Authors

I Chini

Abstract

Research on the information society and the policies and strategies for its creation has tended to

discuss them rationally as the national, and occasionally international or regional, responses to

changes in the competitive environment. The predominant notion of the information society in various

levels of governance has only rarely been critically examined. The paper provides a Foucauldian

analysis of the constitution of the information society as a political and policy imperative at the level

of the European Union and the multiple effects it had for its member states. Drawing on ideas on

governmentality and regimes of truth, I argue that the European Commission continually shaped the

rationality and identity of the information society it heralded, by managing to set itself as the

legitimate locus of policy for the information society. In revealing the dominant discursive truths

about the European information society, the research discusses how the truth claims about the

construction of a particular version of the information society and the legitimate loci of its government

shaped the degrees of freedom of the Greek policy makers through a range of disciplining and selfdisciplining practices.

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