Question 1.2 Techno-ecnomic paradigm

During the 1900s people first lived through shift from the agricultural era to the industrial era. Nowadays, people are in the middle of the shift from the industrial era to the information era. The new era has several definitions based on different theories. At the same time, we talk about information society, network society, post-industrial society, service society, expert society, learning society, postmodern society, innovation society, risk society, and consumer society. These definitions reflect the different points of view of assessing the development people have been experiencing during the recent years. Each of these definitions emphasises different phenomena embedded in the change of present techno-economic paradigm, and each of them builds a basis for the assessment of the requirements of the changing environment. Although the definitions and theories describing the present change are mostly very abstract, some concrete indicators can be determined to describe the phase of the direction in the changing process of the society. The changed should be assessed at regional level, especially as regional dimension is gaining importance in the development policies at the European level. In the regional context the question to raise first is, how the shift of techno-economic paradigm appears in the regional level and what its effect is on emerging regional disparities. Secondly, it is possible to evaluate, how the region’s adaptability to the shift of techno-economic paradigm correlates to its economic success. The variables included in the adaptability indicator are derived from the theories describing the present society. They Finnish urban regions are used as the source of empirical data in this study.