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the information that will be brought to life by being used) and the
capacity of people—individually and in groups to analyze and think
integratively. There are obvious limits to the time each of us can
devote to the production and refinement of knowledge and wisdom.
But the capacity of humanity to integrate its collective experience
through relevant individual thinking is certainly expandable—not with-
out limits, to be sure, but within limits we cannot now measure or
. .
imagine.
Information is not resource-hungry. Compared to the processes of
the steel-and-automobile economy, the production and distribution of
information are remarkably spanog in their requirements for energy
and other physical and biological resources.
Investments, price policies, and power relationships which assume
that the more developed countries will gobble up disproportionate
shares of real resources are overdue for wholesale revision.
Information is substitutable. It can and increasingly does replace
capital, labor, and physical materials. Robotics and automation in
factories and offices are displacing workers and thus requiring a
transformation of the labor force. Any machine that can be accessed
by computerized telecommunications does not have to be in your own
inventory. And Dieter Altenpohl, an executive of Alusuisse, has
calculations and charts to prove that, as he says, '`The smatter the
metal, the less it weighs.''6
Information is transportable. In modern communication systems
information travels at close to the speed of light. As a result, remoteness
is now more choice than geography. You can sit in Auckland, New
Zealand, and play the New York stock markets in real time if you
do not mind keeping slightly peculiar hours. And the same is true,
without the big gap in time zones, of people in any rural hamlet in the
United States. In the world of information-richness, you will be able
to be remote if you want to, but you will have to work at it.
Information is diffusive. It tends to leak- and the more it leaks the
more we have. It is not the inherent tendency of natural resources to
leak: jewels may be stolen; a lump or two of coal may fall off the coal
car on its way east from Montana; and there is an occasional spillage
of oil in the ocean. But the leakage of information is wholesale,
pervasive, and continuous. In the era of the institutionalized leak,
monopolizing information is very nearly a contradiction in terms.
Information monopolies will exist, as time passes, only in more and
more specialized fields, for shorter and shorter periods of time.
Information is shareable. Shortly before his death, Colin Cherry
wrote that information by nature cannot give rise to exchange trans-
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59
actions, only to shanug transactions.7 Things are exchanged if I give
you a flower or sell you my automobile. When our exchange transaction
is done, you have it and I do not. If I sell you an idea, however, or
give you a fact, we both have it. An information-rich environment is
thus a sharing environment. That need not mean an environment
without standards, rules, conventions, and ethical codes. It does mean
that the standards, rules, conventions, and codes are going to be
different from those created to manage the zero-sum bargains of market
trading and traditional international relations.
THE EROSION OF HIERARCHIES
I am not a scholar of information/communication theory, but in my
listening and reading as a practicing generalist I am struck with three
seminal ideas as containing the most nourishment for our purpose,
which is to think about how the new information environment is likely
to modify our inherited assumptions about rule, power, and authority.
One is that information (in its generic sense) is not like other
resources, nor, as some would have it, merely another form of energy.
It is not subject to the laws of thermodynamics, and efforts to explain
the new information environment by using metaphors from physics
will just get in our way.
A second idea I find nourishing is that the ultimate purpose of all
knowledge is to organize things or people, arrange them in ways that
make them different from the way they were before. This is true of
rearranging the genes in a chromosome, and it is equally true of
rearranging people's ideas to create a movement. There is no such
thing as useless knowledge, only people who have not yet learned how
to use it. This was the powerful message canned in a 1979 article in
Science by Lewis Branscomb, chief scientist of IBM. He wrote that
information is so far from being scarce that it is in "chronic surplus."
There is still plenty for scientists to find out, but `'the yawning chasm
is between what is already known by some but not yet put to use by
others."8
A third insight, from the late British communications theorist Colin
Cherry, is the distinction between the inflation ("message'') itself
and the service of delivering it. You may own the paper you hold in
your hand, but you do not own its contents, the facts and ideas in the
paper. Neither, now that I have written them down and you and I are
sharing them, do I.9
The historically sudden dominance of the information resource has,
it seems, produced a kind of theory crisis, a sudden sense of having
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HARLAN CLEVELAND
run out of basic assumptions. This is only partially the product of
information and communication technologies and their fusion in the
new systems that are sprouting daily. Other dramatic extensions of
scientific rationalism and engineering genius such as nuclear fission
and gene splicing all with an indispensable assist from the new
information technologies- have also made their contribution to the
bouleversement of long-held social and political convictions.
But somewhere near the center of the confusion is the trouble we
make for ourselves by carrying over into our thinking about information
(which is to say symbols) concepts developed for the management of
things~oncepts such as property, depletion, depreciation, monopoly,
unfa~messes in distnbution, geopolitics, the class struggle, and top-
down leadership.
The assumptions we have inherited are not producing satisfactory
growth with acceptable equity either in the capitalist West or in the
socialist East. As Simon Nora and Alain Minc wrote in their landmark
report to the president of France: "The liberal and Marxist approaches,
contemporaries of the production-based society, are rendered ques-
tionable by its deniise."~°
The most troublesome concepts are those that were created to deal
with the main problems presented by the management of things-
problems such as their scarcity, their bulk, their limited substitutability
for each other, the expense and trouble in transporting them, the
paucity of infonnation about them (which made them comparatively
easy to hide), and the fact that, being tangible, they could be hoarded.
