Social Contradictions in Informational Capitalism: The Case of Finnish Wage Earners and Their Labor Market Situation

Abstract

Along with the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs), work processes are becoming ever more knowledge intensive. In keeping with this trend, the number of informational (or knowledge) workers in Finland has more than tripled from 12% in 1988 to 39% in 2000. What makes the Finnish case unique and interesting is the exceptional speed with which the information sector of the economy has grown. A few years after facing the most severe economic recession in its history in the early 1990s, Finland is now considered to have an advanced information economy. However, our empirical analysis-based on survey data from 1988, 1994, and 2000-yields a somewhat more critical picture of the Finnish information society than what usually comes across in the mainstream media. The opportunities for social equality offered by the growth of informational work are far more limited than was the case with the transition from agricultural to industrial production.

Information Society for All? Structural Characteristics of Internet Use in 15 European Countries

“…It is assumed that the diffusion of mobile phones and the Internet reflects the level of the national technological infrastructure, human skills, and the creation of technology. On this basis particularly some of the Nordic countries have been characterized as the world's leading information societies (e.g., Viherä and Nurmela 2001;Blom et al 2002;Castells and Himanen 2002: 5Á/6). In a contemporary European context, however, the term 'welfare regime' provides a general approach to the classification of countries on the basis of their institutional characteristics (see Esping-Andersen 1990;Fererra 1996).…”

Knowledge work in distributed environments: issues and illusions

“…The response rate was around 55 per cent. The survey drew upon similar sets of questionnaire data from 1988 and 1994 (for more details, see Blom et al, 2002). In addition to survey material qualitative interviews were conducted in five knowledge-intensive business organisations in [2001][2002].…”

“…IT users are defined as wage earners whose jobs do not meet either or both of the latter two criteria, while traditional workers (or, for brevity, others) are those who do not use information technology in their jobs at all. According to this definition by the year 2000, well over one-third or 39 per cent of Finnish wage earners could be classified as knowledge workers, compared to a mere 12 per cent in 1988 (Blom et al, 2002).…”

The aftermath of the ICT revolution? Media and communication technology preferences in Finland in 1999 and 2004

“…Of course, these findings may partly reflect the recent changes in Finnish white-collar jobs, universities and schools, where the use of information technologies has become commonplace (e.g. Blom et al, 2002;Nurmela, 2001).What is more interesting is the fact that the new ICT evaluations have changed in a similar fashion. Moreover, newspaper and television reflect an identical pattern of change.This indicates that some of the items are probably highly interrelated.The essential features of these technologies would be difficult to capture by concentrating on individual items alone.The next step was to apply factor analysis to the data in order to explore the possible dimensions in which the items can be combined.The goal of the analysis is to reduce a large set of items to a smaller number of 'medium and ICT types'.…”

“…This is also true in the case of Finnish society, which has been characterized as one of the world's leading information societies (e.g. Blom et al, 2002;Castells and Himanen, 2002). In 1998, for example, 60 percent of Finnish households had a mobile phone and fewer than 20 percent had an internet connection.…”