Making the High Tech Economy: Markets, States, and Publics
Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology
High tech growth in recent decades has been built on a system of open innovation, organized through an infrastructure of "global regions" which connect and blend public and corporate spaces. Through an examination of the Irish high tech region (and its connections with Silicon Valley) the role of the "developmental network state" in shaping this growth is outlined. The state's role has been less in the form of planning or disciplining capital than in constituting new actors, shaping and selectively supporting particular actors and types of action, and sponsoring new patterns of social relations. Current challenges to the developmental network state emerge from financialization, weak investments in social reproduction, and the attempt by corporations and states themselves to control public spaces of innovation. Developmental network states are under threat from new forms of "market managerialism" within the state itself.
Seán Ó Riain is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and Visiting Scholar at the Buffett Centre for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University. His research examines the politics of the information economy through studies of developmental network states, of 'time space intensification' in high tech regions, of the growth of technology driven commodity chains, and of the politics of changing class relations in high tech workplaces. He is the author of The Politics of High Tech Growth: Developmental Network States in the Global Economy (Cambridge, 2004). Current projects include studies of the dynamics and politics of the Silicon Valley-Ireland production system (with C.Benner) and a life history study of social change in twentieth century Ireland (with J. Gray and A.O'Carroll).
