| Contradiction,
Confusion and Hubris: An Afterword
by Nicholas Garnham
I am both gratified and flattered that so many distinguished scholars
have taken the time and energy from what I know are busy lives,
to respond so trenchantly and illuminatingly to my original intervention.
That intervention was intended to stimulate debate and I am glad
that it has begun to do so in such a fruitful fashion. I am pleased
to find that there is a large measure of agreement with the broad
thrust of my argument. Where there are disagreements it will not
be my purpose here to defend myself. Rather this response gives
me an opportunity to expand upon and clarify some of the main arguments
and positions which the occasion of my original keynote meant were
necessarily abbreviated in presentation; sometimes it is clear to
the point of misunderstanding.
First, in response in particular to Melody, let me stress that
the target of my critique was Information Society (IS) policy and
the way in which the narrower aims of telecoms policy and regulation
had been highjacked to serve as a building block for a wider set
of socio-economic policy goals dubbed ‘Information Society’.
Thus I do not agree with Peter Johnston that the aim of EuroCPR
was to build ‘a research capability in telecommunications
regulation and Information Society developments’. The aim
was to build capability in Communication Policy research, initially
focused on telecommunications, but expanding under the impact of
so-called convergence towards a wider view of the communications
sector, including traditional media. In so far as it has developed
in the direction of the IS it is part of the problem not part of
the solution. Thus when Melody describes his participation in efforts
at the FCC to deregulate US telecoms he is describing what I, and
I think Bauer also, would call necessarily messy, short term experimentation.
Because it is experimentation it necessarily rests upon an evidence-based
test of its efficacy even if the actual political process of regulatory
development in reality usually short cuts or aborts such evidence
based experimentation. I have no problem with the continuation of
such work and such policy intervention. Indeed I recently contributed
to a seminar assessing Ofcom's latest document on Telecommunication
Regulatory Strategy in just this spirit. I agree that the imperfections
of markets can only be mitigated by effective policy and regulation.
The problems in telecoms policy thus narrowly defined remain those
of defining the market and, in a situation of market turmoil, judging
the moment when intervention is either desirable or possible. I
also think, and I should perhaps have stressed this more clearly,
that 'the public interest goals', for which in Melody’s model
it is the purpose of regulation to align imperfect markets, are
much more problematic and difficult to define than I think Melody
is assuming.
Indeed one of my main critiques of IS policy is that it defines
a very vague set of public interest goals and then assumes that
a range of very questionable policy interventions are the royal
road to these goals. Here the public interest goals are just another
word for the 'visions' for which Henten calls. I am accused of pessimism
because I will not buy into these, in my view flawed, visions. Here
I will just have to put my hand up and admit that I am not a vision
person. Simon has thus correctly identified my disenchantment with
’grand narratives’. One can, I think, identify a number
of visions with influence on policy, the interests they broadly
serve; and in opposition one can point out their flaws whether in
their realism or in their negative social consequences, and this
critique can and should be based on evidence, and indeed on the
'micro storia' for which Simon calls, a call I heartily endorse.
But the 'optimistic' alternative is not simply to produce another
equally flawed, even if alternative, vision. As Brecht said 'pity
the country that needs heroes'.
Let me now turn therefore to my critique of IS policy and its use
of telecoms and ICT industrial policy. Here my critique had two
parts which may have become confused. The first was a macro level
critique of the Lisbon agenda and the assumptions lying behind it
as to the contemporary dynamics of global capitalism and Europe’s
place within it. Here Melody is right to stress that underlying
my whole position, and my original keynote intervention, is an argument
in political economy. This was assumed rather than argued in my
original intervention because the nature of the occasion led me
to focus on the specifics of IS policy and its link with ICT and
telecoms policy. But one response in particular makes it clear that
this level of argument has to be pursued in more depth. As Melody
rightly says ‘this contested arena of policy research deserves
serious testing through critical analysis and debate’. The
illustration that this is so comes in Johnston’s response,
who, while apparently accepting many of my micro arguments concerning
industrial policy, continues to support a broad continuation of
such policies on the grounds of the very political economy of the
global information society and Europe’s position in it that
I thought had been one of the main targets of my critique. Let me
therefore clarify. My argument has two steps. The first is that
IS policy, and the associated vision of a knowledge economy, is
a response to a particular and flawed analysis of the global political
economy. It is this that primarily invalidates the Lisbon agenda
not its specifics relating to telecommunications and IS technologies.
The second step in the argument is that, even if the political economic
analysis was broadly correct, IS technologies do not play the role
ascribed to them and thus related policies are misguided. In response
Johnston claims first that the EU has had three policy aims:
a) Industrial policy to consolidate the European ICT sector and
make it globally competitive;
b) Consumer welfare policies to provide a wider range of more affordable
services;
c) Policies for sustained economic growth stimulating innovation
across all the economy, including in the provision of public services;
and that these goals are tightly linked. The central thrust of
my argument, to which I still hold, was to challenge this linkage,
and especially the linkage between c) on the one hand and a) and
b) on the other. It is on this assumed linkage that the IS policy
argument rests. Johnston then goes on to claim that the policies
in their first phase have been ‘remarkably successful’,
in particular he claims ‘consolidation and competition have
achieved economies of scale and scope, with substantial price reduction
for consumers and a wider range of services available to more people’.
