College and Research Libraries drown out any alternative voices striv- ing for the attention of a larger national audience. The free market, .transformed by the demands of corporate business logic, does not operate for the public good: it breaks down the social fiber of community, and when the market be- comes global, it breaks down the legiti- mate authority of the state. This book, although not Schiller at his best, deserves a wide audience among academic librarians of all stripes, espe- cially those in smaller, nonresearch li- braries with limited budgets for collec- tion development. He explains very well how the corporate free market and its particular ideology work to limit infor- mation available for a national dis- course. Schiller correctly identifies, as have Buchanan and Gingrich, that "Cul- tural, media, and informational issues already are, and increasingly will be, centers of social dispute." Academic li- brarians, as culture managers, can and must play a role in this social struggle if their libraries are to remain centers of true research and scholarship. Schiller's style and the book's organi- zation are more typical of a series of in- troductory lectures than a tightly struc- tured argument. Consequently, the reader must work hard for clarity in certain ar- eas. It is troubling that such an impor- tant book has no bibliography and that the index is minimal, chiefly limited to proper nouns. Concepts such as "ideol- ogy" and "hegemony" are used in the text without descriptions or even brief definitions. With a more thorough index, the reader could massage the text for a clearer understanding of such subjects. Schiller does provide sufficient docu- mentation to support his arguments throughout. Endnotes follow each chap- ter but, on occasion, are less than ideal. For example, note 11 in chapter 5 gives the reference "Gore speech." A close reading of the section surrounding the note gives clues to chase it down. (Notes like this, however, are one of the things Book Reviews 487 that make being a reference librarian fun.) Still, despite these mechanical shortcom- ings, the book is worth reading. Indeed, it is a welcome introduction to a crucial area in the sociology I anthropology of information.-Noei D. Young, Rehoboth, Massachusetts. Webster, Frank. Theories of the Informa- tion Society. London: Routledge (Inter- national Library of Sociology), 1995. 257p. $17.95. (ISBN 0-415-10574-9.) LC 94-49029. The central question in this book by a professor of sociology at Oxford Brookes University is whether the information society in which we now live is a new kind of society, different in character from any previous society, or whether it isba- sically just an "informatized" version of a familiar old kind of society. This sounds as if it ought to matter to information pro- fessionals, who could be expected to ben- efit from occupying a strategic position in a novel kind of society. Webster's book will do nothing to encourage such hopes; he is skeptical of any claim of novelty for the information society. He begins by reviewing, and quickly dismissing, accounts of the transition to a new type of society that are expressed in terms of quantitative increases in in- formation technology, information pro- duction, information occupations, infor- mation transfer, or exposure to media culture. He turns for illumination on the significance of information in modern society to a variety of social theories and theorists. Few of these are explicitly con- cerned with the idea of an information society, but all are relevant in various ways. Daniel Bell's theory of a post- industrial society gets sharply criticized. Herbert Schiller's critique of the domi- nance of market criteria and corporate self-interest in information development, and of class inequalities in access to in- formation, gets a very sympathetic ex- position. So does Anthony Giddens's ac- count of the nation-state's longstanding 488 College & Research Libraries interest in surveillance, fueled in large part by military concerns. Juergen Habermas' s story of a once-thriving, but now threat- ened public sphere of disinterested ratio- nal debate is told briefly and then fol- lowed by an account of recent financial squeezes on British radio, public televi- sion, public libraries, museums, and gov- ernment information services. A chapter is devoted to discussion of recent eco- nomic changes, contrasting the "Fordist" period 1945-1973 with the subsequent "post-Fordist" era, characterized by glo- balization of markets, finance, produc- tion, and other restructurings (e.g., downsizing and outsourcing); this dis- cussion is based on work by what is known as the Regulation School, but the phenomena discussed are all familiar. From this we move on to theories of post- modernism and the views of Jean Baudrillard, J. F. Lyotard, and (very briefly) Mark Poster, David Harvey, and a few others. Finally, Manuel Cas tells's concept of the informational city is ex- plained, emphasizing sharp class con- trasts between globally oriented informa- tion workers and locally oriented service workers and ghetto inhabitants. In Webster's view, the accounts of postindustrial society, postmodernism, and the information city (actually the "in- formation mode of development" that figures in Castells's theory) support the idea of a new type of society resulting from information developments, where- as others, especially Schiller, Giddens, and Habermas, favor the claim that there has been no sharp break but, rather, de- velopment continuous with the past. Webster is firmly on the "no sharp break" side: there is no question about a pervasive "informatization" of life, but there is no warrant for talk of a radically new kind of society. Why not? Webster just finds the continuity story more plau- sible than the sharp break story, and de- nies that the case has been made for a break or, what is somewhat different, for the appearance of a