The Consequences of Information: Institutional Implications of Technological Change

This 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.

Table of Contents:
Contents: 1. Organizations, Information, Networks 2. Technology Design and Social Systems 3. Information Growth as a Self-Referential Process 4. Excursus on Meaning, Purpose and Information 5. Networks Revisited 6. Addendum on Networks and Institutions 7. The Organizational Order of Modernity 8. Epilogue on Technology and Institutions References Index

About the Author :
Jannis Kallinikos, Professor in the Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, London School of Economics, UK

Review :
'Kallinikos' forceful and elegantly written book draws on an impressively wide range of perspectives from information theory, social science and organization theory. It should be of interest to scholars seeking a comprehensive understanding of how technology is involved in the making of social and institutional forms. . . Kallinikos' rare combination of approaches to his subject - not only switching between or digging beneath various academic fields, but even when necessary placing himself in an integrative position above specific fields - should make this an important contribution. . .' 'In The Consequences of Information Kallinikos provides a detailed analysis of the variety of ways in which information gets involved in social and economic life and the consequences such an involvement has for people and organizations, the development and use of ICT. . . The Consequences of Information makes an important contribution to the understanding of contemporary use of ICT and its relation to escalating patterns of information growth. . . the book is an excellent resource for IS scholars in formulating innovative and relevant research questions, taking into consideration the complexities related to new ICT while building on sound social theories.' '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.' 'Kallinikos develops 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.'