Professor Frank Webster

Head of Sociology

Email: F.Webster@city.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7040 4529

Overview

Professor Frank Webster comes from a small coal-mining village in the south west of County Durham in North East England. He attended Coundon Junior School from 1956-62 and Spennymoor Secondary School from 1962-69, then read Sociology at the University of Durham (BA, MA, 1972, 1974). He completed his formal studies at the London School of Economics (LSE, PhD 1978).

He has worked in several universities, at home and abroad. He joined City full-time in 2003 from the University of Birmingham where he was employed from 1999-2002. Before that, he spent several years at Oxford Brookes University and worked at the University of California San Diego in the early 1980s. He has been a Visiting Professor (Docent) in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications at Tampere University in Finland for over a decade. He has been Head of the Department of Sociology at City since 2008.

He was Director of the Sociology Undergraduate Programme at City from 2003 to 2007 and has a long-term interest in teaching and learning.
He has teaching interests in Contemporary Societies, Social Change, and Introduction to Sociology, as well as Information, Communication and Society. He has acted as external examiner, chiefly on undergraduate programmes, in many institutions over the last three decades and has wide experience of postgraduate and doctoral examination.

Research interests

Professor Webster's research has centred on information and communications trends, and has included conceptual analysis and critique, as well as studies of substantive areas such as higher education, public libraries, urban change, and new media. He has published around twenty volumes in his career, singly and with others (most often with Kevin Robins).

For years he drew attention to the dark side of the ‘information revolution’ – warfare, insisting that such unsettling dimensions as the ‘digital battlefield’ and heightened surveillance ought not to be ignored. However, two more substantive research projects, concentrated over a five-year period from 2002-8, involved empirical analysis and theoretical development of the concept of ‘Information War’ that moved beyond a technocentric and military framework.

During 2003-4 Professor Webster undertook an ESRC funded study of journalists reporting on armed conflict with Howard Tumber. A co-authored book from this project appeared in 2006, titled Journalists under Fire: Information War and Journalistic Practices.

Later, he was involved in another ESRC supported project examining the Anti-War Movement in Britain and its adoption of ICTs (see www.antiwarresearch.info/). A book from this later project appeared in 2008 titled, Anti-War Activism: New Media and Protest in the Information Age (Palgrave), written with Kevin Gillan and Jenny Pickerill.

A common concern of all this research has been to understand Information War as an unpredictable and hard-to-control terrain, extending far beyond the ‘theatre’ of conflict, though the symbolic representations and attendant symbolic struggles are matters of enormous consequence (read more about Professor Webster's research in this field).

His more recent research has been situated in a context of interest in democratisation and information trends - an interest manifested especially in his teaching at Masters level at City University.

He began work on a lengthy book, provisionally titled Democratization and Information, in 2008 and he hopes to complete this around 2013.

Professor Webster often delivers keynote addresses at international conferences and his writings have been translated in many languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Greek and Portuguese.

He supervises research students in a wide variety of areas, around information and communications issues. Those interested might contact him at f.webster@city.ac.uk.

Teaching

Undergraduate: Introduction to Sociology, New Media Challenges, Understanding Social Change

Postgraduate: Democratization, Information and Communications, The Information Society

Selected publications (since 2000)

Anti-War Activism: New Media and Protest in the Information Age, with Kevin Gillan and Jenny Pickerill (Palgrave 2008). Paperback edition 2011.

Journalists under Fire: Information War and Journalistic Practices, with Howard Tumber (Sage, 2006)

The Information Society Reader with the assistance of Raimo Blom, Erkki Karvonen, Kaarle Nordenstreng and Ensio Puoskari (Routledge 2004)

The Intensification of Surveillance: Crime, Terrorism and Warfare in the Information Age, edited with Kirstie Ball. (Pluto 2003)

Manuel Castells: Masters of Modern Social Thought, 3 volumes (Sage, 2003), edited with Basil Dimitriou.

Máquina Maldita: Contribuciones para una historia del luddismo (with Frank E.Manuel and Kevin Robins) Barcelona: alikornion educiones, 2002.

Environmentalism. 5 volumes (Routledge, 2002), edited with David Pepper and George Revill.

