Outlining the Future Perspectives on Societal Development in the 21st Century Workshop, March 23, 1999, CAP, Munich Summary Program Participants Word-Download: Executive Summaries, Program, List of Partipants.

				Dr. Uwe Jean Heuser Business in the Net Peculiarities of an Information Economy, and their Consequences From the beginning of his discussion Dr. Heuser made it clear that his analysis of an economy in an information society does not depend on future projections. What he described is already with us in one form or another. Networking, or digitalization, is well on its way to changing our economy, and through that, our society. Heuser, who along with Gero von Randow leads the Reform Workshop at the weekly newspaper Die ZEIT, assumes that networking will fundamentally change the basic tenets of industrial societies. "Networking," said Heuser, "steals stability - from working relations and careers, from social status and the social realm." Established froms of solidarity, established social strutures, will lose their effectiveness. "In one sentence: Networking is taking apart our existing common structures, and delivering the building blocks of new structures." These new structures will be dominated by variety, speed, fluctuation, flexibility and efficiency. A virtual marketplace in a networked economy means, for example, that many packets of products will come unpacked and that ever smaller units will be worth paying for, so that transaction costs sink dramatically. Consequently, one comes quickly to two tendencies: products will be strongly differentiated in a networked economy, combined with strong incentives for supplies to calculate the costs of each item rather than subsidizing one product with another; second, competition will overcome spatial limitations much better than at present. Networking changes not only the character of production, it also means taking leave of customary forms of work. The normal working relationship of mass-produced industrial society - permanent full-time work with benefits - is slowly losing its validity. Stable careers? In a networked gesellschaft, said Heuser, don't count on it. More than ever, individual and actual services will be the measurement of working life. Careers will be fundamentally less plannable in the sense of climbing up a hierarchy to claim ever-increasing rewards. In this situation, each individual must decide far more than in the paradigm of the industrial society. Work, in Heuser's view, is well on its way to losing its character as a place of community-building. If relative equality and solidarity were formerly than the rule, so that, for instance, members of a firm or team could help to carry another member with personal difficulties, the new demands of the marketplace tend to erode these social bonds. Only the loss of these common experiences shows many employess that they existed in the first place.
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