There seems to be a general problem with how one can have greater
consolidation and greater competition. In fact of course there has
been consolidation in some parts of the total sector and greater
competition in others. In so far as consumer welfare has been enhanced
it has been the result of narrowly focused regulation and extensive
liberalisation of carriage. The extent to which this would have
been driven anyway, even in a less liberalised market, by technological
development, remains in my view an open historical question. What
does not seem to be questionable is that industrial supply side
policies have had nothing whatever to do with it for better or worse.
Johnston then goes on to argue that while policy needs adjustment
in the light of changes in the ‘technology landscape’
and the global market, policies remarkably similar to those of the
past are still need to ‘transform Europe into a competitive
and dynamic knowledge society’, and that to reject this as
I do is to retreat to ‘rearranging the deckchairs’.
Well it is true that I would rather have better arranged deckchairs
than the liner foundering because it is steering for a distant way
point on a faulty navigation system rather than skirting the reefs
in its immediate vicinity through the visual sighting of channel
markers. I think on the contrary that we need a much more disaggregated
analysis of Europe’s supposed economic problems (much exaggerated
in my judgement) and thus of the policy instruments that might possibly
make a difference without seeking linkages we can neither understand
nor control.
This then leads me to the two major thematic issues raised by respondents
– issues which I think need much further debate. The first
is the central political economic question raised primarily by Steinmueller,
but also by Simon and Bauer – how do we understand changes
in the global capitalist economic system over the last three decades
and what role have ICTs played in those changes. This remains difficult
and contentious terrain. I will simply say here that I think the
jury is still out and probably always will be out on the contribution
of ICTs, and therefore of future IS oriented policies, to differential
rates of productivity growth and the dynamics and restructuring
of global markets. I will just note however first, that even if
one accepts the measuring methodologies a good proportion of US
productivity growth outside the ICT sector itself seems to be attributable
to good old fashioned labour exploitation and second, that contrary
to the post-Fordists and weightless economy advocates the drive
for economies of scale in goods manufacturing still seems to be
the major driver of globalisation and that the major shortages and
bottlenecks now affecting the global economy are oil and physical
transport infrastructures. Thus while I have no basic disagreement
with Steinmueller that there has been a range of economic ‘activities
where specific kinds of knowledge play a central role and where
ICTs are employed as the primary tools of production’ leading
to an emphasis on the role of the telecommunications and computing
industries in the supply of improved producer good and services’
I do disaggree as to the relative weight to be placed upon this
within an overall political economy, and the extent to which these
developments can be shaped, whether to be accelerated, redirected
or aborted, by policy intervention. Finally Steinmueller argues
that the concepts of the knowledge-based economy and the IS, rightly
understood, are inextricably linked to a shift away from supply
side and technologically determined analyses and policies towards
a user-based approach. While this sounds immediately sympathetic,
since users can easily be taken to be you and me and all the other
little people just waiting to be liberated from the supply dominated
‘system’, there are in my judgement two problem with
this approach. This may be as much my failure of understanding and
perception as a failure of the approach, but in debate we can perhaps
see whether others share my worries. The first problem is with the
definition of users, especially since as Steinmueller himself claims,
the current major users are the supply side and at the same time
the concept of users can too easily be confused with consumers.
Secondly, and here there are similarities with socialism, I have
never yet seen a half way clear or realistic description of what
a user oriented knowledge economy or set of policies would actually
look like, or how they would work.
Finally I turn to the important question raised by both Mansell
and Fransman – namely if it is true that there has been an
absence of sceptical, critical voices in the IS policy arena, how
do we remedy the situation, how sociologically and politically do
we create a space for the development and propagation of such voices.
This is a particularly urgent and pertinent question if, as I have
been arguing, policy is an essentially experimental process. It
is also ironic that we should be asking this question in the context
of the IS, which is defined by some at least as a society which
maximises diversity of voice and thus maximises cultural diversity
and innovation of all types. I have no answer to this question.
But I think we do need to start by focusing on those contradictions
in current IS policies, at least in Europe, that circulate around
it. First of course Intellectual Property policy and the inherent
tension, and thus balance to be struck, between the free circulation
of ideas and incentives to creation. Second the tension between
the drive to increase the output of trained ‘knowledge workers’
and the desire of governments and industrial corporations to minimise
the expenditure on and supposedly maximise the economic efficiency
of the knowledge worker and knowledge output system, higher education
and research, and link it to narrow definitions of its contribution
to the nation’s economy. Finally, in the EU, the centralisation
and increased directedness of research policy and funding that stems
from the topdown industrial and economic policy drive associated
with the Lisbon agenda and other IS initiatives.
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