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Data, Information, and Knowledge: Have We Got It Right?

Max H. Boisot, Ian C. MacMillan, and Kyeong Seok Han

in Explorations in Information Space: Knowledge, Actors, and Firms

Economists make the unarticulated assumption that information is something that stands apart from and is independent of the processor of information and its internal characteristics. This book argues ... More

Economists make the unarticulated assumption that information is something that stands apart from and is independent of the processor of information and its internal characteristics. This book argues that they need to revisit the distinctions they have drawn between data, information, and knowledge. Some associate information with data and others associate information with knowledge. But since none of them readily conflates data with knowledge, this suggests too loose a conceptualization of the term ‘information’. This book argues that the difference between data, information, and knowledge is in fact crucial. Information theory and the physics of information provide us with useful insights with which to build an economics of information appropriate to the needs of the emerging information economy.Less

Recapitulation and Conclusion

Max H. Boisot

in Knowledge Assets: Securing Competitive Advantage in the Information Economy

This final chapter explores the broader implications of the analysis for strategic management of knowledge assets in the twenty-first century. In industrialized countries, this kind of management ... More

This final chapter explores the broader implications of the analysis for strategic management of knowledge assets in the twenty-first century. In industrialized countries, this kind of management perhaps holds the key to continued prosperity and social stability. In the emerging economies it offers the prospect of by-passing the dreadful and dehumanizing experience of industrialization through which developed countries initially secured their wealth. As things stand, neither industrialized nor industrializing economies have yet developed a managerial orientation appropriate to the needs of the information economy in general, or the phenomenon of knowledge assets in particular. It has been shown here that far more important than having the physical resources is the ability to do something intelligent with them.Less

The Growth of the Information Economy

Edward N. Wolff

in Does Education Really Help?: Skill, Work, and Inequality

This chapter documents the growth of information workers in the US economy during the postwar period and analyzes the sources of this expansion. The growth in the information economy is important for ... More

This chapter documents the growth of information workers in the US economy during the postwar period and analyzes the sources of this expansion. The growth in the information economy is important for two reasons: First, it could be argued to shed additional light on the factors that explain why workplace skills have not kept up with educational attainment and wages have not grown along with skills and education. Second, it has a direct bearing on the educational and training needs of the labor force. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 5.2 updates the statistics on the composition of the workforce between information and noninformation jobs up to 2000. Section 5.3 uses a decomposition analysis to break down the changes in the information workers' share of the labor force into three parts: the substitution of information labor for other types of labor within the production process—that is, the change in the proportion of information workers in each industry's labor force; the change in each industry's share of the economy's total output; and the change associated with relative variations in labor productivity of the different industries.Less

Introduction

Max H. Boisot

in Knowledge Assets: Securing Competitive Advantage in the Information Economy

Knowledge has come to be viewed as an advantage in its own right and not simply as an improvement of other kinds of assets. Prompted by the rapid spread of the information economy, knowledge assets ... More

Knowledge has come to be viewed as an advantage in its own right and not simply as an improvement of other kinds of assets. Prompted by the rapid spread of the information economy, knowledge assets have only begun to be thought of as economic goods. In contrast to physical assets, knowledge assets could in theory last forever. This chapter briefly summarizes the working hypothesis that will be established in the rest of the book, namely that a firm's distinctive competences, its capabilities, and its technologies can be observed as emerging from the discontinuous effect of its knowledge assets on the spatio-temporal and energy systems that make up its physical assets. Technologies, competences, and capabilities, each in their own system, are manifestations of a firm's knowledge assets operating at diverse levels of organization.Less

The Customer Relations Factory

Simon Head

in The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age

This chapter examines the importance of customer relations management (CRM) in the new economy in the U.S. It states that CRM has moved forward to the center of corporate strategy and the ... More

This chapter examines the importance of customer relations management (CRM) in the new economy in the U.S. It states that CRM has moved forward to the center of corporate strategy and the pre-eminence of CRM has been an insistent theme of recent business literature. Harvard Business School theorist Rosabeth Moss Kanter suggested that this trend may be attributed to the shift from an industrial to an information economy where more people hold jobs that involve human contact.Less

The personal information economy: trends and prospects for consumers

Perri 6

in The glass consumer: Life in a surveillance society

This chapter presents an overview of the personal information economy, exploring its development and importance. It notes the difficulty of overestimating the importance of personal information — ... More

This chapter presents an overview of the personal information economy, exploring its development and importance. It notes the difficulty of overestimating the importance of personal information — global retail organisations take investment decisions based on the most finely grained analysis of consumers's data. It also warns of the risks and builds a framework detailing the risks of the said economy. It notes that traditionally, much attention has been focused on risks of intrusion when considering consumers' information but less attention has been paid to risks to life chances that arise from the ways the economy works.Less

State of Emergency

Gregory Starrett

in Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt

This chapter discusses some examples of the way the public economy of information shapes the representations of the political uses of Islam, stating that the public economy of information is the part ... More

