In the last two decades, the labour markets of many OECD countries have witnessed major changes in the relative position of low-and highly-skilled workers. On the one hand, inequalities between the earnings of the low-and the highlyskilled have increased. On the other, the less skilled workers were much more vulnerable to the risk of unemployment than the highly-skilled ones. Amongst the theories that have been developed to explain the deteriorating position of the less educated workers, the hypothesis of a skill-biased technical change (Machin & Van Reenan, 1998) seems to find the most support in the relevant literature.
This paper examines the technology policy challenges facing peripheral European Union economies in their effort to catch up with the more advanced countries. It is argued that, generally, the subordinate position of peripheral economies within the EU compels them to replicate the technology policies followed in advanced countries. Yet the latter have proven more or less inappropriate for peripheral countries and regions because they usually do not properly accommodate their growth models and their corresponding production structures. On the other hand, the EU's preoccupation with 'high-tech' and 'best-practice' policies can be attributed to the underestimation of business organization and broader economic structures by the dominant theoretical paradigm of technology and innovation.
The hypothesis of this article is that industrial capitalism, as conceptualized by a series of authors from Smith and Marx to Weber and Sombart, and then to Galbraith and Chandler, is outdated. We are entering a new era of information or 'post-industrial capitalism'. The term used in the article is post-industrial capitalism. This is mainly because the notion of information capitalism does not define explicitly what is really new regarding the history of capitalism. Information capitalism can be either post-Fordist, or postindustrial, or even a transition period towards a post-capitalist society. The argument of the article is developed in two parts. The first offers a systematic comparison between the basic features of industrial and post-industrial capitalism. The second explores three main contradictions of post-industrial capitalism. The general idea behind this exploration is that the future of postindustrial capitalism remains open. It depends on how the contradictions of this new form of capitalism will be resolved. This, in turn, implies a critical position towards approaches that either extrapolate the economic patterns of the last two decades into the 21st century, or, by adopting sophisticated versions of technological determinism, propose a monistic scenario for the future.
KEYWORDS information economy • intangible capital • intellectual assets • national accounts • post-industrial • productivity paradox • symbolic resources
WHY POST-INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM?The first issue here is to explain why the recent changes to capitalist economies put into question the fundamentals of industrial capitalism. The comparison between industrial and post-industrial capitalism that follows focuses on five basic features of economic systems -the technological base, Thesis Eleven, Number
The article is based on Lewontin's distinction between transformational and variational evolution. Given that transformational evolution is dominant in the social realm while variational evolution reigns in the organic world, the question is if Hodgson and Knudsen's Generalized Darwinism bridges the ontological gap between the two types of evolution. It is argued that the three successive strategies of the authors—deconstruction of Lamarckism, appropriation of the Price equation, redefinition of the replication notion—are all based on controversial semantic innovations. Most importantly, it is shown that Generalized Darwinism, in its effort to address the transformational character of social evolution through the notion of generative replication, is compelled to radically restrict the importance of Darwinian natural selection.
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