Material Detail

Dr. Mansell was interviewed by Laureano Ralon on July 12th, 2010 as part of the Figure/Ground Communication scholarly interview series: http://www.figureground.ca/interviews/

Robin Mansell is a Professor of New Media and the Internet in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Professor Mansell’s research focuses on the social, economic, and technical issues arising from new technologies, especially in the computer and telecommunication industries. She examines the integration of new technologies into society, the interaction between engineering design and the structure of markets, and the sources of regulatory effectiveness and failure. She has written extensively on the social, organisational and economic factors influencing innovations in new technologies. She is a leading contributor to policy debates on the potential of, and risks associated with, the information society. She is a Canadian who received her PhD in 1984 from Simon Fraser University and then worked for William H Melody & Associates, a small Vancouver-based consulting firm run by Professor Melody who was her PhD supervisor and by Professor Dallas W. Smythe, who was on her research committee. She then worked for the OECD Information, Computer and Communication Policy Division in Paris from 1985 to 1987 before being appointed as Reader at the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex in 1988. She was promoted to full Professor of Information and Communication Technology Policy in 1994 and was later Director of Research at SPRU. She joined LSE in 2001, appointed to a new Chair in New Media and the Internet, and was Head of the Department of Media and Communication from 2006 to 2009 and elected academic Governor of LSE from 2005 to 2010. She holds an Honorary Professorship at SPRU/Sussex and was Honorary Professor at the Learning, Information, Networking Knowledge Centre, Graduate School of Public & Development Management, University of Witwatersrand from 2005 to 2010. She was elected President of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) from 2004 to 2008, the worldwide professional association for academics in the field. She continues her active membership as co-Chair of the IAMCR Task Force on Media and Communication Policy and its Finance Committee (2008 to the present). She served as a Trustee of the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex from 1999 to 2009 where she continues to serve as an active member of their Fellowship Review and Promotion Board and is developing a new line of research on the political economy of the ‘knowledge-based economy’ jointly with them. She is author of Mobilizing the Information Society: Strategies for Growth and Opportunity (Oxford University Press 2000 with W E Steinmueller) and editor of The Handbook of Global Information and Communication Policy (with Marc Raboy, in press 2011), The Information Society (Critical Studies in Sociology) (Routledge 2009), The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies (Oxford University Press 2007), and Trust and Crime in Information Societies (Elgar 2005). She is author of many journal articles and has undertaken and led many externally funded research projects over the years, funded by the European Commission, research councils, governments and UN agencies, most recently the 9million Euro OPAALS project ( http://www.opaals.eu/).