An ICT Skills Model of Inclusion: Contemporary Distortions of Equity in British Network Engineer Training

The increasing integration of ICT interoperability and functionality in market environments is acknowledged by some, for instance Castells (1996), to have generated an information-based mode or form of production with global flows of trade in knowledge and service products. Said to characterize post-Fordist production, it focuses less on quantity and more on the ability to qualitatively transform increasingly complex levels of information into knowledge and service commodities (Leppimäki et al. 2004). For this reason, an ICT-based economy is sometimes referred to as the ‘k-economy, where ‘knowledge has become perhaps the most important factor determining the standard of living … our most powerful engine of production … Today’s most technologically advanced economies are truly knowledge-based’ (DTI 2004: 27–28).