new type of society. September 1996 Webster's arguments are often sus- pect. When at the beginning he dismissed quantitative accounts of a transition to a new kind of society, it apparently was be- cause no one could tell him exactly how much change it took to make a new soci- ety-exactly how much more informa- tion, exactly· how many more people in information occupations. But where did he get the idea that gradual quantitative change can never result in major quali- tative change without there being any particular point at which the change oc- curs? (One grows old, but there need be no exact point in time at which one be- comes old.) Unless he is going to deny the possibility of gradual evolution of new species, it is hard to see why the absence of a clearly defined sharp break settles any questions about the informa- tion society. (And if he does deny that pos- sibility, why should anybody follow him?) There is another and even more bother- some recurrent argument Webster uses against proponents of a new type of soci- ety. He repeatedly accuses people such as Bell and Castells of technological de- terminism, which he thinks is obviously a serious intellectual crime. They think that technological change has led to ma- jor social change; why is that so wrong? Webster's (implicit) argument seems to be this: If you think that technological change ever leads to major social change, you must think that it always does and that nothing else ever does. Obviously, Bell and Castells do not have to think any such thing, but Webster's apparent be- lief that they do has devastating effects on his own position. He is helpless in dealing with technological change. So Webster does not have much to of- fer in support of his argument that the in- formation society is no new kind of soci- ety. But might he not be right all the same? Let us review the situation. Everyone is agreed on the pervasive "informatization" of society, it appears; the argument is over whether to call the information society a new stage in an old process or a new kind of society. But that argument just cannot get off the ground unless we have some way of distinguishing new "stages" from new "kinds." But we do not appear to have any agreed ways of doing that, and so two commentators can describe the same social situation as enormously different from the past but only a new stage or, alternatively, as the begin- nings of a new kind. The thing to do might be to put a moratorium on this particular argument and tell the parties to come back when they have proposals about how best to distinguish stages from kinds, and why we should care. On reflection, one wonders why informa- tion professionals should care, unless they can be shown reason for thinking the difference between stage and kind is a big deal and one that makes a dif- ference to them.-Patrick Wilson, Uni- versity of California, Berkeley. Wilder, Stanley J. The Age Demographics of Academic Librarians: A Profession Apart. Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1995. 88p. $30.00. (ISBN 0-918006-77-5.) Authored by Stanley J. Wilder, assistant dean for technical and financial services at Louisiana State University Libraries, the purpose of the report is to: (1) corn- pare the age demographics of academic librarians to the age demographics of members of comparable professions, (2) examine the dramatic increase in age of librarians between 1990 and 1994, and (3) project the retirement rates of academic li- brarians over the next twenty-five years. Additionally, the author wanted to explore the possible explanations for, and impli- cations of, his discovery that academic li- brarians tend to be older than their coun- terparts in comparable professions. If you are like me, you are probably initially wondering why this information is important and what the implications of an older workforce for the profession might be. Wilder examined librarian age differences for different job categories; Book Reviews 489 among minority group members, library administrators, and librarians working different regions; and in public and pri- vate institutions. He suggests that the age demographics information will have im- plications for workforce planning, re- cruitment, automation, and outsourcing. Wilder relies primarily on data ob- tained from the Association of Research Libraries' (ARL) salary surveys for 1990 and 1994, and ARL statistics from 1963-91 and 1992-94; indeed, the subtitle of the report is A Report Based on Data from the ARL Annual Salary Survey. However, the appendices reveal that he also analyzed data obtained from the Current Popula- tion Survey (CPS) ·and from the Associa- tion of Library and Information Science Education (ALISE). The author makes good use of the ARL statistics by conduct- ing a secondary analysis of the data and by supplementing the analyses with ad- ditional material from ALISE and CPS. The first purpose of Wilder's research was to examine the age of librarians as compared to members of comparable professions. The U.S. government-de- fined, comparable professions are de- rived from the Standard Occupational Clas- sification Manual. This professional spe- cialty group includes librarians, physi- cians, professors, teachers, lawyers, and social workers, among more than 100 other professions. The author found that librarians tended to be older than mem- bers of these other professions. There was an underrepresentation of young people and an overrepresentation of librarians in the 45-49 age group. Wilder states that during the 1960s there was a dramatic in- crease in the number of students attend- ing higher education institutions. This increased population required an in- crease in staff at colleges and universi- ties, including more academic librarians. Of lesser consequence is the banishment of a mandatory retirement age for col- lege faculty. Academic librarians with faculty status also are exempt from man- datory retirement.