This theme delves into the profound influence of technology on political structures, communication, and governance. The internet, in particular, has minimized transaction costs, blurred the lines between private and public realms, and expanded access to information, thus offering novel avenues for collective interests. While this has empowered individuals and groups to mobilize for political causes on a global scale, it also sparks concerns about disparities in information and power, often favoring those with higher education and financial resources. This theme focuses on technology's pivotal role in reshaping political dynamics and institutions, with a specific emphasis on its implications for democracy and collective action.Advanced technologies can reshape the dynamics of asymmetric conflicts. These technologies have the potential to empower non-state actors and smaller, less resource-rich entities, altering the balance of power in such conflicts. As both the government and citizens invest in and develop new technologies, it can indeed spark a sort of technological arms race. Governments may enhance their surveillance and control technologies, while citizens deploy tools to protect their privacy and civil liberties. This race may extend to augmentation technologies that amplify the capabilities of individuals or groups, thereby influencing the dynamics of asymmetric conflicts.----Bimber, Bruce, Cynthia Stohl, and Andrew J. Flanagin. "Technological change and the shifting nature of political organization." Routledge handbook of Internet politics. Routledge, 2008. 72-85.["Underpinning the study of politics is an understanding of organizational dynamics and their relation to collective action. This chapter addresses ways in which new communication technologies enable the development of a diverse array of organizational forms in the pursuit of collective interests. Taking advantage of the internet’s ability to reduce transaction costs, blur private and public boundaries, and enable accessibility to information and new types of knowledge management systems, actors have available new strategic possibilities for organizing. These options are no longer dependent upon the complex array of material resources and formal coordinating mechanisms needed in the past. We propose an integrative theoretical approach to this rich variety of collective action and forms of organizing. Toward this end, we advance a conception of collective action as communicative in nature, and offer a two-dimensional model of collective action space, comprising dimensions for (a) the mode of interpersonal interaction, and (b) the mode of engagement that shapes interaction. Conclusions address the implications of this new theoretical framework for contemporary organizations, organizing, and organizational membership."]Graber, Doris A. "The ‘new’ media and politics: What does the future hold?." PS: Political Science & Politics 29.1 (1996): 33-36.["Thanks to the new electronic networks, individuals can now inform people worldwide and mobilize them for political action. Individuals and groups eager to spread their political messages no longer depend on media coverage to publicize their appeals. In cyberspace, a single private citizen can address hundreds of thousands of people via a computer from the privacy of his or her home. Additionally, electronic publishing on home computers has vastly boosted the numbers of newsletters that various social, professional, and trade communities can distribute. In practice, cyberspace riches are available only to individuals with superior education and financial resources. These are the publics who already participate far more in politics than their less privileged fellow citizens. As technology continues to evolve, the knowledge gap between the information privileged and the information underclass is likely to grow. Since knowledge means power, an information-deprived class is likely to suffer other power deprivations. It cannot readily avail itself of Internet resources that empower interest groups to use the information superhighway to organize and lobby for their causes. Hence, the influence of educationally and economically privileged groups on politics, which has always been substantial, may be greatly enhanced."]Fountain, Jane E. Building the virtual state: Information technology and institutional change. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.*Weare, Christopher. "The Internet and democracy: The causal links between technology and politics." International Journal of Public Administration 25.5 (2002): 659-691.["This paper strives to explicate the causal links between changing technology and democratic governance. Its over-arching goal is to define the relevant concepts of communication and governance and more importantly, to focus empirical observations on the critical dimensions of a multifaceted phenomenon. The analysis focuses on three key links in this causal chain. The first is the effects of technological innovation on different communication activities. The second link involves the role communication and information play in democratic governance. The final is the social and political mechanisms by which technological innovations are introduced within and transform democratic processes and institutions. We argue that a sharper understanding of these three essential links will enable the growing numbers of researchers interested in electronic democracy to employ the massive social experiment the Internet represents to clarify and further democratic theory itself."]Jenkins, Henry, and David Thorburn. "Introduction: The digital revolution, the informed citizen, and the culture of democracy." Democracy and new media 1 (2003): 17.Bloomfield, Brian P., and Rod Coombs. "Information technology, control and power: The centralization and decentralization debate revisited." Journal of management studies 29.4 (1992): 459-459.