Automating interaction: Economic reason and social capital in addressable networks

This interdisciplinary study demonstrates that the conceptions of economic action and economic rationality employed within orthodox economic theory are both logically and empirically inadequate for modelling the economic implications of rapid innovation and adoption of new communication and information technologies. Reevaluation of those economic standards of rationality is therefore warranted and indicated. A 'critical-pragmatic' reinterpretation of the 'Information Economy', combining elements of traditional institutional economic theory and contemporary critical social and linguistic theory, is advanced as an alternative theoretical perspective which offers a more adequate conceptualization of economic action and reason.;The three chapters of Part I develop this communications-centred perspective. What, it asks, does communication theory tell us about economic action and reason within digital communication networks? This framework of investigation emphasizes the interdependence of economic actors, the interpretive complexity of their transactional communications, the centrality of the tacit normative dimensions of transactions to the achievement of economic coordination, the role of information technology in the rationalization of tacit transactional norms, and the contradictions which emerge in the relationship between property rights and communicative interaction in the economic process.;Applying the methodological prescriptions of critical-pragmatism (as outlined in Part I), Part II investigates the communicative presuppositions of positive economics. What, it asks, does economic theory tell us about information and communication in the economic process? Two themes are traced, in these chapters, within the theoretical discourse of mainstream economics: the role of knowledge and information as endogenous and exogenous variables in economic action; and the role of social norms and institutions as factors in economic reasoning.;Economic theory is discovered to exclude by definition any systematic account of the interdependencies inherent in the use of information and communication resources, and therefore to lack criteria for distinguishing between those communicative norms and competences that impede economic coordination, and those that contribute to it.;Part III provides an extended example of the application of these competing perspectives to the allocation of information and communication resources. Its three chapters report a policy-oriented case study of personal information control in public switched networks, which demonstrates the divergent implications of the two perspectives, especially with regard to the relation between the economic performance of digital transaction networks, and the kind and degree of their public-interest regulation.;The study concludes that where actors must choose collectively among alternative possible trajectories of technological and institutional change, and thereby among the multiple equilibria populating the frontiers of the social welfare function, social investments in regulative interaction norms and critical communicative competences yield decisive future transaction-cost efficiencies. In a context of rapid change in communications technology, this choice-set is incompatible with neoclassical economic assumptions, and with neoliberal economic policies. It therefore suggests the necessity of substituting, for the "methodological individualism' of neoclassical economics, a 'methodological interactionism' drawn from the critical study of transactional communication processes.