Greening the networked economy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 167

Being aware of the changes that ICT and the prominence of infor-
mation bring about in the global economy, we nevertheless have to
put these transformations into perspective: ICT is not (yet) turning the
economy upside down as some of the radical New Economy adherents
want us to believe. Nor does informationalisation make the economy
virtual, weightless, dematerialised and footloose. 6 There is no 'sudden'
change towards one dominant informational economy, but, rather, a
mixing of old and new economic forms of production and consump-
tion: informational configurations are parallelled by mass production,
flexible specialisation and craft production (Thompson, 2004 ). And
even in the informational configurations of the networked economy
ICT cannot replace face-to-face interactions completely. Codified, rou-
tinised and scientific knowledge and information is easily transferred
faceless, but tacit knowledge, trust, reliability and contracts need face-
to-face, or handshake-based, interactions. Hence, this explains the
ongoing logic of clustering and proximity of economic production net-
works (e.g., Porter and Ketels, 2003 ). 7 Thus, several authors conclude
that distance still remains important in many economic networks and
chains, and that, in some respects, the 'distance of trade' between coun-
tries is decreasing rather than - as one would expect in times of glob-
alisation and ICT networking - increasing (Thompson, 2004 : 567).
Against the background of such transformation and continuity in the
global networked economy, the next sections analyse how information
and information systems play a role in environmental protection in eco-
nomic practices of production and - to a lesser extent - consumption.

3. In-company environmental management
and public accountability

In his topic The Audit Society, Michael Power ( 1997 ) explores the
explosion of monitoring, verification and communication that has
emerged in various contexts and systems in our modern society. During
the 1980s and early 1990s, the word audit began to be used with increa-
sing frequency, parallelled by the establishment of all kinds of new

6

In Globalization and Environmental Reform, I have dealt more in detail with
the materiality and groundedness of the global economy (Mol, 2001 ).

7

Also within services and financial markets firms seem to concentrate and
conglomerate in a few huge cities. See Sassen ( 1994 ) for a detailed analysis of
the reason behind the geographical concentration of financial firms.