It was in the nature of things that the few had access to resources and
the many did not.
Thus, the inherent characteristics of physical resources (both natural
and man-made) made possible the development of hierarchies of power
based on control (of new weapons, of energy sources, of trade routes,
of markets, and especially of knowledge), hierarchies of influence
based on secrecy, hierarchies of class based on ownership, hierarchies
of privilege based on early access to valuable resources, and hierarchies
of politics based on geography.
Each of these five bases for discrimination and unfairness is crumbling
today because the old means of control are of dwindling efficacy;
secrets are harder and harder to keep; and ownership, early arrival,
and geography are of dwindling significance in getting access to the
knowledge and wisdom which are the really valuable legal tender of
our time.
Out of dozens of assumptions requiring a newly skeptical stare in
the new knowledge environment, these five seem to me to bear most
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61
directly on leadership and management, because they are likely to
affect most profoundly the ways in which, and the purposes for which,
people will in future come together in organizations to make something
different happen.
POWER BASED ON CONTROL: POWER AND PARTICIPATION
Knowledge is power, as Francis Bacon wrote in 1597. So the wider
the spread of knowledge, the more power gets diffused. For the most
part individuals, corporations, and governments do not have a choice
about this; it is the ineluctable consequence of creating through
education societies with millions of knowledgeable people.
We see the results all around us, and around the world. More and
more work gets done by horizontal process—or it does not get done.
More and more decisions are made with wider and wider consultation—
or they do not stick. If the Census Bureau counted each year the
number of committees per thousand population, we would have a
rough quantitative measure of the bundle of changes called the
information society. A revolution in the technology of organization-
the twilight of hierarchy—is already well under way.
Once information could be spread fast and wid~rapidly collected
and analyzed, instantly communicated, readily understood by mil-
lions—the power monopolies that closely held knowledge used to
make possible were subject to accelerating erosion.
In the old days when only a few people were well educated and
knowledgeable, leadership of the uninformed was likely to be organized
in vertical structures of command and control. Leadership of the
informed is different: it results in the necessary action only if exercised
mainly by persuasion, bringing into consultation those who are going
to have to do something to make the decision a decision. Where people
are educated and are not treated this way, they either balk at the
decisions made or have to be dragooned by organized misinformation
backed by brute force. Recent examples of both results have been on
display in Poland.
This is the rationale for Chester Barnard s durable theory of the
executive function: that authority is delegated upward. As director
of an organization, you have no power that is not granted to you by
your subordinates. Eliciting their continuous (and, if possible, cheerful)
cooperation is your main job as director; without it, you cannot get
accomplished the most routine tasks (for which others are holding
you, not your staff, responsible)." Indeed, nowadays in many offices
orders that used to be routinely accepted are now resisted or refused.
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HARLAN CLEVELAND
In the modern American office, if you want a cup of coffee you do
not take that co-worker, your secretary, off her or his own work to
get it for you.
In an information-rich polity, the very definition of control changes.
Very large numbers of people empowered by knowledge~oming
together in parties, unions, factions, lobbies, interest groups, neigh-
borhoods, families, and hundreds of other structures assert the right
or feel the obligation to make policy.
Decision making proceeds not by the flow of recommendations up
and orders down, but by development of a shared sense of direction
among those who must form the parade if there is going to be a parade.
Collegial not command structures become the more natural basis for
organization. Not command and control, but conferring and networking
become the mandatory modes for getting things done. Planning cannot
be done by a few leaders, or by even the brightest whiz kids immured
in a systems analysis unit or a planning staff. Real-life planning is the
dynamic improvisation by the many on a general sense of direction—
announced by the few, but only after genuine consultation with those
who will have to improvise on it. More participatory decision making
implies a need for much information, widely spread, and much
feedback, seriously attended~as in biological processes. Participation
and public feedback become conditions precedent to decisions that
stick.
That means more openness, less secrecy not as an ideological
preference but as a technological imperative. Secrecy goes out of
fashion anyway, because secrets are so hard to keep. And policy
widens out to become what Paul Appleby, that farseeing philosopher
of public administration, called it a generation ago. `'Policy," he said,
'`is the decisions that are made at your level and higher."'2 But note
that his vertical language is already obsolescent.
Most of the history we learn in school is so narrowly focused on
visible leaders that it may give us the wrong impression about leadership
processes even in earlier times. We learn that Genghis Khan or Louis
XIV or ibn-Saud or the emperor of Japan or George Washington said
this and did that—as though he thought it up by himself, consulted
with nobody, and wrote it without the help of a ghostwriter. But even
in ancient, traditional societies I suspect that effective leadership
consisted in being closely in touch with where the relevant publics
were ready to be told to go.
