new. As Harnad points out, there are already levels of prestige for institutions and journals. But while we are implementing an electronically enhanced peer review, we will need to remember that we are implementing traditional hierarchies. We will also need to consider that with the panoptic potential of information technologies, we will be implementing hierarchies with a much wider reach and much greater power to dictate the life course of a particular scholar. Finally, it will be important to remember that traditional hierarchies normally have links to traditional world-views and traditional interests and that (usually) the only reason for transporting traditional hierarchies is to maintain or strengthen these traditional interests. Lyotard (1979: 14) comments about regulation and control and the transformation of these functions with the emergence of information technology are instructive and suggestive.For brevity's sake, suffice it to say that functions of regulation, and therefore of reproduction, are being and will be further withdrawn from administrators and entrusted to machines. Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made. Access to data is, and will continue to be, the prerogative of experts of all stripes. The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers. Even now it is no longer composed of the traditional political class, but of a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level administrators, and the heads of the major professional, labour, political, and religious organizations.Finally, for reasons that should be obvious now, we will need to conduct a detailed analysis of the structural factors which are influencing (and which are being influenced by) information technologies. As I have suggested throughout this paper, powerful structural factors impinge on the evolution ...
