ABSTRACT
Modernity is inherently globalizing-this is evident in some of the most basic characteristics of modern institutions including their disembeddedness and reflexivity. For Giddens a first approximation in defining 'modernity' is to say that '"modernity" refers to modes of social thought or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence'. The new information technologies, while of course responsible for profound social and other effects, they believe are effectively a 'refinement of what was fundamentally a political-administrative "revolution"'. One important new information technology development, for example, involved abandoning edger-based systems for card-based systems. Cards of a uniform size, on which standardized data were transcribed, housed physically in card drawers and related furniture and organized conceptually by classification schemes of various kinds, in effect epitomized a new 'modernist' technology.