Consensus is a prominent feature of many cultures now dismissed
as primitive. The Polynesians in the Pacific Islands with their circular
village councils and the American Indians around their campfires made
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THE mILICHT OF HIERARCHY
63
(and in some degree still make) decisions by fluid procedures which
may induce more genuine participation than a modern meeting run by
parliamentary procedure. In the agora of Athens and the Roman
"senate and public" (the SPQR), there seems to have been lively
participation by those (wellborn male citizens) qualified to take part.
The difference in the current scene is the sheer scale of the relevant
publics. In democratic Athens slaves, women, tradesmen, and other
noncitizens did not presume to play in the decision games. The notion
that all men, let alone whole peoples, had inalienable rights came in
only with the Enlightenment, a scant three centuries ago—and has
been made effective, still in a minority of the world's nations, only in
the twentieth century. In Switzerland women still cannot vote.
Participatory fever is contagious. Public policy used to mean what
the government does. Now it includes corporate policies, collective
bargaining agreements, the cost of health care, the recruitment of
university presidents, lobbying practices, equal employment oppor-
tunity, environmental protection, tax shelters, waste disposal, private
contributions to political candidates, the sex habits of employees, or
just about any other insider activities that outsiders think are important
enough to engage their time and attention.
The biggest issues so far have to do with the quality of public
responsibility that shows forth in the actions of corporations, univer-
sities, hospitals, and the thousands of other structures in which
executives make the decisions that serve people, cost them, anger or
please them.
The rising tide of participation is reflected in dramatic orgaruzational
changes. Big corporations now usually have a vice-president for keeping
the corporation out of trouble with nosy outsiders, or even with their
own stockholders and employees, who raise questions about what the
company ought to produce, who it ought to employ, and how it ought
to invest its money.
Should my company, or any American company, make and market
nerve gas, even if the government does want to buy some? Should my
company, or any American company, promote nuclear proliferation
by selling to developing countries nuclear power plants that make
plutonium, the fuel for nuclear weapons, as a by-product of generating
electricity? Shouldn't my company have more women, and blacks,
and American Indians in its employ—and especially in its board and
top management? Should a company whose stock I own invest my
money in South Afnca? Should my company, or any American
company, pass the social costs of its profit seeking—overcrowding,
the paving of green space, radioactive risk, dirt, noise, toxic waste,
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HARLAN\ CLEVELAND
acid rain, or whatever to the general public? Should our community
hospital perform abortions, splice genes, change people's sex, and
invest in expensive equipment that can help only a few affluent patients?
Should our state university do secret work for the Defense Department?
Should the CIA recruit our students for who-knows-what clandestine
wars in other people's countries?
Such questions cannot be brushed aside without raising their decibel
level. There are ways to deal with all of them: shifts of policy, or
consultative processes, diversionary moves, or public explanations—
in descending order of probable effectiveness. But the visibly respon-
sible leaders increasingly have to build into their organizations, not as
a public relations frill but as an essential ingredient in bottom-line
budgeting, staff members competent to help develop strategy on such
issues as these. And the visible executive now has to be personally
competent to defend the organization's public posture in public debate.
These public responsibility issues can make or break companies,
products, and executive reputations. If you do not believe that, take
a Nestle executive to lunch and ask him about marketing baby formula
in the Third World.
INFLUENCE BASED ON SECRECY: DILEMMAS OF OPENNESS
The push for participation by all kinds of people and the inherent
leakiness of the information resource combine to produce the modern
executive's most puzzling dilemma. The dilemma must have been
familiar to the first cave people who tried to bring other cave people
together to get something done. But for us moderns, the scale of the
perplexity is without precedent. The dilemma can be summarized in
one question: How do you get everybody in on the act and still get
some action?
The contemporary clamor to be in on the act is certainly impressive.
In business, customers are feistier, more likely to complain; stock-
holders are more numerous and less passive; policyholders are more
inclined to follow through on their insurance claims; union members
and other citizens give advice on what is wrong with the steel and
automobile industries; employees assert the right to judge whether
their employers should make fragmentation bombs; maritime unions
decide whether shipments should go to the Soviet Union; advocacy
agencies excluded from the United Way organize their own competing
drive for community funds; ethnic groups keep a watchful eye on
investments in South Africa and business with the Arabs. More and
more parents have a world population policy; teachers organize to tell
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THE TWILIGHT OF HIERARCHY
65
school systems what ought to be taught; students want tailor-made
courses of study. Environmental groups, carefully avoiding questions
about whom they represent, are articulate (and effective) beyond the
wildest dreams of Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt. New kinds
and colors of people are breaking through the oligopoly of influence
long controlled by businessmen and male lawyers from early-a~Tiving
ethnic groups. Even those deadly predictable circuses, our national
political conventions, become increasingly interesting as minorities
and women fill more delegate slots and live TV coverage enhances the
risk that a delegate will be seen making a deal, picking his nose,
adjusting her shoulder strap, or falling aslee~in millions of living
rooms at once.
Openness, then, is the buzzword of modernization. In its firmament
the dieties are the public hearing, the news conference, the investigative
reporter, "60 Minutes" and "20/20," Ted Koppel, Phil Donahue, and
the National Enquirer. Its devils are also well known: smoke-filled
rooms, secret invasions, hidden or edited tapes, and expense account
luncheons at which The Establishment decides what to do next.
