Dresden
The next session is kicked off by George Barnett. He begins by noting the move from an industrial to an information economy which has now occurred in developed nations, and the simultaneous trend towards globalisation on a number of levels. There are a number of models for globalisation: a universal model which points to homogenisation or modernisation, in a diffusion model of knowledge and culture from Europe to other regions; a clustered model with the rise of regional clusters based upon economic, political and cultural similarities; and a hegemonic model with a concentration of economic, political and cultural power in few countries competing at the top of a hierarchy (this is based on work by Hargittai and Centeno). It is also possible to analyse patterns of competition which may occur in triadic or bipolar models, or to present a view by which hegemony competition is lacking because of a new American imperialism.

What kind of model does globalisation follow, then - what are its boundaries, what structural patterns, clusters, blocs, and interrelationships are emerging? Has there been a change to the global power geography and structure? This paper measures national innovativeness by the number of patents created, the global trade in patents, and the nationality of patent creators (with a particular interest in patents by co-inventors with different nationalities). On such lists, the U.S., Germany, and the UK are international leaders both in patent im- and export and in their centrality in co-invention, and there are some useful graphs over the last thirty years here - knowledge transfer between countries really began in a very strong sense from the early 1990s onwards. There are also some interesting maps of knowledge co-invention, with centres emerging around the U.S. (this centre also includes Western Europe) and East Asian countries. The core here seems to be made up by Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK, and the U.S.

This means that globalisation is unequally distributed ad operates on a hierarchical structure; the U.S., the UK, and Germany are competing at the centre of this structure. No visible structural change has occurred since the 1970s - there is strong structural continuity without strong evidence of regionalisation, with a growing global dependency on a few central countries and a polarisation between knowledge-rich and -poor nations, and with only weak structural change through the growing power of Asian invention systems. This would seem to point to a hegemonic model of globalisation - at least with the dataset used in the present study.

Telecommunications Traffic Flows

Seungyoon Lee is the next speaker. Her focus is on the international telecommunications traffic, which reflects the transformation of network structures that is led by globalisation and technological innovations. It is important here to look further at the local level, where there remains much heterogeneity between blocs and pairs of nations, also with a focus on developing nations and both sides of the communications divide. World systems theory and dependency theory assumes an asymmetry between information-rich and -poor, while core-(semi-periphery-)periphery structures may also be able to be observed. At the same time, it is also possible that there is decentralisation, heterogenisation, and regionalisation which may lead to the development of cluster structures - and this study aims to determine which structural model may better describe the telecommunications traffic patterns observed.

The study found that inbound telecommunications traffic has diversified between 1989 and 1999, and that there was greater decentralisation and upward mobility of a number of rising nations in global telecommunications flows. There are some useful graphs of traffic interconnection between different nations here, and significant changes in the interconnections between nations were able to be observed. The global telecommunications network is moving towards a cluster structure with increasing interaction and reciprocity between nations hat are less developed and located at the periphery. This also points to a need for policies that aim for the increasing inclusion of developing countries in the global telecommunications network. Further studies are necessary to investigate the nature of communications traffic that is being exchanged, though - voice, data, etc.

Orgocentric Link Profiles

Jim Danowski now presents on what he calls orgocentric link profiles. He notes that the idea of social capital can be extended into 'Web capital': where social capital is bifurcated into strong social capital (with much mutuality) and weak social capital (between diverse social actors). Social capital is conceptualised at the individual level, while Web capital would exist more in a multilevel fashion using page links as the unit of analysis. What is necessary here is to consider inlinks, outlinks, affiliation links, and other forms of connection; the Web, then is an extruded simulacrum. Third-party observers become particularly important here, and therefore this gives rise t a kind of perceived or attributed social capital.

Jim investigated the Web capital of several key academic associations (ICA, NCA, and AEJMC) and performed an automatic Web link analysis, measuring the structural properties of the link network. (Interestingly, Google and Yahoo! reported a very different number of links (as determined by the 'link:' search prefix, and it would be worth investigating why this is so.) Jim plotted a number of orgocentric network graphs which show these connections - and interestingly the integrativeness (the overall cross-linking between all sites found here) is similarly low for ICA and NCA, and significantly higher for AEJMC. Overall, the findings were that ICA has the most informational Web capital, NCA has moderate informational Web capital, and AEJMC has some informational but also the highest closure Web capital (because of the greater integrativeness).

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