Economy Of Signs Research Articles

Media Is Driving Work

Media Is Driving Work

Business service firms, service space and the management of change

The growth of business service firms represents the latest stage in a continuing twentieth century process of technological and organizational restructuring of production and labour skills. It is associated with the rising information intensiveness of production and the development of an economy of signs. Business service activities located in service spaces drive innóva.tions both in production technology and in management systems. The co-presence of business service firms with their clients as well as other business service firms shapes the possibilities of trust between them. A detailed case study of the way in which large client firms utilize the services of independent business service companies is provided. This is followed by an examination of the relationship between small firms and business service expertise. A dual information economy may be developing in which large firms are able to search for specialist business service expertise irrespective of its location, while SMEs are tied into local providers of more generalist expertise.

Book Review: Autonomy and Social Policy, Ministers and Parliament: Accountability in Theory and Practice, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Global Order, The New Telecommunications: A Political Economy of Network Evolution, Telecommunications in Transition: Policies, Services and Technologies in the European Community, The Gulf Crisis and its Global Aftermath, Spider's Web: Bush, Saddam, Thatcher and the Decade of Deceit, The

Book Review: Autonomy and Social Policy, Ministers and Parliament: Accountability in Theory and Practice, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Global Order, The New Telecommunications: A Political Economy of Network Evolution, Telecommunications in Transition: Policies, Services and Technologies in the European Community, The Gulf Crisis and its Global Aftermath, Spider's Web: Bush, Saddam, Thatcher and the Decade of Deceit, The

Forget Postmodernism? Notes from De Bunker

Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space, London, Thousand Oaks, Cal., and New Delhi: Sage, 1994, £45, paperback £13.95, vii+360 pp. Chris Rojek and Bryan Turner, (eds.), Forget Baudrillard?, London and New York: Roudedge, 1993, £37.50, paperback £12.99, xviii+170 pp. Keith Tester, The Life and Times of Post-Modernity, London and New York: Roudedge, 1993, £37.50, paperback £11.99, 168 pp.

Globalised Religion?: The ‘parliament of the world's religions’ (Chicago 1993) in theoretical perspective

Abstract This paper tests the hypothesis that contemporary global and globalised religion as exemplified in the Chicago ‘Parliament of the World's Religions’ of 1993 may be regarded as a resource which is central, rather than marginal to current human concerns in a threatened world. The paper is structured as follows. First, a short personal narrative gives some sense of what happened at the Parliament, and how this affected one of those present. Second, as a means of conveying the scale of the meeting, a brief content analysis and interpretation of the programme shows how (within certain limits) collaboration was made possible. Third, three insights are drawn from current sociology that facilitate an informed, albeit preliminary, evaluation of the Parliament as emancipatory event. These are: i) recent globalisation theory of the world system (Roland Robertson and Peter Beyer); ii) differentiation in a social reality understood as an “economy of signs and space”; (Scott Lash and John Urry); and in) the se...

Book Reviews

Book Reviewed in this article: D. Smith (Ed.), The Apartheid City and Beyond: Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa. Eviatar Zerubavel, Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America. Bertell Ollman, Dialectical Investigations. Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space.

Book Review: Economies of Signs and Space

Book Review: Economies of Signs and Space

Economies of Signs and Space.

This is a novel account of social change that supplants conventional understandings of `society' and presents a sociology that takes as its main unit of analysis flows through time and across space. Developing a comparative analysis of the UK and US, the new Germany and Japan, Lash and Urry show how restructuration after organized capitalism has its basis in increasingly reflexive social actors and organizations. The consequence is not only the much-vaunted `postmodern condition' but also a growth in reflexivity. In exploring this new reflexive world, the authors argue that today's economies are increasingly ones of signs - information, symbols, images, desire - and of space, where both signs and social subjects - refugees, financiers, tourists and fl[ci]aneurs - are mobile over ever greater distances at ever greater speeds.

Other than this: ‘An economy of signs’ and ‘fabled territories’

Other than this: ‘An economy of signs’ and ‘fabled territories’

The Last Post?

Postmodernism is as various as the books about it, indeed sometimes created by them. But whatever the tones and stances of the different postmodernisms whether 'carnavalesque', anarchistic, sceptical, cynical, demonic or tragic-comic they are changed, we are all changed, by the recent events in Eastern Europe, by the apparent collapse of Socialism and Marxism, and thereby the vindication of the postmodern spirit, which can applaud and proclaim: 'I told you so!' as it watches the last claybottomed bastion of the Enlightenment 'project' topple to the ground, for 'Now you can be like us'. Postmodemism acquires a status and legitimation it had never dreamt of. The 'wall' is removed and put up for sale and the deprived crowds hurtle across the gap to savour the hi-tech of Western capitalism. The market economy surges to the East upon a tide of pluralism. An ironic playwright becomes President of Czechoslovakia. Communist darkness glows with the designer commodity. History has lost its meaning, indeed reached its end according to a Japanese-American academic, echoing Daniel Bell's 'end of ideology' of the fifties, when the capitalist consensus was complete this side of the Elbe and 'post-industrialism' had just been born. The present situation is both a return to the consensus of those days and dramatically different. Gone is the cold-war nightmare of the Bomb. Gone are the old fixities and frontiers. Multinational capital is melting the globe into a new consensus as Socialism declines and the Third World languishes. In the de-industrialised West the 'information society' is born, propelled by monetarism and dominated by the media and the image. Poverty, homelessness, unemployment grow, but in the illusory world of Thatcherism, where society does not exist, the individual is free to do what she or he likes not in the old Rabelaisian sense of selffulfillment or delight, but in the 'postmodern' Nietzschean one of the 'will to power'. Even this 'will to power' shrinks, according to Kroker and Cook, to a mere 'will to will' as all purpose and meaning, indeed all reality drains out of this society and its members rush hysterically after short-term profits and excitements which can never satisfy. The Western world, according to this vision, resembles Baudrillard's 'simulacrum', a second order world of media and information which banishes the real and produces an economy of signs without referents, a world without depth, a world of spectacle, display and surfaces, of designer commodities and aestheticised needs into which the hapless inhabitants try vainly to 'implode' in search of something new. It is Nietzsche's nihilist desert. The actual reality of the homeless, the poor and the unemployed has no place in this metaphysical scheme. (A predilection for surface over depth is common coinage among postmodernists from Deleuze onwards, for depth connotes cause and meaning.) There is another, apparently more optimistic, face to postmodernism, which says: it's all over the grand narratives, the Enlightenment project, ideologies, causes, goals, profundities, totalities, homogeneities, for look what they did: did they not result