The Information Society

by Robin E. Mansell (Editor)

‘The information society’ refers to a constellation of developments arising from the growing use of communication technologies in the acquisition, storage, and processing of information, and the role of information in supporting the creation and exchange of knowledge. Research on information societies really began to take off in the 1970s when Daniel Bell wrote about ‘the information age’. While there were earlier works that focused on the growing importance of information in the economy, it was not until the mid-1990s and the spread of the Internet that this field of study experienced a huge expansion across a broad range of disciplines in the social sciences and beyond. A critical mass of scholarship has now accumulated, establishing ‘the information society’ and ‘information societies’ as a terrain of substance and complexity, the exploration and understanding of which requires increasingly sophisticated navigation skills. As research in and around the area continues to flourish as never before, this new title in Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Sociology, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature, and to provide a map of the area as it has emerged and developed over the last thirty years or so. The Information Society is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students―as well as policy-makers and practitioners in the field―as a vital one-stop research resource.

1926 pages, Hardcover

First published May 8, 2009

About the author

Robin Elizabeth Mansell is Professor of New Media and the Internet in the Department of Media and Communications at London School of Economics and Political Science. In 2018–19 she directs the double degree MSc/MA Global Media and Communications (LSE and UCT). She has training in several social science disciplines including psychology, social psychology, politics and economics and is a strong advocate of interdisciplinary research when it builds on the strengths of disciplinary inquiry.

Her research and teaching focus on media and communications regulation and policy, internet governance, privacy and surveillance, digital platforms, the socio-technical features of data and information systems, and the social, political and economic impacts of innovation in digital networks and applications. Her current research focuses on the political economy of ‘platformisation’ and ‘datafication’ and its social consequences for society and on the challenges of designing and implementing regulatory norms, rules and processes through institutions in diverse contexts around the world.

She has been involved in many aspects of LSE life and served as Head of the Media and Communications Department in 2006-09 and in 2017-18 as well as LSE interim Deputy Director and Provost 2015-16 and academic Governor 2005-10. She is a Standing Selection Committee member of Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) Canada, board member of TPRC (Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy), member of the Scientific Advisory Council of LIRNEAsia, Sri Lanka, and Chairs the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) Clearinghouse for Public Statements, having served as IAMCR President 2004-08. She was Trustee of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex 1999-2009 and serves as a Trustee of the Canadian Centennial Scholarship Fund.