["When computers first came into common use within organizations there was an expectation shared among many observers that they would tend to centralize organizational power. Information was equated with power and the potent information processing capacity of computers was seen as an extension of managerial control. To some extent the reason for the expectation can also be attributed to extrapolations from the particular technological form in which computing emerged following the first military uses during and immediately after the Second World War - namely, large centralized data-processing departments."] In addition, it is worth pointing out the fact that the dissemination of computers into organizations was accompanied by ideas from systems theory which engendered a reconceptualization of managerial and organizational processes, explicitly emphasizing the importance of control over subsystems (Boguslaw, 1965; Lilienfeld, 1978). Systems thinking has often been associated with technocratic ideas and so further strengthened the feeling that computers would pave the way for enhanced centralization in organizations."]Orlikowski, Wanda J. "Integrated information environment or matrix of control? The contradictory implications of information technology." Accounting, management and information technologies 1.1 (1991): 9-42.["This paper examines the extent to which information technology deployed in work processes facilitates changes in forms of control and forms of organizing. A field study of a single organization that implemented information technology in its production process is presented as an empirical investigation of these issues. The findings indicate that information technology reinforced established forms of organizing and facilitated an intensification and fusion of existing mechanisms of control. While debunking the technological imperative once again, the results also provide a number of insights into the contradictory implications of computer-based work and control in organizations. In particular, the paper shows that when information technology mediates work processes it creates an information environment, which while it may facilitate integrated and flexible operations, may also enable a disciplinary matrix of knowledge and power. These findings and their implications for forms of control, forms of organizing, and professional practice are discussed. Much has recently been written about the potential of information technology to create new ways of organizing and transforming existing bureaucratic organizational forms and social relations [Applegate, Cash and Mills 1988; Drucker 1988; Hammer 1990; Huber 1986; McFarlan 1984; Miles and Snow 1986]. Many of these anticipated changes are premised on the potential of information technology to loosen the hierarchical stranglehold on organizational practices, creating networked and lateral relations that can usher in new organizational forms and practices. Among these potential forms we find cluster [Applegate, Cash and Mills 1988], information- based [Drucker 1988], networked [Miles and Snow 1986], post-bureaucratic [Toffler 1980], post-hierarchic [Zuboff 1988], and post-industrial [Huber 1986]. Applegate, Cash and Mills [1988:136] write about their vision of the new organization: "The new technologies hold great promise that our large, rigid, hierarchies will become more adaptive, responsive, and better suited to the fast-paced world of the twenty-first century."]Zmud, Robert W. "Opportunities for strategic information manipulation through new information technology." Organizations and communication technology (1990): 95-116.*Dechow, Niels, Markus Granlund, and Jan Mouritsen. "Management control of the complex organization: relationships between management accounting and information technology." Handbooks of management accounting research 2 (2006): 625-640.["In this chapter we discuss the relations between information technology, information systems and management control. We argue that important issues can be learned about management accounting and control as we study its relations to information technology. Such relations are many times not only complex but also problematic: information technology is simultaneously a challenge and a resource for management control. Being integral parts of the emergence of complex organizations, new information technologies also produce new images of what and how something can be modeled, and therefore also of how something can be calculated and accounted for. Management accounting/control can easily be seen to be dependent on information technology, but as we demonstrate information technology cannot present its own case. Accounting is a key metaphor in many applications, and distinctions between various kinds of performance relate back to prior discussions in the accounting field. The intermingling of information technology and accounting is therefore important. And yet, the benefits for accounting from information technology may materialise only in uncertain and surprising ways and typically only after long implementation barriers. There is thus a relationship but it is one to be untangled rather than to be assumed. The research needed to develop insights into this relationship is significant because it concerns the principles about how organizations choose to coordinate their increasingly complex activities."]Leonardi, Paul M. "Activating the informational capabilities of information technology for organizational change." Organization science 18.5 (2007): 813-831.