From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 33

(1973) , arguably one of the founding fathers of the Information Soci-
ety idea, was especially interested in occupational changes: the decline
of jobs in the manufacturing sector and their increase in the service
sector, in which information workers were dominant. The work of
Gouldner ( 1979 ) and Perkin ( 1989 )onprofessionals can be read in
the same tradition. These quantitative calculations and figures have
been questioned and debated by others. The Information Society adher-
ents have been accused of using data that is too aggregated to dis-
tinguish different kinds of informational activities and jobs. Do all
employees in the service sectors or even in the informational organ-
isations really perform informational work? But it is not just quan-
titative economic indicators that have taken a central position in
the economic arguments on the Information Society. Charles Lead-
beater ( 1999 ), for instance, especially looked into what this occupa-
tional change and the increasing importance of information means in
qualitative terms. Knowledge, skills, talent, creativity and the capac-
ity to exploit networks have become the bases of obtaining wealth,
instead of physical effort. This would even require the reformula-
tion of economic theory itself. Labour and capital, considered to
be the central variables and forces of production, are to be com-
plemented, or even replaced, by information and knowledge; the
labour theory of value by the knowledge theory of value (cf. Kumar,
1995 : 12).
Although dominant, the assessment of the coming of an informa-
tion society has not remained restricted to changes in the economic-
technological domain. Bell remains cautious in claiming an overall
transformation of all sectors of society, as he keeps to the idea that
different domains or realms in society are structured and governed
by different dynamics, factors, principles, rationalities and rhythms of
change. And the informational change, according to Bell, is mainly
related to the technoeconomic structure of modern society, leaving
political and cultural domains rather intact. Others, however, are less
cautious and follow the basic logic of revolutionary change, which
claims interrelated transformations of all sectors and domains of a
society. This is how sociologists and historians have understood the
Industrial Revolution. Toffler ( 1981 ) relates the coming of the Infor-
mation Society to changes in not just the techno-sphere, but also in
what he calls the socio-sphere, the power-sphere, the bio-sphere and
the psycho-sphere. The Information Society is then not just a new mode
of production, part of a transformation of the economic structure and