Читать книгу The Digital Economy - Tim Jordan - Страница 11

1 The Financial Times methodology can be found at www.ft.com/content/1fda5794–169f-11e5-b07f-00144feabdc0. The Fortune 500 gives the most recent available numbers but ranks companies by revenue. The figures come coded to thirty-eight economic sectors according to the FTSE/Russell Industry Classification Benchmark, a scale that is mirrored in the Fortune ranking (FTSE/Russell 2016). To decide on the top-level sectors I compared the classification used by FT and Fortune to other influential classification models: the United Nations International Standard Industrial Classification, the related European Union Statistical Classification of Economic Activities, and Standard and Poor’s Global Industry Classification Standard. I distilled from this analysis six top-level categories: digital, financial, manufacturing, extractive, retail and services. Following this I reviewed all the 500 companies and their existing classification, allocating companies that clearly seemed to fit a broad understanding of the digital economy to the digital category. 2 These years were chosen for several reasons in addition to the datasets being available, in a context where such datasets may be sold for greater sums than academic budgets allow. First, they offer a decade-long view of a stabilised digital economy after the 1997–2002 dot.com bubble and NASDAQ crash. Second, changes in data format make other years difficult to access and use. Third, 2017, though derived from a different ranking, was the most recent data available. In light of the definitional issues that this chapter will explore, a subsequent project would be to revisit and extend this statistical view based on a consistent and coherent definition of the digital economy. 3 All figures in the rest of this chapter, unless otherwise indicated, come from Fortune 2017. 4 This is not unlike Butler’s account of the importance of iteration in performativity, or Derrida’s of the impossibility of repetition – if something is an exact repeat then it is the same thing as the original, if it is not exact then it is not a repeat – both of which are solved, in complex ways, by noting that it is the cultural or social logic of a particular context that tells all those entangled that this is a repeated entanglement (Butler 1997: 150; Derrida 1988; Jordan 2013: 41–5).