This chapter discusses some examples of the way the public economy of information shapes the representations of the political uses of Islam, stating that the public economy of information is the part of culture which is most firmly grounded in the expectations and worries created by schooling. The examples it presents and discusses were chosen for what they reveal of the public image of Islamicized political activity and the creation of “Islamic publicness.”Less

Conclusion

Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski

in The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom

This book has argued that the real cyber war is a competition among different political economies of the information society. It has shown how discourses of “internet freedom” serve to legitimize a ... More

This book has argued that the real cyber war is a competition among different political economies of the information society. It has shown how discourses of “internet freedom” serve to legitimize a particular political economy of globalism and how the increasingly vocal call for information sovereignty serves a legitimating function for state efforts to govern highly complex societies in a world wired for globally instantaneous communications. By emphasizing four lines of conceptual inquiry—history, social totality, moral philosophy, and praxis—a political-economy framework places the internet-freedom movement in the broader geopolitical and economic context within which strategic actors are competing for resources and power. The book has also examined the various economic and political interests at stake in debates over internet governance by focusing on Google's efforts to dominate each of the four distinct aspects of the information economy, the economics of internet connectivity, and the myth of multistakeholderism. In closing, the book revisits the idea that data is the new oil.Less

The Bar Code: A Micro-technical Force of Change

Andrew Deener

in The Problem with Feeding Cities: The Social Transformation of Infrastructure, Abundance, and Inequality in America

This chapter explains how digital technologies and information management tools transformed the movements of material objects and reshaped food distribution industries. By the 1970s, manufacturing ... More

This chapter explains how digital technologies and information management tools transformed the movements of material objects and reshaped food distribution industries. By the 1970s, manufacturing corporations had already entered the age of automation, but the retailing side of the food system continued to face profitability issues as a high-volume but low-tech sector. Because of the supermarket’s high-volume and low-margin merchandising platform, different arms of the food industry negotiated new shared uses of technical devices, such as bar codes, optical laser scanners, and computer data processors. The new sociotechnical machinery eventually transcended the supermarket by spreading the information management tools into corporate discount retailers and pharmacies. This new age of information and product mobility broke down boundaries between territories, merged the supermarket with the general discount store in the creation of big box stores, and forced supermarkets into another round of profitability constraints.Less

The Rise of Literacy

in Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium

Writing has been taken to imbalance the ancestral ways of knowing, but signs and things keep a fine balance in the natural economy of information. Writing allows an endless accumulation of ... More

Writing has been taken to imbalance the ancestral ways of knowing, but signs and things keep a fine balance in the natural economy of information. Writing allows an endless accumulation of information, and unchecked accumulation leads from eloquence to confusion. Writing has a precision and permanence that human recollection widely shared but cannot match. When literacy occupies an oral culture, it depletes vitality from the community. Literacy can be liberating because the detached information of writing is more widely and easily available than natural or oral information. Writing not only brings near what is distant in time and space, but also allows to realize what otherwise is prohibitively remote as a possibility of conception and imagination.Less

Compiling the Indian IT Workforce

Carol Upadhya

in Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy

Chapter 2 examines the making of the Indian IT workforce, a process that has been shaped not only by IT companies’ requirements for skilled labour but also by the agency of IT workers. It describes ... More

Chapter 2 examines the making of the Indian IT workforce, a process that has been shaped not only by IT companies’ requirements for skilled labour but also by the agency of IT workers. It describes the methods through which IT workers are recruited, trained, and deployed, and highlights the implications of these practices for the social stratification and segmentation of the IT workforce. The chapter also explores the functioning of the software labour market, the flexibilization of IT labour, and the individualization of work and workers. In the fluid and unstable global information economy, software engineers must create their own ‘job security’ and pursue their careers by changing jobs frequently and continually reskilling themselves to retain their ‘employability’. The chapter argues that IT workers have not been simply ‘produced’ by software capital; instead, they actively produce themselves as ‘entrepreneurial’ worker-subjects as they develop strategies of social mobility.Less

From Shoes to Computers to Vapor Mitigation Systems

Peter C. Little

in Toxic Town: IBM, Pollution, and Industrial Risks

This chapter traces Endicott's industrial history by examining the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company (EJ)—the company that made Endicott into the “Magic City” as it transformed the village into a vibrant ... More

This chapter traces Endicott's industrial history by examining the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company (EJ)—the company that made Endicott into the “Magic City” as it transformed the village into a vibrant and profitable commercial and manufacturing center. Both EJ and IBM played critical roles in the area's industrial facelift. By the 1920s, an estimated 20,000 people worked in EJ's factories, with the labor population booming during EJ's golden years in the mid-1940s. This growth spurt was a direct outcome of World War II, since EJ produced an abundance of military footwear during the war years. After the midpoint of the twentieth century, EJ closed due to the rise of the service and information economy. The chapter then describes the emergence of IBM in Endicott, highlighting how the company created some of the earliest computing technologies that set off the “third industrial revolution” and the so-called Information Age.Less