In consequence, compared with a generation ago most public
officials - and a rapidly growing number of private executives conscious
of their ultimate public responsibility are much more inclined to ask
themselves, before acting, how their actions would look on the front
page of the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal or on the
evening telecast. Even former Vice-President Agnew has conceded
that taking cash from contractors in his government office might be
wrong if judged by what he called post-Watergate moral standards.
No one doubts that raising the risk of public exposure will improve
the private behavior of executive leaders as they ask themselves,
"How would ~ feel about this action if everyone was able to see me
take it?" The moral of Watergate is plain enough: If the validity of
your action depends on its secrecy, better decide to do something
else.
But the yen for wider knowledge and broader participation has gone
well beyond this sensitivity training for visible leaders and has raised
new questions about the cost-benefit calculation of more openness. A
generation of experience suggests that it is high time we faced the next
question: How much openness is enough?
Since this is not a mystery story, I will reveal at the outset the
conclusion of the next few paragraphs. Experience teaches that the
procedures of openness are well designed to stop bad things from
happening and ill designed to get good things moving unless the
consensus for action has been built in private ahead of time.
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The makers of software keep up their pitiful efforts to maintain a
proprietary interest in their products, but the happy-go-lucky free
distribution of copies of copyrighted diskettes has already become one
of the friendly gestures that makes the owners of personal computers
feel like members of a new kind of guild. The leakiness of the
information resource seems destined to overwhelm the backward-
looking efforts to imprison it. The history of arms control, and the
success of computer pirates, teach us that there is always a techno-
logical fix for a technological fix.
Is the doctrine that information is owned by its originator (or
compiler) necessary to make sure that Americans remain intellectually
creative? In most other countries creative work is overwhelmingly
controlled by organizations and carried out by salaried people. In
Japan even the most inventive employee is likely to have a lifetime
job and receive salary raises in lockstep with his age cohort, his morale
sustained not by personal ownership of his ideas but by togetherness
in an organizational family.
Most U.S. patents are held by organizations (corporations, univer-
sities, government agencies), not by the inventors. Many copyrights,
perhaps most, are held by publishers and promoters, not by the authors
and songwriters the Founding Fathers may have had in mind when
they sewed information-as-property into the U.S. Constitution.
An author or songwriter who helps a publisher make money should
certainly participate in the proceeds. But direct agreements about
profit sharing or joint venture arrangements (the movie industry is
already full of relevant examples) seem a less fragile basis for such
cooperation than the fraying fictions that the author owns the words
in a book and that shared information is being exchanged.
In U.S. universities and research institutes, creative work is already
rewarded mostly by promotion, tenure, and tolerant traditions about
teaching loads and outside consulting. We generate a respectably
innovative R&D effort in public-sector fields such as military technol-
ogy, space exploration, weather forecasting, environmental protection,
and the control of infectious diseases without the scientists and
inventors having to own the ideas they contribute to the process. In
the private sector, the leaders of industries on the high-tech frontier
are already saying out loud that their protection from overseas copyists
does not lie in trade secrets but in healthy R&D budgets.
The notion of information-as-property is built deep into our laws,
our economy, and our political psyche and into the expectations and
tax returns and balance sheets of writers and artists and the companies,
agencies, and academies that pay them to be creative. But we had
better continue to develop our own ways, compatible with our own
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traditions, of rewarding intellectual labor without depending on laws
and prohibitions that are disintegrating fast as the Volstead Act did
in our earlier effort to enforce an unenforceable Prohibition.
In international politics the notion that knowledge is owned by
sovereign states is in maximum disarray. Every newly miniaturized
recording or micrographic device and every new satellite launched for
communication or photography or remote sensing makes it more
difficult to sustain the doctrine that national governments can own, or
even control, their information resources.
In 1979 the U.S. government sent two delegations to two world
meetings about the control of information. At a UNESCO conference
in Pans, the delegates righteously advocated the free flow of infor-
mation, meaning information furnished by U.S. news agencies, U.S.
television producers, and U.S. movie studios. A few weeks later, at
the UN Conference on Science and Technology for Development in
Vienna, an equally righteous group of Americans came out against the
free flow of infold relation, meaning information as a technology we were
anxious to hoard. Both principles are authentically American: the right
to choose and the right to own. In the international discourse, we will
hardly be able to have it both ways. Yet there is no evidence that the
two groups of delegates, and the government that instructed them
both, perceived the irony or the contradiction.
The U.S. State Department, which instructed both delegations,
seemed unusually disoriented by the new information environment
when it ruled last year that Western European owners of IBM
computers could not move them from, say, Birmingham to Manchester
without first seeking U.S. permission. This assertion of extraterrito-
riality, over equipment produced by a multinational company with
headquarters in the United States, was designed to prevent strategic
equipment from flowing indirectly to Communist countries. Regardless
of the merits of the case, the edict is simply unenforceable. In the
global information society, the long arms of ownership and control are
shrinking fast.
If information is inherently hard to bottle up, policies based on a
long-term information monopoly are likely to have a short half-life.