Theories of the Information Society [Routledge, 1995], 2nd edition (2002), 3rd edition (2006).

The Virtual University: Knowledge; Markets and Managements, with Kevin Robins (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Culture and Politics in the Information Age: A New Politics? (ed.) (Routledge, 2001).

Journal articles

‘Information and Democratization’, Ch.1 in Stylianos Papathanassopoulos (ed), Media Perspectives for the 21st century: Concepts, topics and issues (Routledge), 2010

‘Science and Technology: Now and in the Future’ (with Mark Erickson), in George Ritzer (ed.), New Blackwell Companion to Sociology (2010/11)

‘The Post-Modern University, Research and Media Studies’, Canadian Journal of Media Studies, Volume 7, June 2010. Available at

‘Capitalism, Information and Democracy’, Communications and Convergence Review 1(1):15-31, 2009

'Understanding the information domain: the uneasy relations between Sociology and Cultural Studies and the peculiar absence of History', ch.1 (pp.27-44) in W. Boyd Rayward (ed), European Modernism and the Information Society: informing the present, understanding the past, Ashgate, 2008

‘Globalization and Information and Communications Technologies: The Case of War’ (with Howard Tumber), pp.396-413 in George Ritzer (ed), Blackwell Companion to Globalization Maldon, MA: Blackwell, 2007

'The Anti-War/Peace Movement in Britain and the conditions of Information War', (with Jenny Pickerill), International Relations 20 (4) 2006: 407-423

'Libraries and Librarians in the Information Society' (with Liz Chapman), ch.50 (pp639-53) in Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (eds), A History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: vol.3, Libraries and Information in the Modern World, Cambridge University Press, 2006

‘Making Sense of the Information Age in Britain: Sociology and Cultural Studies’, Information, Communication and Society 8 (4) 2005: 439-58, 477-81.

‘The End of the Public Library?’, Science as Culture 14 (3) 2005: 1-5

Participating in the Knowledge Society: Researchers Beyond the University Walls Palgrave, 2005

‘Research, Universities and the Knowledge Society’, pp.245-62 in Ruth Finnigan (ed), Participating in the Knowledge Society: Researchers Beyond the University Walls Palgrave, 2005

‘Cultural Studies and Sociology at, and after, the Closure of the Birmingham School’ Cultural Studies 18 (6) 2004: 847-62.

‘Reinventing Birmingham, UK, in a Globalized Information Economy’, pp185-200 in Raymond Breton and Jeffrey G Reitz (eds), Globalization and Society: Processes of Differentiation Examined. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003

‘Technology and Social Problems’ (with Mark Erickson) pp. 416-432 in George Ritzer (ed.) Handbook of International Social Problems, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003

‘Information Warfare in an Age of Globalisation’ ch.4 (pp.57-69) in Daya Thussu and Des Freedman (eds) War and the Media: Reporting Conflict 24/7 London: Sage 2003

'Cyborb Life: Limits to choice', in John Armitage and Joanne Roberts (eds), Living with Cyberspace: Technology and Society in the 21st Century, Athlone Press, 2002

'The Information Society Revisited', ch.1 (pp. 22-33) in Sonia Livingstone and Leah Lievrouw (eds), Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, Sage, 2002 (revised chapter included in new edition, 2005 Sage)

'Globalisation, Information and Change', Pp.79-101 in Juliann Emmons Allison (ed.), Technology, Development, and Democracy; international Conflict and Cooperation in the Information Age. New York: SUNY Press, 2002

'Global Challenges and National Answers in the Information Age', ch.7 in J.M.Chen and B.T.McIntyre (eds), In Search of Boundaries: Communication, Nation States and Cultural Identities, Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2002, pp.111-228

'Sociology, Cultural Studies and Disciplinary Boundaries', in Toby Miller (ed), A Companion to Cultural Studies, Malden, MA.: Blackwell, 2001, ch.5, pp.79-100

'The Postmodern University? The Loss of Purpose in British Universities', in Stephen Lax (ed), Access Denied in the Information Age, Palgrave, 2001, pp.69-92

Re-inventing Place: Birmingham as an information city?', City, 5 (1) 2001: 27-46