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Bureaucracies in the Weberian mould, whether of the state or corporate type, are rational-legal structures organized to deliver order, stability, and predictability. Early developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) appeared set to deliver such an outcome. Yet the new economy turns out to be more ‘distributed’ than had originally been expected. What is the nature of the challenge that this poses for bureaucracies? To address this question, this chapter first presents a conceptual framework, the Information-Space or I-Space, which allows for an exploration of the relationship between how knowledge is structured and how it flows within and between populations of agents. This chapter then examines what cultural and institutional challenges the new ICTs pose for both state and corporate bureaucracies, confronted as they are with the complexities of an increasingly distributed social order.

This introductory chapter sets out the rationale of the book and outlines its major themes. It seeks to generate an overall interpretation of health policy reforming under New Labour based on empirically grounded and comparative case studies of managed networks drawn from four health policy arenas. It highlights our distinctive contribution to the debate, bringing in organizing concepts of wicked problems and governmentality. It suggests that if managed networks are to make substantial progress then they need to be supported in three key domains (cross-organizational ICTs, cross-organizational learning, and lateral leadership). It finally provides signposts to each of the chapters in turn.

Domestic translocal home town networks and international diasporic networks are now enabled anew in realities of daily communication through the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The phenomenon of working-class ICTs and rapid change-over in ICT adoption and use is a parallel concept for social mobility. The centers of capital concentration in China are increasingly wired, and working-class ICTs are filling in the wide gaps of uneven informational development. From the perspective of both the idea of public space for citizen expression in the Chinese city and the public sphere of civil society and its dependence on a critical media, it is suggested that the evolving information society in China will continue to depend on the use of ICTs and their informational potential.

This chapter presents an overview on the making of working-class communities where the information have-less and working-class information and communication technologies (ICTs) are most concentrated, specifically the concrete urban places where the information have-less live and work. It considers the urban village (chengzhongcun) and the factories. The chapter analyzes the commercial informational services in Shipai Village based on data collected from April to December 2007, and shows that the booming IT sector in Shipai Village positively affected the indigenous population. It also reveals that the cases of Foxconn and Uniden exhibit the possibility of change in Chinese factories. Workers in factory dormitories are now much less separated from urban society and much less atomized with the spread of working-class ICTs.

This chapter examines the social distribution of diffusion, concentrating on differences in information and communication technologies (ICTs) use that are dependent on age. Although adoption of new technologies declines with age, and ‘technophobic’ attitudes increase, there is considerable variation within age groups. People should not dismiss the older population as being technologically illiterate. In fact, the key distinction determining use or non-use is not age itself but resources. Older people tend to be poorer. In addition to the effects of age itself, their relative lack of resources determines their use of the new information technologies.

There is a measure of uncertainty in the adoption of new information and communications technologies (ICTs). For instance, people drop in or out of usage in rather complicated ways. This chapter looks at this uncertainty in a different way, through the detailed history of people's decisions to use a computer or the Internet for the first time. Here we can see that a range of influences, which are not easy to predict, need to be taken into account. The chapter argues that it is possible to discern patterns in usage (e.g. in how people use technology as an interface with the real world, and how other people mediate this relationship). It finds that one cannot see either the technology or the individual user as an ‘enclosed’ entity. Computer behaviour is a complex package of interrelationships.

Youth is a major predictor of use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). This chapter attempts to give a detailed examination of the functions for which teenagers use the Internet. It notes that interpersonal communication and downloading music dominate teens' time online. Almost all of teens' online communication is with other teens that they know from school and other local contexts, although online gaming and participation in chat rooms puts them in contact with strangers. By analysing the multiple conversational threads intertwined in an online chat room, the chapter provides a description of how teenagers use online conversation to cope with the perennial concerns of adolescent life, such as gender and racial identity, sexual development, and romantic partners.

This introductory chapter discusses the relationship between social change, religion, and women's lives and self-definition in the contemporary world. Using international and interdisciplinary perspectives reflective of different religious traditions, this volume pays attention to the specific experiences and positions of women, or particular groups of women, to understand current patterns of religiosity and religious change. Recent studies have shown that there is a strong connection between processes of change — such as the impact of globalization, increased intercultural and transcultural interaction and exchange, migration flows, and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) — and religious identities. Overall, recent literature has revealed a great complexity and often contradiction in late modern negotiations of religion and secularism by women and men, and a range of possibilities for change.

Certain epistemologies, politics, and metaphysics are built into mass produced technological offerings. Apparently neutral seeming tools carry normative principles, and are built on unexamined assumptions about social relations. This chapter argues for comprehending the situated-ness of design by attending to how these assumptions and interests are exposed by the use, and the repurposing, of technologies in differing social and historical situations. As many of the examples detailed in the volume refer to cross-cultural appropriations, subversions, or unexpected (re)-uses of technologies, we discuss the specific treatment of knowledge in different social and cultural contexts, and the effects of particular Euro-American assumptions about knowledge and communication on the design of ICTs. The chapter discusses the potential of anthropology and ethnography as modes of approaching and understanding the design and use of technologies, and makes a strong argument, through examples from Papua New Guinea and the US, for the specificity of technology and design as emergent in particular social relations and forms.