["This paper considers how the information enabled by information technology (IT) is implicated in organizational action. It begins by proposing that the relationship between technology appropriations and an organization’s informal advice networks is one useful way to understand how the information that is created, modified, transmitted, and stored through the use of IT can lead to organizational change. I then present the findings of an ethnographic study of the implementation and use of a new information technology service management (ITSM) tool in a large IT organization. The findings show that a number of discrepant events led technicians to appropriate the material features of the technology incertain ways, thus providing them with new and different kinds of information than was available to them previously. Armed with such information, technicians began to seek advice differently than they had before, which led to an overall transformation in the organization’s social structure. I characterize appropriations of a technology’s features as a set of practices that activate the informational capabilities of a new technology through advice networks. In activating its informational capabilities, technicians transformed the potential that the technology had to create, modify, transmit, and store information in new ways into resources used to organize their work. I conclude by discussing the implications of the findings for theorizing about and management of technologically induced organizational change."]Robins, Kevin, and Frank Webster. "Cybernetic capitalism: Information, technology, everyday life." The political economy of information (1988): 44-75.Pfohl, Stephen. "New global technologies of power: Cybernetic capitalism and social inequality." The Blackwell Companion to social inequalities (2005): 546-592.["This essay explores the global historical networking of cybernetic or information-based technologies of power and the impact such new technologies have upon long-standing social inequalities. These complex technologies gained hold over the capital-intensive organization of economic life and the collective social imagination of Northwestern societies during the late twentieth century in a time of cold global warfare. By the early twenty-first century, high-speed cybernetic networks of fascinating and fearful information have become the stuff of everyday life. Whether in the form of wireless cell phone data uploads, 24/7 instant messaging, digital surveillance cams, laser-guided killing machines, ATM dispersals of credit, emotionally charged interactions with television, or any of a wide range of other human–machine interfaces, computational exchanges between energetic humans and coded informational commands today routinely captivate our senses and thoughts, reorganizing what we remember and what we forget. Today, of course, remains a time of global warfare, and the technological streaming together of humans and machines is a constitutive aspect of this realm as well. Sometimes hot, sometimes cold, war today also is always telematic. Driven by cascades of electronic information, wired feedback, and actions aimed at imposing or resisting the imposition of one group’s will upon others, war operates in phantasmatic theaters of pleasure and terror that are at once real and imaginary. This involves both the fateful electronic staging of deadly mass violence,"]Kline, Ronald R. "Cybernetics, management science, and technology policy: The emergence of" information technology" as a keyword, 1948-1985." Technology and Culture 47.3 (2006): 513-535.["In Cybernetics (1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), Wiener had written about the coming of a 'second industrial revolution' based on the processing of information in computerized, automated factories."]Kline, R. (1987). R&D: Organizing for war. IEEE Spectrum, 24(11), 54–61. doi:10.1109/mspec.1987.6448134 ["Government-sponsored laboratories created electronic weapons that helped win the war and fostered management techniques that shaped postwar industry. World War II was the first major conflict in which the weapons at its end were substantially different and more destructive than those at its beginning. Powerful new weapons, such as the atomic bomb and V-2 rocket, underscored the importance of organized scientific research and development in modern wars. Many other weapons were less dramatic, but, along with defensive measures, also proved crucial. Many technical experts shared the view that while the bomb may have ended the war, radar won it for the Allies. Other electronic advances resulted in proximity fuzes, long-range navigation, and vastly improved communications—all products of wartime R&D. The war's outcome was decisively affected by the work of research physicists and electrical engineers, especially those specializing in electronics."]Kline, R. R. (2012). Beyond the closed world. History and Technology, 28(4), 407–413. doi:10.1080/07341512.2012.756239 ["Medina discusses the model and Project Cybersyn in regard to President Salvador Allende’s program of building Chilean socialism as an alternative Middle Way between US corporate capitalism and technocratic Soviet communism. In chronicling the struggles of Beer and the Chilean team to design and build Project Cybersyn in the face of the lack of up-to-date computer systems (partly caused by an invisible US economic embargo), the need to revise British-written software on the spot, shifting government priorities, and worker opposition, Medina vividly illustrates the difficulties of turning paper models into sociotechnical systems in a transnational setting."]Kline, R. R. (2017). Humans and Machines. Technology and Culture, 58(3), 835–845. doi:10.1353/tech.2017.0083 ["Let me turn now to the history of cybernetics and information theory in the United States. These new post–World War II sciences grappled with the question of what it meant to be human in the emerging age of electronic computers. When I began to speak on this research about a decade ago, I found that the information theory of Claude Shannon would put audiences to sleep, whereas the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener would wake them up and lead to lots of questions. As a former engineer who had worked on the computer control systems that could launch nuclear missiles from submarines—which gave me an occupational deferment during the Vietnam War—I could not understand why cybernetics, which drew on control engineering, was so cool in the twenty-first century. I thought the digital age owed a greater debt to information theory. Fred Turner’s wonderful book on the countercultural origins of cyberculture helped clear up that mystery. Fred shows that American artists, musicians, and readers of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog viewed cybernetics as a means to liberate them from the technocracy of Big Brother computer systems. This digital utopianism grew out of what Turner calls the “forgotten openness of the Closed World.”"]Kline, R. R. (2015). Technological Determinism. