Much is said about the information age, the information economy, the information society, and particularly about information technology, but little about information itself. Here, Stuart Macdonald finds information central to a variety of business/economics disciplines, from patents to high technology, from corporate strategy to industrial espionage. In doing so, he reveals the rather tricky role that information plays in current processes of innovation and change.

Stuart Macdonald is Professor of Information and Organization at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Technology and the Tyranny of Export Controls: Whisper Who Dares (Macmillan, 1990) and (with Ernest Braun) Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

• Part I: Information and Theory


• Chapter 1: The Nature of Information


• Chapter 2: Change and Innovation


• Chapter 3: Sources of Information for Change and Innovation


• Chapter 4: The Flow of Information


• Chapter 5: The Mixing of Information


• Part II: Information and Practice


• Chapter 6: Resistance to Information: The Organization and the Independent Inventor


• Chapter 7: Information Intrigue: Controlling the Flow of Information


• Chapter 8: Information Innocence: High-Technology Policy and Technology Parks


• Chapter 9: Transfer without Transaction: Policy for Information Acquisition


• Chapter 10: Hidden Information Flow: Innovation in Eighteenth-Century Agriculture


• Chapter 11: The Illusion of Order: Innovation and the Patent System


• Chapter 12: Information and Control: Strategic Change in the Organization


• Concluding Thoughts