Towards a Knowledge Society
Author : Debal K SinghaRoy
Publisher : Cambridge University Press, Rs895
A careful contextualisation and comparative perspective — hallmarks of good social science research — define the book. The author is thus able to highlight both the continuities and breaks of Knowledge Society with earlier social arrangements, says Maitrayee Chaudhuri
Knowledge Society has been a buzzword in recent times. Its tenor has been shrill and its presence widespread; from policy documents of States, international institutions and corporates, to popular imagination and everyday life of a whole new generation for whom a world without the internet was unimaginable. Perhaps, the biggest contribution of the book is that it helps demystify its magic by situating it in a specific historical context in the long history of human technology interface.
It recognises its unique transformative potential, but treats it as not a single determining influence, but as one which has worked in close tandem within a political economic world marked by specific economic and political policies of neo-liberal globalisation.
This book consists of 10 chapters including the introduction and conclusion. The introduction offers both a comprehensive account of an ideal Knowledge Society and its critique which is made at two levels: One, at the promise it holds out in popular imagination as an antidote to all problems, as the remedy to contain the damage of unfettered materialism even as it reduces the idea of knowledge to ‘data’; (p 51) and the inherent unequal way it actually functions in societies marked by inequalities and different access to resources.
This basic contention, which is buttressed by empirical evidence, runs through the book. What stands out in the book, a point argued at some length in the introduction, is the ‘historical trajectory’ of Knowledge Society. A careful contextualisation and comparative perspective, hallmarks of good social science research, define the book. The author is thus able to highlight both the continuities and breaks of Knowledge Society with earlier social arrangements. He points out that it ‘emerged from within the institutional and the technological of industrial societies’, but it arose at a point where this very basis proved inadequate to respond to the new challenges of late industrial society.
It is this historical and comparative perspective perhaps which enables him to write a book which is on Knowledge Society but which reveals equal familiarity with developments in the agricultural sector at one end, shifts in the educational sector and with the new cultural practice at the other end. Central to the book and not surprisingly to the introduction is the effort to show the gap between the image of a Knowledge Society and its limits. The image if we refer to Toffler, whom the author invokes, is one where “this new societal arrangement could — with some intelligent help from us — turn out to be the first truly humane civilisation in recorded history.” But one, which in reality, and here the author draws from Castell has created both “information wealth” as well as “information poverty”. (p 23) If one were to go with Touraine, this new world is not just characterised by new modes of development, but also invited new modes of analysis and interpretation.
The latter question I think is important for the practice of social science in general and of sociology in particular. It is for instance often argued that the emergent contemporary demands new analytics and new concepts; that the ‘social’ has been reconfigured and is not what it used to be. Marx’s analysis of capitalism, Weber’s take on bureaucracy and Durkheim’s social facts have had their expiry dates long gone by. Debal SinghRoy’s book appears to suggest otherwise.
His careful examination of what has been happening to the agricultural and industrial sector, to the urban and the rural, to new forms of inequality and social mobility suggest that old categories of class, gender and caste remain pertinent even when discussing knowledge society. For instance, he notes how “both the micro and macro-level data suggest that illiteracy in general has remained concentrated among the scheduled caste and scheduled tribe and in rural areas, while higher and technical education mostly among the general categories and a small section of the other backward classes both in the rural and urban areas”. (p 205) At the same time there are new forms of social mobility.
The book thus shows how there is greater professionalisation taking place across sectors and how even in rural areas “traditional organisational arrangements” are being “reoriented with the emergence of “new organisational arrangements”. (p 249)
The last quarter century in India has seen dramatic changes. Most tangible evidence of these changes has been the growth of the IT sector and the making of a Knowledge Society. Often this development is seen as discrete from other political economic changes that have redefined institutions at all levels including the state. The book’s contention on the other hand is that in India, “the process of emergence of knowledge society is embedded with the emergence of a neoliberal state” (p 307) The state has asserted that “we missed the industrial revolution…leap flogging into knowledge era looks eminently possible…”(p 308)
The problem, however, is the old question about the interface of technology and society with its many inequalities and diversities. There have been sections of Indian society that have benefited in a major way: There have also been new forms of marginalisation and exclusion. What has happened therefore is that society is witness at once to new forms of global cosmopolitan identities as well as often assertions of ‘primordial’ identities.