Powerful Dichotomies: Inclusion & Exclusion in the Information Society
Speaker
Abstract
| Technological development, in particular the development of information and communication technologies (ICT), is often presented as the answer to many social problems. Proponents of the Information Society suggest that poverty, failing integration, unemployment, and lack of democracy can be addressed with the appropriate technological means. Inequality is often framed in terms of a digital divide. According to this perspective, a person’s socio-economic status and opportunity for a better life depends on their access to, and capacity to make use of, new technologies. |
| In this book, Ester Barinaga challenges such claims. Her analysis is carefully developed from an ethnographic study of regional development projects founded on the alleged promises of science and technology to solve social problems. She presents the case of Kista Science City, located in the northern outskirts of the Swedish capital Stockholm. Kista Science City, like the Indian ICT-industry centre in Bangalore and Silicon Valley in California, is representative of the high-tech urban clusters, developed through co-operation between business, public policy-makers and higher education, that are a global phenomenon. |
| In an engaged and colourful account employing critical social theory, Barinaga depicts and interprets the practices of Kista Science City. She finds that technology-driven development is superimposed on the prevailing social order, reproducing social inequality and economic disadvantage instead of reducing it. The new, progressive vocabulary of science-based regional development projects tends to mask deeper mechanisms of exclusion, which in this case are often related to categorisation based on ethnicity. However, Barinaga argues that this outcome is not inevitable. She concludes the book by offering ideas for envisioning an effort to destabilise and eventually alter the current state of affairs. |
| This book is recommended reading for all who struggle with social issues in their personal and professional lives, and find that the alluring rhetoric of the information society provides insufficient solutions – researchers, decision makers, investors, politicians, students and interested laypersons alike. |
| Ester Barinaga is Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. This book was written during her stay as a Visiting Scholar at SCANCOR, Stanford University, USA. Her current research interests concern the political economy of ethnic and class relations, with a particular focus on systems of thought and techniques for social cohesion |
| Contact information: |
| Dicea Jansen |
