Alistair S. Duff - A Normative Theory of the Information Society

1Reinventing Government in the

Information Age

International Practice in

IT-Enabled Public Sector Reform

Edited by Richard Heeks

2Information Technology in

Government

Britain and America

Helen Margetts

3Information Society Studies

Alistair S. Duff

4National Electronic Government

Building an Institutional

Framework for Joined Up

Government A Comparative

Study

Edited by Martin Eifert and Jan

Ole Pschel

5Local Electronic Government

A Comparative Study

Edited by Helmut Drke

6National Governments and

Control of the Internet

A Digital Challenge

Giampiero Giacomello

7The Politics of Cyberconfl ict

Security, Ethnoreligious and

Sociopolitical Confl icts

Athina Karatzogianni

8Internet and Society

Social Theory in the Information

Age

Christian Fuchs

9Hacking Capitalism

The Free and Open Source

Software Movement

Johan Sderberg

10Urban Youth in China

Modernity, the Internet

and the Self

Fengshu Liu

11Network Governance of Global

Religions

Jerusalem, Rome, and Mecca

Michel S. Laguerre

12Migration, Diaspora and

Information Technology in

Global Societies

Edited by Leopoldina Fortunati,

Raul Pertierra and Jane Vincent

13A Normative Theory of the

Information Society

Alistair S. Duff

A sequel and companion volume, although freestanding, to my Information Society Studies (Routledge 2000), this book was initially drafted during a sabbatical partly spent at the University of Oxford, with generous funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am grateful to William H. Dutton and company at the Oxford Internet Institute, and to Hazel Hall, Robert Beveridge and other colleagues at Edinburgh Napier University who helped me bear the cross of interdisciplinary work. Going further back, my education benefi ted from the input of eminent political philosophers such as Peter Winch, G. A. Cohen and Michael Lessnoff and information scientists such as Blaise Cronin and A. J. Meadows. The bibliography registers numerous (some might say, too many) additional influences, not least that of Daniel Bell, whose writings first inspired my interest in the information society thesis. I am thankful to Max Novick, Terry Clague and others at Routledge for having confidence in this project, recklessly ambitious (I can now see) though it was. I wish also here to remember my father, Robert S. Duff (19201989), who alongside his achievements as a cardiologist, founded in the late-1970s a small company called The Information Corporation; perhaps he had heard the faint heartbeats of an embryonic society. My main debt, however, must be to Elizabeth, for her indefatigable support of myself and our children, Alexander, Ruaridh and Laura.

Although this monograph comprises original work throughout, early versions of some ideas were published as follows (in chronological order):

Social democracy and information media policy, in B. Rockenbach and T. Mendina (eds) Ethics and Electronic Information: a Festschrift for Stephen Almagno (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2003), pp. 15465.

Social welfare aspects of information with special reference to news, in Proceedings of the IADIS (International Association for Development of the Information Society) International Conference on e-Society , vol. 2, Lisbon, Portugal, June 36 2003 , pp. 7736.

Ethical messages: R. H. Tawney confronts the information age, Ethical Space 1(3) 2004, pp. 1720 (with R. Melville).

For a new nanny state: the role of national information services in postindustrial societies, in T. Mendina and J. J. Britz (eds) Information Ethics in the Electronic Age: Current Issues in Africa and the World (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2004), pp. 155-62

The past, present, and future of information policy: towards a normative theory of the information society, Information, Communication & Society 7(1) 2004, pp. 69-87

The sickness of an information society: R. H. Tawney and the post-industrial condition, Information, Communication & Society 7(3) 2004, pp. 403-22

Social engineering in the information age, The Information Society 21(1) 2005, pp. 6771.

Laying a foundation of fact: Fabianism and the information society thesis, Information, Communication & Society 9(4) 2006, pp. 54162.