For the 1980s and beyond, the principle is clear: if the validity of your
action depends on its continuing secrecy, do not depend on it.
In our generation-long arms race with the Soviet Union, successive
U.S. administrations have managed to persuade themselves that each
new U.S. weapons system (its made-in-America technology a contin-
uing mystery to our adversaries) would enable us to stay ahead. In
one of the most damaging of these actions, in the early 1970s, the
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THE ~I~GHTOFRIE~RCHY
71
United States decided to stuff multiple independently targeted reentry
vehicles (MlRVs) into single missiles. Despite elaborate secrecy on
our part, the Soviets soon figured out how to do likewise. But since
they (for other reasons) had built much bigger missiles boosted by
more powerful rockets, they were able to stuff more MIRVs into their
canisters than we could. Thus did we outsmart ourselves by taking an
action that depended for its validity on technological secrecy, and
create the famous window of vulnerability instead.
In the management of mutual deterrence the overclassification of
information about what we could do, if we had to, may actually
increase the danger of war by miscalculation. The core of the nuclear
deterrent, that remarkably stable if unattractive substitute for peace,
is the Soviet leaders' uncertainty about what the U.S. president would
do in the event of Soviet moves against our allies or ourselves combined
with their certainty that we have the means to retaliate no matter
what. Keeping our intentions credibly uncertain is easy: we cannot
know what we would do in a situation until we know what the situation
is. But keeping from our adversaries full knowledge of our capabilities
merely adds another element of madness to the nuclear arms race.
Our own government has for three decades engaged in halfhearted
and demonstrably ineffective efforts to control strategic U.S. science
and keep foreign nationals out of sensitive university research. In our
mostly open society, it never worked very well. Americans have no
corner on the market for brains; scientists talk quite freely across
frontiers to each other; our European and Japanese allies never had
much enthusiasm for controlling transborder information flows (be-
cause sales of equipment mean jobs for Europeans and Japanese); and
Soviet technological espionage, like our own, has long been a thriving
industry.
Keeping our R&D to ourselves is a policy that depends for its
validity on secrecy. As informatization intensifies in the postindustrial
world, strategic secrecy can be expected to work less and less well.
Similar government behavior used to work better for dictators and
totalitarian bureaucracies in societies where keeping information from
spreading is honored by doctrine and practiced ad absurdum. The last
time I looked, Xerox machines still had to be licensed by the government
in the Soviet Union; in Bulgaria, even typewriters are closely con-
trolled. Ideas are harder to license: Russian youngsters readily learn
about jeans and hard rock, and scientists on both sides of the porous
Curtain seem to know how far along their peers are in unraveling (for
example) the puzzlements of rocketry and space travel.
The good news is that information is leaky, that sharing is the natural
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HARLAN BLEED
mode of scientific discovery and technological innovation. The new
information environment seems bound to undermine the knowledge
monopolies which totalitarian governments convert into monopolies
of power. In the horoscope of the USSR and the Soviet bloc, a future
looms where nobody is in charge.
PRIVILEGE BASED ON EARLY ACCESS: EQUALITY OF ACCESS
AND FAIRNESS
The informatization of society may destabilize more than the Soviet
bloc. It may help undermine the systems that keep 2 billion people in
relative poverty and more than a third of them in absolute poverty. In
many ways the most exciting, and puzzling, question about the new
knowledge environment is whether it will be good news or bad news
for the global fairness revolution and for that revolution's U.S.
precinct, the upward mobility of women, minorities, and the poor.
The most arresting trait of the information resource is that it is
inherently more accessible than other resources and that, once
accessed, it unlocks the other resources. What does that imply for
access to the power and affluence that knowledge brings in its wake?
Theoretically at least, compared to things-as-resource, information-as-
resource should encourage:
· the spreading of benefits rather than the concentration of wealth (infor-
mation can be more equitably shared than petroleum or gold or land or
even water), and
· the maximization of choice rather than the suppression of diversity (the
informed are harder to regiment than the uninformed).
In the industrial era, poverty was explained and justified by shortages
of things; there just were not enough minerals, food, fibers, and
manufactures to go around. Looked at this way, the shortages were
merely aggravated by the tendency of the poor to have babies.
In the postindustrial era, the physical resources are joined at center
stage by information, the resource that is harder for the rich and
powerful to hoard. Each baby, poor or not, is born with a brain. The
collective capacity of all the brains in each society to convert infor-
mation into knowledge and wisdom is the measure of that society's
potential.
But whether the informatization of the globe will actually mean a
fairer shake for those who have been the victims of discrimination
depends mostly on what they do. Most of the fairness achieved in
world history has not been the consequence of chanty, goodhearted-
ness, and noblesse oblige on the part of those in power. Always in
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73
history, it seems, fairness has been granted, legislated, or seized when
there was no alternative. And usually the reason there was no
alternative was that those out of power were determined (or at least
perceived by those in power to be determined) to cast off their shackles
and take the law into their own hands.
Societies flexible enough to adapt to the pressure from groups out
of power (as the United States has been doing, not without conflict
and coercion, on school integration, voter rights, sex discrimination,
and equal employment opportunity) manage to keep change compar-
atively peaceful.
