Introduction: new frontiers of environmental governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 11

basic premise has been that knowledge and information are becoming
the strategic resource and transforming agent of the post-industrial
society” (Bell, 1980 : 531). Social scientists such as Daniel Bell ( 1973 ,
1980 ), Alvin Toffler ( 1970 , 1981 ) but also Alain Touraine ( 1971 ) and
even André Gorz ( 1982 ) started to reorient their initial writings of the
material underpinnings of modernity to more cultural processes, ser-
vice sectors, new social movements and information. Although these
and other scholars share some basic starting ideas - most notably
for us the growing importance of information and informational pro-
cesses in social development - it would be a major mistake to put
all postindustrial society and Information Society scholars and advo-
cates under one common denominator. In an illuminating study, Boris
Frankel ( 1987 ) analysed the similarities and differences in what he
labelled left-wing and right-wing postindustrial utopians. In analysing
the origins, continuities and differences of postindustrial thinkers and
postmodernism, Kumar ( 1995 ) equally illustrated the variety of ideas
and analyses among postindustrial and Information Society analysts
and advocates. And, finally, in a number of topics, Frank Webster
( 2002 ;Webster and colleagues, 2004 ) has brought together the main
founding fathers and contributors to the Information Society thesis,
illustrating their diverging approaches, assessments and theoretical
stance.
In academic studies on the changing character of modern society in
the 1980s information lost its prominent place, only to regain it in
the 1990s with the emergence of a group of scholars that we will bring
together under the label Information Age. 6 According to these scholars,
in the 1990s information, information technologies and informational
processes became crucial in understanding and defining a new phase in
modernity, often labelled late, reflexive or global modernity. Especially
with the work of Manuel Castells (and especially his major trilogy The
Information Age ; 1996 /1997), information became widely accepted
as a key element that restructures modern society under conditions
of globalisation. With him, general and theoretical sociologists such as
Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and John Urry 7 focused on information
and communication technology, globalisation and global networks and

6

Several authors earlier - before the 1990s - coined the term Information Age
(e.g., Naisbitt, 1984 , for a timely use).

7

Others have preceded or followed their line of investigating (cf. Sassen, 1994 ;
Gunaratne, 2002 ), resulting in what we have labelled elsewhere a sociology of
networks and flows (Mol and Spaargaren, 2006 ).