The Diffusion of Military Power examines how the financial and organizational challenges of adopting new methods of fighting wars can influence the international balance of power. Michael Horowitz ...argues that a state or actor wishing to adopt a military innovation must possess both the financial resources to buy or build the technology and the internal organizational capacity to accommodate any necessary changes in recruiting, training, or operations. How countries react to new innovations--and to other actors that do or don't adopt them--has profound implications for the global order and the likelihood of war.
This book presents the previously untold history of the use of new media in Democratic electoral campaigning over the last decade. Drawing on open-ended interviews with more than fifty political ...staffers, fieldwork during the 2008 electoral cycle, and archival research, the book follows a group of technically skilled Internet staffers who came together on the Howard Dean campaign and created a series of innovations in campaign organization, tools, and practice. After the election, these individuals founded an array of consulting firms and training organizations and staffed a number of prominent Democratic campaigns. In the process, they carried their innovations across Democratic politics and contributed to a number of electoral victories, including Barack Obama’s historic bid for the presidency. The book contributes to an interdisciplinary body of scholarship from communication, sociology, and political science. The book theorizes processes of innovation in online electoral politics. It shows how the innovations of the Dean and Obama campaigns were the product of the movement of staffers between industries, organizational structures that provided a space for technical development, and incentives for experimentation. The book also analyzes how Dean’s former staffers created an infrastructure for Democratic new media campaigning after the 2004 elections that helped transfer knowledge, practice, and tools across electoral cycles and campaigns. The book shows how organizational contexts shaped the use of tools by the Obama campaign, analyzes the emergence of data systems that facilitate electoral coordination, and reveals how cultural work mobilizes supporters to participate in collective action.
InConfronting Dystopia, a distinguished group of scholars analyze the implications of the ongoing technological revolution for jobs, working conditions, and income. Focusing on the economic and ...political implications of AI, digital connectivity, and robotics for both the Global North and the Global South, they move beyond diagnostics to seek solutions that offer better lives for all. Their analyses of the challenges of technology are placed against the backdrop of three decades of rapid economic globalization. The two in tandem are producing the daunting challenges that analysts and policymakers must now confront.
The conjuncture of recent advances in AI, machine learning, and robotization portends a vast displacement of human labor, argues the editor, Eva Paus. AsConfronting Dystopiashows, we are on the eve of-indeed we are already amid-a technological revolution that will impact profoundly the livelihoods of people everywhere in the world.
Across a broad and deep set of topics, the contributors explore whether the need for labor will inexorably shrink in the coming decades, how pressure on employment will impact human well-being, and what new institutional arrangements-a new social contract, for example, will be needed to sustain livelihoods. They evaluate such proposals as a basic income, universal social services, and investments that address key global challenges and create new jobs.
Contributors:Vandana Chandra, Mignon Duffy, Dieter Ernst, Vincent Ferraro, Martin Ford, Juliana Martinez Franzoni, Irmgard Nubler, Robert Pollin, David Rueda, Diego Sanchez-Ancochea, Guy Standing, Stefan Thewissen
"Bessen sets out to refute the arguments of... techno-pessimists, relying on economic analysis and on a fresh reading of history" ( The Wall Street Journal ). Technology is constantly changing our ...world, leading to more efficient production. But where once technological advancements dramatically increased wages, the median wage has remained stagnant over the past three decades. Many of today's machines have taken over the work of humans, destroying old jobs while increasing profits for business owners and raising the possibility of ever-widening economic inequality. Here, economist and software company founder James Bessen discusses why these remarkable advances have, so far, benefited only a select few. He argues the need for unique policies to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to implement rapidly evolving technologies. Currently, this technical knowledge is mostly unstandardized and difficult to acquire, learned through job experience rather than in classrooms, but labor markets rarely provide strong incentives for learning on the job. Basing his analysis on intensive research into economic history as well as today's labor markets, Bessen explores why the benefits of technology can take decades to emerge. Although the right policies can hasten the process, policy has moved in the wrong direction, protecting politically influential interests to the detriment of emerging technologies and broadly shared prosperity. This is a thoughtful look at what leaders need to do to ensure success not only for the next quarter, but for society in the long term. "Everyone agrees that education is the key to wage growth. But what kind of education?... This enlightening and insightful book... shows that economic history can provide some useful and surprising answers." —Hal Varian, chief economist at Google
Drawing on a number of disciplines and an ethnographic analysis of 250 Facebook political groups, Marichal explores how Facebook's emphasis on social connection impacts key dimensions of political ...participation: e.g. mobilization, deliberation, and attitude formation.