Societies that try to maintain rigid hierarchies (and especially those
which, like the Shah's Iran, at the same time encourage education for
most of their people) get blown out of the water. The Shah of Iran
was brought down by the marriage of convenience between two groups
who harbored powerful resentments: mullahs who had been bypassed
and downgraded by modernization were angered by the lack of respect
for tradition, and Iranian students, at home and abroad, were angered
by lack of fairness. Afterwards the tradition defenders and the fairness
advocates went after each other, and the fairness people lost.
In other countries the mix is different, but part of the stew of
resentments is always the complaint we learn from infancy to make:
"It isn't fair."
There will be less excuse in the future than in the past for depriving
whole populations of the benefits of development. There will also be
less excuse for the disadvantaged to blame their condition on the
barons and bosses when the accessible knowledge to even the score
is already floating out there in the noospher~the sphere of human
consciousness and mental activity.
The noosphere is an accessible resource that has many of the
characteristics of a commons. In considering the implications for
fairness of information-as-a-resource, it is an intriguingly fresh thought,
worth a moment of speculation.
In earlier times shading arrangements for a common resource were
customary, for example in tribal ownership and nomadic practices.
Vestiges of the idea survive in the Boston Commons, the National
Park system, and in the way many major waterways in Europe and
North America are managed. For people in old England the commons,
as Ivan Illich defines it, was "that part of the environment which lay
beyond their own thresholds and outside of their possessions, to which,
however, they had recognized claims of usage [not to produce com-
modities but to provide for the subsistence of their households]." The
commons "was necessary for the community's survival, necessary for
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74
different groups In different ways, but
was not perceived as scarce.''l5
HARLA~r C~VELAND
in a strictly economic sense,
The older commons, such as those for sheep and cattle, have
disappeared through enclosure. But the commons idea has now been
revived In a big way, as the basis for worldwide cooperation in the
environments that by common consent belong to no one or everyone
(which seems to be about the same thing): the deep ocean and its
seabed, Antarctica, outer space and celestial bodies, and the weather.
The Mediterranean Sea, the arena of bloody ancient feuds and lethal
modern rivalnes, has recently been formally recognized by all the
coastal states (including the Arab states and Israel) as so precious a
shared commons that reversing its degradation must be a matter for
cooperation even among sworn enemies. The resulting international
agreement, intermediated by the UN Environment Programme, is self-
enforcing: violating its terms would be in a literal sense self-defeating.
For the management of an information commons, a shanug envi-
ronment, these exotic precedents suddenly seem not so exotic. Illich,
in a Tokyo speech called "Silence Is a Commons,'' argued that
electronic devices (from the microphone to the computer) are a form
of enclosure, reserving to the few the pnvilege of breaking the silence
otherwise available to the many.'6 I do not know about silence; I have
not had much experience with it. But on the computer as a form of
enclosure, I demur. In its general impact the forced march of infor-
mation technology, personal computers combined with global telecom-
munications, seems to me to be taking us away from the idea of
enclosure. My hunch is that the fusion of computers and communi-
cations will further empower the many to participate in making policy
in domains to which the few, with their moth-eaten monopolies of
knowledge, will have to yield more and more access.
Neighborhood organizations are furnishing themselves with personal
computers to deal more effectively with the banks, developers, and
government agencies that will otherwise make the neighborhoods'
decisions for them. American Indian tribes might set up a computer
teleconference to concert their political clout on fast-moving legislation.
A single individual with a personal computer can even now get access
to so much useful and timely information that she or he can, with a
week's homework and without leaving home, intervene as an unusually
knowledgeable citizen in almost any public policy issue on the national
agenda.
To chart these potentials is not to fulfill them. The trends in
infonnation technology would make it possible to organize as a
commons (with free though not necessarily costless access thereto)
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THE TIGHT OF HIE~CHY
75
most of the world's useful knowledge. That is not to say it will happen.
It just helps remake the point that those who think "it isn't fair'' will
have plenty of opportunity to get access to almost any information
that is being withheld from them to their disadvantage. But they will
have to want to work at it, they will have to prepare their brains for
the task. In the information society as in its predecessors, there is still
no free lunch.
POLITICS BASED ON GEOGRAPHY: THE PASSING OF
REMOTENESS
I have argued the mind-blowing implications of the informatization
of society for four of the old hierarchies—based on control, secrecy,
ownership, and structural unfairness. Let's look at what is happening
to the fifth of the old hierarchies, those based on location.
The inherited idea is that the political importance of communities is
based on their geography. Cities usually developed because they were
seaports or on critical inland waterways, or (earlier) on important
overland caravan routes and (later) on important railway lines. It made
a difference whether you were in the city or in the country; if you
lived in a rural area, you were remote. There was no choice about it,
you were just remote.
The importance of countries was often based on the natural resources
they had discovered, and developed, on their territory. The spices of
the Orient, the rubber and tin of Southeast Asia, the coal and iron of
Central Europe, the diamonds (and later, uraniums of South Africa,
the fruit of Central America, the petroleum reserves of Indonesia and
Mexico and Venezuela and North Africa and the Persian (or Arabian)
Gulf and the North Sea, the soil that produced those "waving fields
of grain" in North America these crucial resources left an indelible
mark on the national sovereignties which happened to find them in
their backyards.
