICT enables a further marketization or commodification of relationships. Of course, the idea that all relationships can be reduced to market relationships (Thatcher’s comment that ‘there is no such thing as society’) is a fantasy only found in economics textbooks; as a political philosophy it is a dangerous utopia, as chiliastic as the marxist fantasy of a complete egalitarian society. This is because even the most complete marketization requires social institutions (not least those involved in the monetary system) to regulate it.
Marketization expands inequality. The expansion of the market over the last two decades in all OECD countries has also involved an expansion of inequality. Markets create ensure differential rewards. If unrestrained, such inequality can become counter-productive in a whole series of ways. Just as too little inequality removes one crucial incentive for innovation, too much inequality can exclude the talents of much of the population. Because marketization means that everything has its price, it is also a powerful force for cultural homogenisation: deregulation of the media industries has reduced cultural diversity even though it has increased formal choice (‘five hundred channels and nothing to watch’). And finally, just as the market is a powerful force for liberating individuals from the constraints of group conformity, so unrestrained marketization corrodes any social communitarian social bonds, right into the family itself - and that applies whatever form the family takes. In such a global information society, individuals buy and sell across the world, but are unable to sustain relationships of mutual trust with their neighbours.
Potentially there is an alternative European vision. The key here is that the state is seen as a necessary complement to the market, and not as an unwelcome intruder. State institutions serve the common good, they define a common interest, they ensure that the marketplace is also -as in the Greek polis - a meeting place. The European conception of the state creates social inclusion through social rights of its citizens rather than through the arbitrary charity of individual millionaires; it creates a public space where social interests can be articulated beyond the market. In other words, non-market spaces are related to the state and not only, as in both American and East Asian versions, to the family and the ethnic group. Because the market is not the only legitimate form of interaction, diversity can be welcomed and protected, rather than ridiculed.
Yet such a vision can only be articulated if the future is clearly understood to be open. In other words, if technology is seen as all determining, if ‘the information society’ is inevitable, then the most that public policy can do is ensure that we are prepared for it. At a European level this was in fact the position taken by the Bangemann Report (High Level Group of Experts, 1994); this is also largely the stance of Information Society Ireland. And such a perspective must mean accepting what are in fact American visions, even though they come under the label ‘global’. Once however technological determinism is intellectually rejected, once ‘the information society’ describes a range of new possibilities, then there is space for alternative visions and alternative policies. Thus within the European Commission Commissioner Flynn’s ‘High Level Expert Group on the Information Society’ (European Commission, 1996a), and to a lesser extent the Commission’s own Green Paper Living and Working in the Information Society (European Commission, 1996b) suggest how ICT can be utilised in a very different way.
At the level of economic organisations it is argued that full use of ICT requires trust and high commitment. In the US human resource management theorists have been preaching ‘empowerment’ for over a decade with precisely in mind and it would seem, with some success. Americans - at least those with good professional jobs - do seem to find work and the workplace more rewarding (if also more demanding) than in the past (most recently, Hochschild, 1997). However, while soft HRM theorists preach the importance of motivation and training, their harder colleagues who watch the figures preach the importance of out-sourcing, downsizing and generally making employment more insecure. Reconciling these two imperatives is rather difficult! Equally, talk of trust and empowerment is always rather double edged, for American unitary versions of management do not accept the legitimacy of any other interests than those of management itself. By contrast a European perspective tends to protect existing employment and therefore potentially the benefits of retraining; it accepts the legitimacy of diverse interests within the greater community of the enterprise and therefore accepts collective representation as rights rather than favours (trade unions, employee participation, etc.).
American management is infatuated with human resource management and cultural change within the organisation. One of the reasons for this is the condition of American society, increasingly a society of anomic, isolated individuals. In such a situation it becomes both necessary and possible to turn the enterprise into an island of social cohesion in a sea of social anomie. Enterprises have to socialise people because society decreasingly does. By contrast, Europe’s traditions of social welfare as social citizenship makes this less necessary. This is not an argument for the status quo. It is quite clear that the European model of social welfare can contribute to labour market inflexibility, just as the European model of secure employment can stultify innovation. Hence the European Commission argues that making the welfare system more flexible and expanding the training system must go hand in hand. As Commission Flynn argued when launching the Green Paper:
“Two of the important messages that I have been trying to put across to you today are the combining of flexibility and security and the renewal of Europe’s training and education systems.” (People First Report, 1997: 37)
Finally, a European perspective can take cultural diversity seriously. The European Union is not developing into a federalist superstate enforcing uniformity on its members. Instead the developing European constitution is haltingly institutionalising diversity (Gillespie, 1996). From an information society perspective this means that diversity can realistically become a resource and not a problem. Conventionally the issue is posed as simply cultural protectionism. How do we preserve our culture, our heritage, our languages, our diversity? The information age is seen as creating one homogenous (and largely American) society. Yet in the emerging information economy, so it can be argued, our cultural heritage is itself a source of competitive advantage. If Europe is simply created as one large market, then we hand it on a plate to large US and Japanese firms that have specialised in mass production for such markets. The picture looks different if Europeans are seen not just as consumers but as producers. As particularly Sir David Puttnam has argued, European cultural diversity is a potential resource for the educational and artistic products that the information society requires (European Commission, 1997).
As an English speaking European country, linked by language and emigration primarily to the Anglophone world, Ireland occupies a peculiar position in this emerging debate. Up until now, there has been no contradiction between the Irish movement towards Europe and Irish openness to US influence. Now the two are moving into tension. More so than the Bangemann Report, the Information Society Ireland report does acknowledge the importance of cultural production and indeed claims a particular advantage for Ireland in this area. And equally, the latter report makes some proposals to make training and education a life-long project. At the same time, its fetishisation of market solutions and its fundamental technological determinism means that it accepts a framework that makes such objectives implausible. Such contradictions suggest that sooner or later, Ireland may have to choose between Europe and the USA.
If technology is seen as all determining, then the future must be closed; what will happen in the future is already fixed here in the present. Much discussion of the ‘information society’ assumes that a motley collection of information society prophets, seers and gurus have been to the future, checked it out and have now come scurrying back to tell the rest of us about it. And often they fail to understand why so many new denizens of this new society remain unimpressed.
Alternatively, once technological determinism is rejected, then it is entirely sensible to evaluate technology and its implications. This evaluation can range from the macro to the micro level. And although choice is of course easier at the level of the discrete application, nonetheless choice is on the agenda. In education choices will involve above all the extent to which Ireland is to have a real innovation strategy to utilise and develop information technology or remain simply opportunistically taking advantage of EU and multi-national funding. At a more general level, there is a choice emerging between the USA and Europe as forms of social and labour market policy, and consequently of the role of ICT within this. Such choices are necessarily political. Sociology cannot advocate one position or the other, but as a critical discipline it must point out where choices are being made, even if this is in the name of the great unstoppable, all-embracing and utterly pre-determined global information society.
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