The chapter examines why and how the Kelabit, a people of Central Borneo, engaged with information and communication technologies through the electronic Bario (e-Bario) development initiative. It explores the ways that aspects of Kelabit society and history provided the context for implementation of the project, and constituted a rationale for attitudes to social change among the Kelabit. The chapter argues that the basis for adoption and application of ICT in the Kelabit Highlands was framed by local understandings of ‘progress’ and ‘development’, and conditioned by fundamental Kelabit concepts of doo-ness, or ‘goodness’, and iyuk, or status mobility. Through doo-ness and iyuk the kelabit engaged with new tropes of success and progress associated with the e-Bario initiative as a development project. The Kelabit used ICT to facilitate greater political agency and capacity for engagement with government, to preserve their cultural identity and protect traditional land rights. The hegemonic imperatives of new forms of technology were subordinated to and integrated with existing practices and values, sociopolitical arrangements and products in the Kelabit community. The Kelabit case thus illustrates the ways in which engagement and appropriation of developmental initiatives can subvert the intended outcomes of policy makers with regard to the use of ICTs as drivers of development.

Networks in sexual health services began in the mid-1980s in response to the needs of people affected by HIV/AIDS and were mandated for all sexual health services in the National Strategy for Sexual Health (DoH, 2001). This chapter compares and contrasts two urban sexual health networks. Metropolitan City was separately funded and clinician led. It focused on service reconfiguration and improvement, achieving some success in meeting new government guidelines on speedy referral. Cathedral City's network, run by the Primary Care Trust, had a greater focus on prevention issues, particularly teenage pregnancy. Neither network was wholly successful in meeting the needs of service users from ethnic minorities. Both networks benefited from strong leadership (initially tri-partite in Metropolitan City) and had systems for promoting organizational learning. New ICTs helped in some ways but were a hindrance in others. Availability of new resources was a key factor in enabling network development and functioning.

It has been argued that new ICTs will be important in the development of effective networks. This chapter considers if evidence from our eight case studies supports this assertion. Statistical data collected for reporting purposes were often considered irrelevant or flawed and sometimes misinterpreted. A number of networks were trying to develop ways of sharing clinical information, often hampered by system incompatibilities and in some cases by reluctance to allow knowledge to cross organizational boundaries. ICTs could have a role in governance and governmentality. However, reporting systems were often dismissed as 'tick box' exercises, though statistical information was sometimes used to influence dissenters to conform to group norms. In a few instances new ICTs, such as video conferencing and websites, were used in creative ways to promote organizational learning. Overall, the chapter concludes that ICTs were not acting as a major driver of organizational transformation towards network forms.

The introduction explains that the main argument and narrative of this book is that technology and romanticism are not in opposition to each other. The literature of the philosophy of technology lacks attention to the relationship between romanticism and technology; conversely, in related fields like cultural studies, sociology, and media studies, there is much literature about this relationship and its history. This book focuses on specific and contemporary technologies and critically examines its own arguments. The book also discusses how to move past romanticism, while acknowledging that the means of analysis are informed by Romanticism. It is comprised of three parts which discuss the traditional opposition between technology and romanticism, the complex relationship between them, and the ways to move beyond romantic and machine thinking.

Chapter 5 continues constructing the “hybridity” and “fusion” narrative, but now focused on contemporary electronic ICTs. For the purpose of trying to understand the relation between romanticism and these ICTs, it constructs the working thesis that contemporary use and development of ICTs can meaningfully be interpreted as contributing to, if not completing, material romanticism’s project to marry Enlightenment and Romanticism: rather than creating new “machines”, there is an attempt to reach a synthesis of rationalism and romanticism by fusing humans and machines. The chapter reveals romanticism in the development and use of smartphones, social media, games, surveillance technology, algorithmic art, robots, transhumanist human enhancement, and other technological practices and phenomena. It is also shown how romanticism and even gothic is present in contemporary science and scientific-technological practice. It seems that with these new hybrids, technology and romanticism merge to an unprecedented extent.

This book offers a panoramic view of working-class information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the information have-less, and develops a systematic examination of the emergent working-class network society in urban China. Part I describes the diverse forms of working-class ICTs—their patterns of diffusion, transformation, and the broader implications—while Part II analyzes the different groups of the information have-less: their informational needs, the way they use and appropriate communication technologies, and the dilemmas they face. Part III evaluates how the have-less people and their technologies come together to produce concrete urban places and critical events that mark the beginning of a new class formation process in the enlarged network society. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in the book is given.

This chapter offers an overview of the basic conditions of have-less migrants under conditions of industrialization and urbanization in a global context. It examines the link between have-less migrants and their working-class information and communication technologies (ICTs), concentrating on the connection between empowerment and networked connectivity. The chapter then describes variations among have-less migrants by gender, ethnicity, and regional identity, and their translocal networking through working-class ICTs. It shows that ICT connectivity produces openings for empowerment and upward social mobility, and also paves the way for alienation and disempowerment in the context of an overwhelmingly commercialized urban society. Physical mobility has increased with the spread of working-class ICTs. The chapter then suggests that the rise of working-class ICTs is a harbinger of new class dynamics.