Then there was the sense of place in military strategy, summed up
in the once-popular word geopolitics. This was the idea that a nation's
power depended largely on its geography- how vulnerable its land
mass, how defensible its frontiers, how rich its mineral deposits, how
fertile its soil, how plentiful its water, how extensive its coastline.
But communications satellites and fast computers are gradually
erasing distance, eroding the idea that some places are world centers
because they are near other places or near obsolescent natural resources
or near old-fashioned means of transportation, while other areas are
bound to be peripheral because they are remote from these centers.
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HARLAN CLEVELAND
Octavio Paz, a poet, caught onto what was happening well before
most of the systems analysts and political pundits. "We Mexicans,"
he wrote in the 1970s, "have always lived on the periphery of history.
Now the center or nucleus of world society has disintegrated and
everyone including the European and the North American is a
peripheral being. We are living on the margin . . . because there is no
longer any center.... World history has become everyone's task and
our own labyrinth is the labyrinth of all mankind."
The passing of remoteness is one of the great unheralded macrotrends
of our extraordinary time. Once you can plug in through television to
UN votes or to a bombing in Beirut or a Wimbledon final; once you
can sit in Auckland, or Singapore, or Bahrein and play the New York
stock markets in real time; once you can participate in rule, power,
and authority according to the relevance of your opinion rather than
the mileage to the decision-making venue—then the power centers are
wherever the brightest people are using the latest information in the
most creative ways.
Distant farmsteads can, if they will, be connected to the central
cortex of their commodity exchanges, their political authorities, their
global markets. The fusion of rapid microprocessing and global tele-
commurucations presents nearly all of us with a choice (and an
obligation to choose) between relevance and remoteness. There will
be costs and benefits to either choice but the necessity to choose is
new, and inescapable.
There is, of course, an alternative to geography as a principle of
organization. The revised proposition was recently formulated by
futurist Magda McHale: in the new knowledge environment, civilization
will be built more around communities of people, and less around
communities of placed
That this trend is well advanced can be seen in a quick review of
what is happening to the great geographic hierarchies which in this
last couple of centuries have been dividing, and governing, the world.
The state is not withering away, as with their different motives Karl
Marx and the advocates of world government would have desired. But
power is leaking out of sovereign national governments in three
directions at once. The state is leaking at the top, as more international
functions require the pooling of sovereignty in alliances, in a World
Weather Watch, in geophysical research, in eradicating contagious
diseases, in satellite communication, in facing up to global environ-
mental nsks. The state is leaking sideways, as multinational co~pora-
tions private, pseudo-private, and public—conduct more and more
of the world's commerce, and operate across political frontiers so
much better than committees of sovereign states seem able to do. The
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THP ~INCHT OF HIE~RCHY
77
state is also leaking from the bottom, as minorities, single-issue
constituencies, special-purpose communities, and neighborhoods take
control of their own destinies, legislating their own growth policies,
their own population policies, their own environmental policies.
And what has nation come to mean? Increasingly it means not a
hierarchy of power but ethnicity—the Frenchness of Quebec, the tribal
loyalties of the Ibo in Biafra, the separatism of the Scats, the rhetorical
brotherhood of the Arabs, the world's many diasporas, ranging from
the Overseas Chinese to the Zionist and non-Zionist Jews outside
Israel.
And organized religion? All of the great religious traditions have
had to settle, so far in world history, for hegemony in one or another
part of the world. But in a world of people-communities, not place-
communities, the parish cannot be mostly geography-based. Now,
even established religions are trying to break free from their national
and regional parishes. The Roman Catholic pope's extensive travels
and the terrorist outreach of Ayatollah Khomeini's Shiites forTn a
grotesque correlation: both are breaking loose from historic geographic
bounds to appeal to wider religious—and therefore political—constit-
uencies.
The prospect of people rather than place as a basis for community
has interesting implications for universities trying to serve a local
clientele, for corporations that have bet heavily on regional organiza-
tion, and for political systems that have bet heavily on geography-
based constituencies. It implies that those institutions which exploit
the electronic answers to remoteness may be catching a wave in the
twilight of hierarchy.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
In sum, the informatization of society will force dramatic changes
in some long-standing hierarchic forms of social organization. The
process of change, the slow accumulation of small changes in the way
venous social functions are performed, is far harder to discern than
the ultimate result. Information technology pervades our lives and
institutions in the same way that termites inhabit a house. As unseen
termites consume the structural supports of a building, so may
information technology challenge the rules, norms, and conventions
that, in an earlier time, served to organize society by vesting economic
and social power in centralized leadership, secrecy, ownership, re-
source control, and propitious geography. As with termite damage,
we can be caught unawares at the collapse of those structures we
thought sturdy, with the first visible sign of change serving also as
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78
HART CLEVELAND
proof positive that it is too late for stop-gap solutions. Therefore, if
we are to avoid catastrophe, or a least avoid fighting the last war, we
must both broaden and lengthen our vision of the future.
