Information and Organization: A Tribute to the Work of Don Lamberton

Don Lamberton was one of the first scholars to recognize the need for information to be taken seriously; he has spent much of his career persuading others. Focusing on his contribution, this volume explores the struggle for recognition of a way of thinking which is fundamental to our understanding of the social and economic role of information. Each of the thirty authors, prominent in information economics and related fields have written a contribution especially for this volume. Vital issues, central to Lamberton’s concerns and often ignored in euphoric approaches to information - the plight of the information poor, the poverty of information policy, the future of universal service, quality of employment, organizational and market failure to effect information transactions, the role of information in economic development, problems of codifying, classifying and managing information, the limitations of information systems - are emphasized throughout. The whole encapsulates the vast progress which has been made, not just in academic thinking about information, but in the part this thinking now plays in corporate strategy and government policy. The volume is both an affectionate account of Don Lamberton’s contribution to the understanding of information, and also the most comprehensive and authoritative of collections on the social and economic significance of information.