The Consequences of Information: Institutional Implications of Technological Change

'The Consequences of Information is a brilliant penetrating meditation on the evolution of modernity as we struggle to adapt to our new information "habitat". Jannis Kallinikos describes with force and precision the way our once heterogeneous reality is subjected to the methods of information technology and reconstituted on the microscopic level of the particle: Life is literally turned to dust. Yet this decomposition yields fresh possibilities of redistribution and recomposition. What will be our fate? Will our "progressive emancipation from material constraints" lead to a new disaggregation of resources, shifting power to individual consumers and citizens? Or will it produce a surprising "retraditionalization": a return to feudal social relations in which the individual is wholly absorbed by the institutional order? Kallinikos' fascinating and virtuoso treatise returns the study of information systems to where it belongs - at the heart of debate on the future of institutions and the destiny of the individual.'- Shoshana Zuboff, formerly Harvard Business School, Harvard University, US'Kallinikos develops a brilliant and original analytics to capture one of the deeper meanings of the information era: the disaggregating of reality into the elements of software code and the reconstitution of these elements into novel social forms. Information thus conceived is shown to produce new conditions from the infrastructural bottom-up rather than top-down from the powerful global controllers and makers of information.' - Saskia Sassen, author of Territory Authority Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages'In his comprehensive and systematic investigation into the saturation of the modern world by information and its technologies, Jannis Kallinikos offers us new ways of thinking the social and institutional consequences of this development. Drawing on an impressively wide range of perspectives from information theory, social science and administrative studies to semiotics and philosophy, Kallinikos shows how the contemporary spread and pervasive use of information technology is challenging our conventional tendency to think the world in terms of stable and enduring structures. The new informational world recreates reality as a transient and continuously dissolving panorama of events in space and time. A significant theme of the book is its emphasis on the new plastic and pliable ways of thinking required to grasp the social and institutional implications of these ongoing informational transformations.'- Robert Cooper, Keele University, USThis important book addresses the organizational and economic implications of the new technologies of information and communication. Jannis Kallinikos analyses the recent spectacular growth of information and the self-propelling processes through which technological information is increasingly generated out of the reshuffling and recombination of available and interoperable information sources. He argues that information is no longer simply a resource but a pervading element of socio-economic life that is crucially involved in the redefinition of a variety of organizational practices and modes of economic action. Academics and students in a variety of disciplines, including information studies, information systems, management and organization studies, sociology, social psychology and social policy will find much to interest them in this book.