ABSTRACT
In this chapter I shall try to show that the development and application of the new information technologies was not the product of an impartial, politically blind unfolding of pure scientific progress. Instead, the direction of technological advance was mainly determined by a variety of problems which confronted corporations in industrialised economies from the second half of the 1980s onward. And the enthusiasm with which Japanese government and enterprises embraced both the new technologies and the concept of an information society becomes understandable when we examine the particular configuration of problems which assailed the Japanese economy.
