Dissertation Information for Stephen Dwight McDowell NAME: - Stephen Dwight McDowell
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- International Relations
SCHOOL:
- York University (USA) (1988)
ADVISORS: - None COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - None
MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected
Title: Hegemony and international organizations: A history of transborder data flow research programmes
Abstract: The project examines the origins, development and demise of transborder data flow as a question guiding policy research programmes in international organizations from 1975 to 1985. Transborder data flow as a research question asks about the extent of computer data movement across borders, and its national and international policy implications. This research question is treated here as ideology: the shared problems, concepts and methods of a particular historical group.
The study is organized by the three-part hegemony framework, which links ideology, the relationship of material forces, and institutions. The relationship of material forces is applied here as the distribution of electronic information capabilities among groups in world political economy (world patterns of production and exchange of telecommunications and computer hardware, software and services). Institution refers both to formal international organizations and to exchange, property and production relations and practices guiding the production and dissemination of information.
Research programmes are examined in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Intergovernmental Bureau for Informatics, Canada-United States interstate relations and the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations. Organizational documents, interviews with participants, and published reports of conferences and work programmes are used.
In the period--typified by the concentration of information capabilities in the north--organizational processes for producing policy concepts changed in sevral ways. Open research to serve rational policy formation in the OECD and the Canadian state was replaced by carefully managed consensus-building. Some issues were not fully covered, including the impact of transnational corporations' use of transborder data flow, national sovereignty concerns and data protection rights for legal persons and states. Analysts from trade agencies and representatives of transnational corporations supplanted the international organization officials and academics who initially participated in this research. These shifts in ideology and participation occurred alongside the movement toward property and market institutions to guide information production and exchange, and the decline of public service or public utility conceptions in communications policy research.
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MPACT Scores for Stephen Dwight McDowell A = 0
C = 6
A+C = 6
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2014-01-28 10:10:12
Advisors and Advisees Graph
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