Militaries with state-of-the-art information technology sometimes bog down in confusing conflicts. To understand why, it is important to understand the micro-foundations of military power in the ...information age, and this is exactly what Jon R. Lindsay's Information Technology and Military Power gives us. As Lindsay shows, digital systems now mediate almost every effort to gather, store, display, analyze, and communicate information in military organizations. He highlights how personnel now struggle with their own information systems as much as with the enemy. Throughout this foray into networked technology in military operations, we see how information practice—the ways in which practitioners use technology in actual operations—shapes the effectiveness of military performance. The quality of information practice depends on the interaction between strategic problems and organizational solutions. Information Technology and Military Power explores information practice through a series of detailed historical cases and ethnographic studies of military organizations at war. Lindsay explains why the US military, despite all its technological advantages, has struggled for so long in unconventional conflicts against weaker adversaries. This same perspective suggests that the US retains important advantages against advanced competitors like China that are less prepared to cope with the complexity of information systems in wartime. Lindsay argues convincingly that a better understanding of how personnel actually use technology can inform the design of command and control, improve the net assessment of military power, and promote reforms to improve military performance. Warfighting problems and technical solutions keep on changing, but information practice is always stuck in between.
The new division of labor Levy, Frank; Murnane, Richard J
2004, 2012., 20121126, 2012, 2004-01-01, 20040101
eBook, Book
Die Autoren gehen von der Tatsache aus, dass sich die Situation auf dem Arbeitsmarkt in den letzten Jahren grundlegend verändert hat: Selbst nach einer Rezession werden die durch die Automatisierung ...oder die Verlagerung in Niedriglohnländer verloren gegangenen Arbeitsplätze nicht wieder entstehen. Analysiert werden die Einflüsse der Informationstechnik auf die Arbeitsplatzstruktur, insbesondere die Möglichkeiten der Problemlösung und Kommunikation. Es wird dabei die These abgeleitet, dass komplexe Kommunikation nach wie vor eine Domäne menschlichen Handels sein wird, und Computer auf diesem Gebiet keine Alternative darstellen. Die Gesellschaft muss sich auf diese Veränderungen einzustellen, indem eine Arbeitsteilung zwischen automatisierten Jobs und gut bezahlten und hochqualifizierten Arbeitsplätze akzeptiert und gestaltet wird. Arbeitsplätze, deren Schwerpunkt auf komplexen Problemlösungen sowie auf interpersonaler Kommunikation liegt, werden in großer Zahl entstehen. Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: deskriptive Studie. (IAB).
Through a series of studies, the overarching aim of this book is to investigate if and how the digitalization/digital transformation process affects various welfare services provided by the public ...sector, and the ensuing implications thereof. Ultimately, this book seeks to understand if it is conceivable for digital advancement to result in the creation of private/non-governmental alternatives to welfare services, possibly in a manner that transcends national boundaries. This study also investigates the possible ramifications of technological development for the public sector and the Western welfare society at large. This book takes its point of departure from the 2016 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report that targets specific public service areas in which government needs to adopt new strategies not to fall behind. Specifically, this report emphasizes the focus on digitalization of health care/social care, education, and protection services, including the use of assistive technologies referred to as "digital welfare." Hence, this book explores the factors potentially leading to whether state actors could be overrun by other non-governmental actors, disrupting the current status quo of welfare services. The book seeks to provide an innovative, enriching, and controversial take on society at large and how various aspects of the public sector can be, and are, affected by the ongoing digitalization process in a way that is not covered by extant literature on the market. This book takes its point of departure in Sweden given the fact that Sweden is one of the most digitalized countries in Europe, according to the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), making it a pertinent research case. However, as digitalization transcends national borders, large parts of the subject matter take on an international angle. This includes cases from several other countries around Europe as well as the United States.
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