In assessing the impact of ICTs on globalisation, we assess the intersection of science and social sciences, to attempt to bridge the greatest transdisciplinary gulf in academic analysis. It is unsurprising that there have been relatively few such attempts, and a basic finding is that social science literature has relatively neglected: [a] study of international (regional and global) economic, social, political and legal phenomena; [b] the domestic response to such international (and therefore) exogenous restraints; [c] the role of technology in the internationalisation of production, finance, information flows, and security structures; [d] the pivotal part played in all the previous fields of inquiry by ICTs; [e] the step change in international integration of economies, nations and societies caused in the past three decades by computer-mediated information transfer, satellite and fibre-optic transmission and digital switching-compression technologies, and latterly the ubiquitous penetration of the Internet and mobile telephony into the developed sections of the global economy and society.The omission of research from nationally-oriented agendas due to funding and resource constraints (in response to which the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, and indeed CRIC, were founded in 1997) is compounded by the disciplinary gulf between social scientists and computer scientists. There are therefore both financial resource and knowledge resource gaps, which urgently require remedial action on the part of funding councils. Where pioneering research has been undertaken on a sustained basis – and the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex is the outstanding UK concentration of such research – the results have been world-leading, recognised as such by the OECD and EU. Indeed, perhaps the best-known examples of the successful marrying of ICT and international public policy are the OECD Science and Technology and Industry Directorate (Paris) and its Information Computing Communications Programme (ICCP), and EU Joint Research Centre (JRC), containing the Institute for Prospective Technology Studies (Seville). More independent science-social science collaboration is urgently required, especially in view of le defi americain which is glaringly obvious in this transdisciplinary study, perhaps as much as anywhere in academic research. Consider the Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA) at the Kennedy School at Harvard, as an example of the transdisciplinary research collaboration required. Associated with that Center are the Information Infrastructure Project (HIIP), Program on Information Resources Policy (PIRP), and Center for Business and Government (CBG). Where such concentrations of expertise are pooled, far greater efforts are possible in bridging the science-social science divide. Further, the dissemination of that research to user communities is achieved to far greater effect, the past director of the HIIP being information infrastructure advisor to the Clinton Administration (Brian Kahin). In the UK, such advice is ad hoc rather than structured.The themes identified above (crudely: parochialism, economic disparities, knowledge disparities, neo-Luddism or technophobia, the neglect of the international study of social impact of ICTs in consequence, and the American challenge) are broadly those which can be identified in the international political economy. In this, academic research reflects the policy arena. I therefore address these themes in both assessing the current state of knowledge, and in assessing the ‘state of play’ in diplomatic terms. I identify these key issues as:1. Continued under-estimation of the importance of international developments to the national policy arena, which are no longer tenable in the face of e-commerce (consider the taxation issue, for instance);2. An exponentially widening gulf in resources between small clusters of financial plenty (e.g. the City of London) and broad swathes of the ‘working poor’ and non-employed;3. An increasing gulf between well-endowed centres of research excellence (e.g. Ivy League universities or the McKinsey Global Institute) and the broad mass of state-financed institutions;4. A gulf between scientific and technological realities in which interlinked global production, finance and knowledge structures are more pervasive than ever in human history (consider the phenomenal growth of both Internet access and mobile phone penetration) and an academic denial of the irreversibility of globalisation;5. A broader societal ignorance of globalisation and ICTs, in which the word ‘globalisation’ has been demonised (e.g. the attacks by anarchists in Seattle 1999 and Davos 2000), yet where the youth generation travels, emails and manipulates global cultural artefacts more ubiquitously than all but utopians could anticipate only five years ago;6. An international economic order in which US-based corporations have become so dominant in world ICT trade, encouraged by an administration which since 1992 has employed strategic trade policy to the advantage largely of ICT-based industries, that the early 1990s predictions of the decline of US hegemony, the growth in stature of Japan and the EU, have been proved (decisively) false.
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Open Access
Feb 18, 2021
Adriana Marotti De Mello + 4
