Human, Social, and Intellectual Capital in the COVID-19 Era: Establishing the Agenda. Framing, Plausibility, and Verifiability in the Repositories

The health and economic crisis caused by the SARS CoV-2 coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease has accelerated the emergence of an informational economy focused on the use of electronic networks. The impact of this scenario on education led to the transition from the traditional classroom to the electronic whiteboard. The objective of the present work is to analyze the relationships between human, social, and intellectual capital. A model showing the prevalence of human capital creation—as indicated by data processing in the virtual class-room and self-management of knowledge—was established.

South Africa in the Installation Phase of a New Techno-economic Paradigm

South Africa’s situation of financialization, low growth, unemployment, and inequality is linked here to the ‘installation phase’ of a new technology as described by Carlotta Perez. South Africa’s informational economy is examined, and the role of the financial sector is summarized. The article then considers the strengths and weaknesses of the manufacturing and service sectors, and the embeddedness in them of digital technologies. The article concludes by supporting manufacturing as the best route to a new productive economic core while other sites of digital industry take deeper root. The need to shape finance to more national ends is also affirmed.

The Informational Economy of Vaudeville and the Business of American Entertainment

In the early twentieth century, vaudeville was the most popular theatrical form in the United States. Operating before the rise of mechanically reproduced entertainment, its centralized booking offices moved tens of thousands of performers across hundreds of stages to an audience of millions. Designed to gather and analyze data about both audiences and performers, these offices created a complex informational economy that defined the genre—an internal market that sought to transform culture into a commodity. By reconstructing the concrete details of these business practices, it is possible to develop a new understanding of both the success of the vaudeville industry and its influence on the evolution of American mass culture.

Between Truth and Power

This book explores the relationships between legal institutions and political and economic transformation. It argues that as law is enlisted to help produce the profound economic and sociotechnical shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the informational economy, it is changing in fundamental ways. We are witnessing the emergence of legal institutions adapted to the information age, but their form and their substance remain undetermined and are the subjects of intense struggle. One level for legal-institutional transformation involves baseline understandings of entitlement and disentitlement. Both lawyers and laypeople tend to think of legal entitlements as relatively fixed, but the ongoing transformation in political economy has set things in motion in ways that traditional accounts do not contemplate. In particular, the datafication of important resources and the shift to a platform-based, massively intermediated communications environment have profoundly reshaped both the organization of economic activity and the patterns of information exchange. The authority of platforms is both practical and normative, and it has become both something taken for granted and a powerful force reshaping the law in its own image. Another level for legal-institutional transformation involves the structure and operation of regulatory and governance institutions. Patterns of institutional change in the networked information era express a generally neoliberalized and managerialist stance toward the law’s projects and processes. They reflect deeply embedded beliefs about the best uses of new technological capabilities to manage legal and regulatory processes and account for activities of legal and regulatory concern.

Conclusion

This book has explored the gradual and contested emergence of legal institutions adapted to the informational economy. It has considered changes in patterns of entitlement and disentitlement and in the structure and operation of regulatory and governance institutions. The conclusion offers a brief reflection on the ways that transformations in political economy shape the horizons of possibility for Polanyian protective countermovements and on the durability of such countermovements. It observes that countermovements are temporary, inevitably inviting new strategies for evasion, capture, co-optation, and arbitrage, but that they also create the possibility for real, incremental improvement—and occasionally even for transformative improvement.

The Biopolitical Public Domain

This chapter explores the emergence of a new factor of production in the informational economy—data flows relating to people and their activities—and identifies the legal construct that facilitates contemporary practices of personal data extraction and processing. The idea of a public domain of personal data has two interrelated effects. First, it constitutes personal data as available and potentially valuable, thereby supporting the reorganization of sociotechnical activity in ways directed toward extraction and appropriation. Second, it constitutes the personal data harvested within networked information environments as raw, thereby underwriting narratives of legal privilege that attach to the processing of personal data processing on an industrial scale and to the outputs of such operations.

Digital marketing instrument in the conditions of development of the informational economy

The evolution of marketing, large volumes of data, analytics and the enormous growth of advertising in the consumer information space, have led to a global transformation of marketing functions. Today, marketing, retaining its functional tools, is changing and modifying. Marketing systems primarily focus on understanding the process of shaping consumer decisions. Given that people spend most of their time in the digital world, marketers should work in it as effectively. It is difficult to imagine the successful operation of any enterprise without a well-established marketing activity. In a modern economy, the question of the role of marketing in the enterprise is acute. Manufacturers, trying to sell their goods intensively use all marketing tools, in particular – advertising. Aggravating competition in most markets requires the formation of mobile marketing systems of the enterprise. The basis of modern society is the rapidly growing network of electronic knowledge and tools that covers manufacturers, suppliers, sellers, buyers and users of information in electronic form. The experience of recent years shows that traditional unified marketing techniques no longer work with the expected effect, so new creative ways to promote a product or service to the market should be introduced into the marketing system in order to meet the needs of an overly demanding consumer. Each year, technology is moving forward, new trends are gaining momentum, affecting all the schemes that people make business in the digital world. And in order to be ahead of competitors, or even simply to “stay in the game”, you need to learn how to work with new tools, track trends and be flexible enough to adapt to these changes.