Flows and Cohesion: balancing capabilities across an expanded union Dinar Kale PhD

1. Shaping EU Regional Policy: Economic Social and Political PressuresRSA International Conference Leuven, June 2006 Flows and Cohesion:balancing capabilities across an expanded union Dinar Kale PhD Centre for Innovation, Knowledge and Development, Open University. Stephen E. Little PhD Head, Centre for Innovation, Knowledge and Enterprise, Open University Business School, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA United Kingdom s.e.little@open.ac.uk Paper at: http://www.design-and-determination.com

2. A New Context for Cohesion

3. A New Context for Cohesion • Post-Cold War Era, • growing global economic integration • disparate national and regional cultures increasingly interacting within networked and globalised organisations. • facilitation through information & communication technologies • In the post-cold war era difference and diversity are resources (Delamaide; 1994, Ohmae; 1995).

4. Shifting the Debate • Global Production Chains replaced by Global Production Networks • linkages among members of the Triad account for the majority of global trade (Dicken, 1998) • production AND consumption at both ends • substantial areas and populations are excluded from the global cycle of technical innovation and improvement • Network Organisations • flexible coalitions • within and between existing corporations (Castells, 1996) • between independent partners (Inoue, 1998)

5. International Migration in the Global Context • “Zebra strategies” (Ohmae; 1995) • play to the relative strength of the most developed components of national economies • create regional synergies. • Taiwan Straits • Malaysia-Singapore • South Wales - Northern Spain • Differential development entrenched • global infrastructure driven by the priorities of the dominant developed economies. • key supporting technologies, in particular ICT infrastructure, may be optimised for externally-driven activities.

6. International Migration in the Global Context

7. Shifting the Debate

8. Exploiting the Possibility of Intellectual Remittances • Differences between centre and periphery, between large and small scale economic activity • central to an understanding of the impact of globalisation and its supporting technologies. • Differences within individual national states • as significant that those between developed and developing states. • Excluded regions • difficulty maintaining modest economic objectives. • excluded from policy making processes • no influence over the emerging global information system • reducing ability to negotiate sustainable exploitation of their own resources

9. Exploiting the Possibility of Intellectual Remittances

10. Conclusion • Divisions in both developed and developing countries present the less advantaged actors with a major problem • accessing or utilising technologies which have been shaped by other players towards the support of different priorities. • Existing inequalities will be reinforced unless access to these technologies can be achieved.

11. A Shifting Context for Community Informatics • Management ------ Governance • Ultimate consequence of Williamson (1975) and transaction driven view of organisation • governance replacing management • governance flows along the value chain • disntermediation and re-intermediation • Microsoft ----------- OSF • Cathedral --------- Bazaar Raymond E.S. (2001) • Information Sharing ---------- Knowledge Sharing • hierarchies ---------------------- distributed CoPs

12. Diaspora and community • Digital Divide • access to the “information economy” as important as physical location • Excluded communities • difficulty maintaining modest economic objectives. • excluded from policy making processes • no influence over the emerging global information system • reducing ability to negotiate sustainable exploitation of their own resources

13. Conclusion

14. Access versus Ownership Skill in the diaspora low cost internet- based telephony Business centres & internet cafes located at the margins

15. Diasporic Community in Action On 26th December 2004 the son of a Tamil Nadu fisherman working in Singapore saw TV news coverage of the tsunami and telephoned a warning to his sister which was relayed from the village Knowledge Centre, allowing all the villagers to escape to safety www.stevedenning.com

16. Bottom up response to disaster • Public response to the disaster • powerful images and accounts counter “compassion fatigue” • tourist technologies • digital video cameras • cell phones • http://www.digital-review.org/aud16a.htm. • same technologies delivered ad-hoc warnings to Knowledge Centres around Pondicherry • http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com • collective logging of events and monitoring of relief and recovery efforts continues

17. Tracks and Traces:The Braceros • 350,000 contract workers in 1942 • 1,000,000 US residents descended from these workers or their families • Oaxaca Index a matrix of materials surrounding los braceros, http://www.geocities.com/archiving_practice/losbraceros.html

18. Proximities and Identities • Use of available infrastructure • affordable internet cafés • Portal metaphor • Linguisic barriers removed (Abatte 2000) • Diasporic Communities re-connected (Miller & Slater 2000) • Global Knowledge for Development • Community Informatics

19. Metagovernance • Closing loop along the value/delivery chain • IS driven and enabled feedback from customer/public to both provider and government/regulator • Implications for government and business strategy and tactics • http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/ • http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20010514&s=gevisser

20. Technologies with Potential • Next Generation Mobile Communications • Switching from geostationary Earth orbits (GEOs) to medium Earth orbit (MEO) and low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites • Geophysics dictates equality of coverage • WiFi Access • Low cost access to higher speed connections • The last kilometre is often the biggest barrier to access

21. Reversing the Panopticon: surveillance by the surveilled • The technologies which have enabled military and managerial surveillance of distributed resources also, paradoxically, enable the communities so scrutinised to develop their own distributed strategies and patterns of relationships with external parties • Little & Grieco (2003) • New paradigm • bottom-up and networked response, • feedback loop from those on the receiving end

22. Windows of Opportunity • How can “small” players influence an emerging new "techno-economic paradigm" (Perez, 1985) ? • A window paradigm for globalising information systems • using available technologies without regard for their underlying assumptions • mobile phones and micro-enterprises • “Windows of opportunity” may be inadvertently closed by the momentum of mainstream technical development • E-commerce already mutating in to M-commerce