Information technologies will be assimilated without turmoil only if
scholars recognize the need to rethink their disciplines in light of the
erosion of societies based or material resources and industrial pro-
duction. Citizens will have to get used to the responsibility that goes
with the influence and power almost casually available to them through
access to information. Generalist leaders will find themselves rethinking
the nature of leadership. They more than others will have to widen
their angle of vision to take in an informed and consulting public, and
extend their focal length to take in the full implications of the twilight
of hierarchy, not in the next 100 years but in their own life and work.
We will need to change we are already changing—the negligent
procedures that left the Bomb unconstrained by hard thinking about
causes and effects. The informatization of society holds great promise,
but will need to be housed in a new intellectual home. The termites
are at work on the old one, and we had best not wait until we lean on
its wall and it caves in without notice.
NOTES
1. The statistics on the redistribution, between 1880 and 2000, of the U.S. work force
were culled from the research of G. Molitor, Public Policy Forecasting, Inc., by
Henry M. Boettinger, who headed AT&T's corporate planning before he joined
E. F. Hutton as head of its Office of lnfonnaiion Strategy and Technology.
"Information Industry Challenges to Management and Economics,'' New Jersey
Bell Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spnog 1984), pp. 12-21.
2. The OECD report, Information Activities, Electronics and Telecommunications
Technologies: Impact on Employment, Growth, and Trade (Paris: OECD, 1981),
was one of a series of reports OECD has conducted as it tries to trace the impacts
of the Information Age on, and its implications for, member countries.
3. G. Edward Schuh's comments were made in a note to the author.
4. P. Drucker, Managing in Turbulent Times (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
5. The first report to the Club of Rome, which sold more than 3 million copies in many
languages, is available in book form as The Limits to Growth, by Donella H.
Meadows et al. (New York: Universe Books, 1972). John McHale's book, The
Changing Information Environment (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1976; first
published in the United Kingdom in 1972) covers the changes in communications,
resource use, education, business and management, and political process that derive
from the impact of inflation upon society.
6. Dieter Altenpohl discussed the role of materials development and their social,
economic, and ecological impacts (thus illuminating the role that information plays
in materials substitution) in his book Materials in World Perspective (Heidelberg,
Gennany; Berlin: Spnnger-Verlag, 1980~. His chart relating the weight of materials
to their degree of sophistication, can be found on p. 201.
7. In his book manuscript entitled "A Second Industrial Revolution?," Professor Colin
Cherry of the University of London explained the ''sharing" nature of messages—
OCR for page 79
THE TWILIGHT OF HIERARCHY
79
while making clear that meaning is not necessarily or even usually shared. The
discussion here is based on that manuscript and on talks with Professor Cherry
about that draft in Aspen, Colorado, the summer before he died.
8. Lewis Branscomb, '`Infonnation: The Ultimate Frontier,'7 Science, January 12,
1979, pp. 143-147.
9. C. Cherry, "A Second Industrial Revolution?' (unpublished manuscript).
10. Comments about the obsolescence of both liberal and Marxist approaches are found
in the influential examination of the effects of the new communication and computer
technologies on society by Simon Nora and Alain Minc in L'informatisation de la
Societe. Originally produced as a commissioned report from the two civil servants
to President Giscard d'Estaing, it quickly became a best seller in France and
influenced the thinking of Giscard's successor, President Franc~ois Mitterand. The
book was eventually translated into English as The Computerization of Society
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981), with an introduction by Daniel Bell. The English
version of the title misses the point that Nora and Minc were making in their book-
which is that the marriage of computer and telecommunication technologies is the
new dimension of society.
11. Chester Barnard's theory of executive process is spelled out in The Functions of
the Executive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938).
12. Paul Appleby, Policy and Administration (University, Ala.: University of Alabama
Press, 1949), p. 21
13. Charles Lindblom's book, The Intelligence of Democracy (New York: Free Press,
1965), introduced the concept of '~mutual adjustment'' in the management of both
public and private organizations and institutions. He updated his thoughts in a
lecture at the University of Minnesota's Center for Strategic Management Research,
"Incremental Strategy: Still Muddling Through,'' on May 13, 1983.
14. The comment by David Riesman comes from my extensive correspondence with
him on the subject of openness in university governance.
15. Ivan Illich argued that computers are doing to communication what fences did to
pastures, in 'Silence Is a Commons," The CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1983,
pp. 5-9.
16. See note 15.
17. Magda Cordell McHale, `'The Feminist Model.'' Center for Integrative Studies,
State University of New York at Buffalo, 1984.
Comments
ALEXANDER H. FLAX
President Emeritus
Institute for Defense Analyses
Harlan Cleveland paper, as befits the subject of this symposium, is truly
global in scope, not only geographically, but in its full sweep, in its contem-
plation of human affairs, and in treating civilization as an integrated whole.
Its insights into the nature of changes in society being wrought by the rapid
pace of progress in information technology are profound and thought-provok-
~ng.
It would be very difficult indeed to do justice to this paper in a brief
discussion, but I think it would not be amiss to talc about a few things from
Representative terms from entire chapter:
information society
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