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 109–112. doi:10.1016/b978-0-08-097086-8.85034-5 ["‘Technological determinism’ is a term used to describe a set of claims made about the relationship between what we generally call ‘technology’ and ‘society.’ Two meanings have come into use: (1) an internal, technical logic determines  the design of technological artifacts and systems; and (2) the development of technological artifacts and systems determines broad social changes. The second claim is much more common and is often associated with debates over Karl Marx’s theory of history. But the two meanings are often conjoined in the claim that an autonomous technology (in both its development and use) shapes social relations. Other claims are less strong and express the belief that technology is a major cause, but not the sole determinant, of social change. Although scholars have argued for many years against the strong version of technological determinism, the general belief that technology is a major force shaping society, which dates to the early nineteenth century, still pervades popular culture in the United States and Europe. Ironically, critics of the harmful effects of technology tend to reinforce the strong claims of technological determinism. Methods developed to analyze the social construction of technology have moved the debate from questions like ‘does technology drive history?’ to arguments about a mutual relationship between technological and social change. New research recommends taking technological determinism seriously in order to understand its justificatory role in developing and using sociotechnical systems."]Cohen, Richard A. "Ethics and cybernetics: Levinasian reflections." Ethics and Information Technology 2 (2000): 27-35.["Is cybernetics good, bad, or indifferent? Sherry Turkle enlists deconstructive theory to celebrate the computer age as the embodiment of “difference.” No longer just a theory, one can now live a “virtual” life. Within a differential but ontologically detached field of signifiers, one can construct and reconstruct egos and environments from the bottom up and endlessly. Lucas Introna, in contrast, enlists the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to condemn the same computer age for increasing the distance between flesh and blood people. Mediating the face-to-face relation between real people, allowing and encouraging communication at a distance, information technology would alienate individuals from the social immediacy productive of moral obligations and responsibilities. In this paper I argue against both of these positions, and for similar reasons. Turkle’s celebration and Introna’s condemnation of information technology both depend, so I will argue, on the same mistaken meta interpretation of it. Like Introna, however, but to achieve a different end, I will enlist Levinas’s ethical philosophy to make this case."]Boguslaw, R. (1979). Postpositivism and the dilemmas of social planning. Society, 16(5), 40–44. doi:10.1007/bf02697733 ["Postpositivism has arisen from the " r e a l m " in systems theory that Ludwig yon Bertalanffy has called "systems technology." Bertalanffy, the "father of general systems theory," has tried to explain his offspring as an intellectual reorientation made necessary in physics, biology, the social sciences, and philosophy because of the change from power engineering (which released large amounts of energy in such gadgets as steam and electric machines) to control engineering (which in the form of computers and automation uses lower power devices to direct various processes). These "self-controlling" machines range from simple thermostats to the self-steering missiles of World War II and contemporary ICBMs."]Miles, Raymond E., et al. "Organizational strategy, structure, and process." Academy of management review 3.3 (1978): 546-562.["Organizational adaptation is a topic that has received only limited and fragmented theoretical treatment. Any attempt to examine organiza­tional adaptation is difficult, since the process is highly complex and changeable. The pro po sed theoretical framework deals with alterna­tive ways in which organizations define their product-market domains (strategy) and construct mechanisms (structures and processes) to pursue these strategies. The fram ework is based on interpretation of existing literature and continuing studies in four industries (college textbook publishing, electronics, food processing, and health care)."]Boguslaw, R. (1967). RAND in Retrospect. Society, 4(5), 56–57. doi:10.1007/bf02804517 ["Back in Santa Monica things were simpler. You could wear orange and purple sportshirts and play Kriegspiel during lunch. (Kriegspiel is a modified form of chess played with two boards, a screen between the players, and an umpire.) The guards beamed as they recognized you and reported your arrival by calling your name into a tape recorder. And puzzle-solving and problem-solving were the things that excited the gang and made them raise their voices or retreat