#knowledge-based society

In State, Power, Socialism, Nicos Poulantzas conceptualized a state that materializes and concentrates power and displaces the class struggle from the economic to the political arena. In the past twenty years, much has changed. We argue that economic relations have been transformed by economic globalization, work reorganization, and the compression of space, time, and knowledge transmission through an information and communications revolution. Knowledge is far more central to production, and the locus of the relation between power and knowledge has moved out of the nation state that was so fundamental to Poulantzas’ analysis.

This sociological theory of communication is founded in a tradition that includes Giddens’ structuration theory, Habermas’ theory of communicative action, and Luhmann’s proposal to consider social systems as self-organizing. The study also elaborates on Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication for the formalization and operationalization of the non-linear dynamics.