Transformation of regional societies through ICTs: State(s) of the Art(s)

Substantial territorial disparities continue to exist between Europe’s regions. Still today, the nature of the variation across regions is not well understood, neither is the role of information and communication technology (ICT), which could have been expected to eliminate traditional disparities between central and peripheral regions because of its contribution to ‘time-space compression’. Existing evidence suggests that, while the potentials of ICT are available – at least to some degree – to every region, the ways and the effectiveness with which regions exploit these potentials vary hugely across the EU territory. In this context, the notion of transformation as a particular kind of change has recently come to the fore in the public debate. We consider transformational change as a change in the form of (regional) society but not its type, and neither its underlying goals and aims. We can thus distinguish transformational change both from the incremental change in degree, on the one hand, and from totalising or revolutionary change, on the other.