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Over the past 25 years, a new economy has taken place. Castells describes it as "informational, global and interconnected".It is global because it encompass all the globe, without leaving aside any, even remote, community. It is interconnected because all regional economies need each other in order to make sense of the global. But, why is it "informational"? And what does this mean?[Segue nel testo .]* Presentato dal Dipartimento di Studi su Società, Politica e Istituzioni.

Based on an empirical study of the British think tank Demos, the article deliberates on the nature of current political ideas. The key argument is that such a deliberation must take into account not only ideas of production but also ideas of mediation. The article argues that the ability to disseminate, brand, and market political ideas in the public sphere through the mass media is a crucial part of the activities of modern idea producers such as think tanks. Ideas are normally conceptualized as statements. As an analytical tool, the article makes a distinction between the two components of a statement. The two components are utterance (or impartation) and proposition (or semantic unit more generally). By so doing, it is possible to focus on (1) the necessity for think tanks to be an `impartational node' in communicative networks and (2) the importance of attributing certain meanings and values to the political ideas (to brand ideas). From this theoretical outset, the article then describes the logic or nature of the mediation, marketing and branding of political ideas.

Es wird die These entwickelt, dass die Informatisierung der Arbeit ein wesentliches Merkmal einer Gesellschaft im Umbruch ist. Dieser strukturelle Zusammenhang findet seinen Ausdruck in dem von Manuel Castells geprägten Begriff des "informational capitalism". Zusammen mit einem erweiterten qualitativen Verständnis des Prozesses der Informatisierung als Schaffung einer verdoppelten Welt der "zweiten Natur" kann ein sozialwissenschaftlicher theoretischer Rahmen entwickelt werden: Der gegenwärtige gesellschaftliche Umbruch ist nicht nur mit einer deutlichen quantitativen Ausdehnung der Informationsarbeit verbunden. Spürbarer noch sind die qualitativen Veränderungen, die sich in der Arbeit selbst, in ihren Organisationsformen und auf gesellschaftlicher Ebene zum "social digital divide" (digitale Spaltung der Gesellschaft) beobachten lassen. Informatisierung ist jedoch keine lineare Tendenz, sondern in sich widersprüchlich. Sie bedarf ausgedehnter, sich jeweils neu definierender Zutaten und Interpretationsleistungen, um Information zu Wissen und damit für zielgerichtete Praxis nutzbar zu machen. Die allmähliche Ablösung des Begriffs der "Informationsgesellschaft" durch den der "Wissensgesellschaft" signalisiert das zunehmende Bewusstsein für diese Verschiebung. Information und Wissen, Wissen und Nicht-Wissen bilden eine innere Einheit. Aus dem Spannungsverhältnis von Information und Wissen, von Formalisierung und Subjektivität resultieren schließlich Spielräume für das Subjekt und damit Gestaltungsspielräume für Technik und Organisation. (GB)

The focus of this paper is on individuals' decisions to seek access to influence a legislator's policy choice from a given binary agenda under uncertainty. In the model, influence is exclusively through the provision of information regarding the true state of the world, and money is used exclusively to seek access to the legislator to exert such influence. However, bias can occur through differences in individuals' willingness to contribute to seek access and through choice of argument at the lobbying stage, conditional on access being granted. Among the results are that the decision of moderates (i.e. those with state-dependent induced preferences over the agenda) to seek access is independent of others' decisions, but this is not true of extremists (those who unequivocally favour one or other of the two alternatives); that although the policy preferences of the legislator coincide with those of the moderates, the legislator often sets the required contribution from moderates higher than that from extremists and, moreover, this is so despite the fact that extremists seeking access offer an argument to the legislator which, although informative, gives negligible payoff gains to the legislator; and, finally, that (expected) "bias« in decision making typically exists and persists even when the size of extremist groups is negligible relative to that of the moderate group.

This essay builds on the literatures on 'biocapitalism' and 'informationalism' (or 'informational capitalism') to develop the concept of 'bio-informational capitalism' in order to articulate an emergent form of capitalism that is self-renewing in the sense that it can change and renew the material basis for life and capital as well as program itself. Bio-informational capitalism applies and develops aspects of the new biology to informatics to create new organic forms of computing and self-reproducing memory that in turn has become the basis of bioinformatics. The paper begins with a review of the successes of the 'new biology', focusing on Craig Venter's digitizing of biology and, as he remarks, the creation of new life from the digital universe. The paper then provides a brief account of bioinformatics before brokering and discussing the term 'bioinformational capitalism'.