into long silent stupors."]Boguslaw, R., Davis, R. H., & Glick, E. B. (1966). A simulation vehicle for studying national policy formation in a less armed world. Behavioral Science, 11(1), 43–61. doi:10.1002/bs.3830110105 ["Persons responsible for the formulation and direction of national policy are constantly confronted with problems of predicting the future under unknown or unanticipated social and psychological conditions. Basic issues in the processes of negotiation behavior involve such questions as: If a particular course of action is adopted, how will the environment respond? Given the social pressures and human prejudices that are operative, what is feasible? Would some other course of action be more productive for the nation as a whole or for some particular ’interestgroups? Here the authors present a simulation vehicle and supporting experiments to study problems of national policy planning and negotiation."]Boguslaw, R., & Davis, R. H. (1969). Social process modeling: A comparison of a live and computerized simulation. Behavioral Science, 14(3), 197–203. doi:10.1002/bs.3830140304 ["The extent to which an entirely computerized simulation could recapture the essential decision-making processes involved in a complex, but controlled laboratory exercise using human subjects is examined. A series of analytic simulations of an exercise called PLANS were run on a digital computer. Beginning with simulations based upon entirely random decision processes, greater and greater degrees of “decision making” sophistication were gradually incorporated into the computerized versions of PLANS. Past efforts to simulate human psychological process on a computer - for example, chess playing and music writing programs-have been directed generally at improving the effectiveness of computer programs. In the present study, involving the simulation of social rather than purely psychological processes, the situation appears reversed: computer programs behaved too rationally and efficiently."]Boguslaw, R. (1960). Situation Analysis and the Problem of Action. Social Problems, 8(3), 212–219. doi:10.2307/798911 ["Recent efforts to construct automatons which will learn to play respectable games of chess have highlighted the operational significance of our continuum. It is, of course, a trivial problem to program a high-speed computer to specify the best move in a chess game for a situation in which nothing appears on the chessboard but a white king, a black king, and a black rook. There are many other situations of a similar nature, characteristically occurring toward the end of a game in which a more or less simple rule, procedure, or algorithm will provide an exact specification of what each side should do under every possible set of circumstances."]Lilienfeld, Robert. "Systems theory as an ideology." Social Research (1975): 637-660.["In principle, we have the technological capability to adequately feed, shelter, and clothe every inhabitant of the world. In principle, we have the technological capability to provide adequate medical care for every inhabitant of the world. In principle, we have the technological capability to provide sufficient education for every inhabitant of the world, enabling them to enjoy a mature intellectual life. In principle, we have the technological capability to outlaw warfare and institute social sanctions that will prevent the outbreak of illegal wars. In principle, we have the capability to create in all societies a freedom of opinion and a freedom of action that will minimize the illegitimate constraints imposed by society on the individual. In principle, we have the capability to develop new technologies that will release new sources of energy and power to address physical and economic emergencies throughout the world. In principle, we have the capability to organize the societies of the world today to bring into existence well-developed plans for solving the problems of poverty, health, education, war, human freedom, and the development of new resources. If human beings have the capability of doing all these things, why don't they do it? The answer is that we are not organized to do so."]----Also see:[Technonationalism][Abt Associates][Bertalanffy][Decision Support Systems]Technonationalismhttps://archive.org/details/bitzinger2015Research and Development for National Defense https://archive.org/details/speakman1952System Development  Corporation (Misc.) https://archive.org/details/meyer1939/221610/Operational Research Society (ORS) https://archive.org/details/jors.1953.20.fp.png_v03/10.2307%4079184/page/411/mode/2upSerious Games, War Gaming, (Deterrence & Threat Management) https://archive.org/details/brody-1963/Brody1963/Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO) https://archive.org/details/humrroElection 2022 (Urban Operations & Manpower) https://archive.org/details/manpower_mout_election2022----Applegate, Lynda M., James I. Cash, and D. Quinn Mills. "Information Technology and tomorrows manager." Harvard business review 66.6 (1988): 128-136.Peter, F. Drucker. "The coming of the new organization." Harvard Business Review 66.1 (1988): 45-53.Hammer, Michael. "Reengineering work: Don't automate, obliterate." Harvard business review 68.4 (1990): 104-112.Huber 1986: "The importance of successful communication" by George P. Huber.    Mcfarlan, F. "Information Systems Changes The Way You Compete." Harvard Business Review (1984).Miles, Raymond E., et al. "Organizational strategy, structure, and process." Academy of management review 3.3 (1978): 546-562.Toffler, Alvin. "The third wave/alvin toffler." New York: Morrow 544 (1980).Zuboff, Shoshana. In the age of the smart machine: The future of work and power. Basic Books, Inc., 1988.Boguslaw, Robert. The new Utopians: A study of system design and social change. Prentice-Hall, 1965.Robert, Lilienfeld, et al. "The rise of systems theory." (1978).