disorganization, or decentralization?

John Urry claims, in "Is Britain the First Post-Industrial Society," that Bell's thesis of post-industrialism hasn't quite proven true. He cites Liverpool and notes that the high rate of unemployment in this previously industrious city indicates that it is "deindustrialized," not beyond industry as "post-industrial" would suggest. He goes on to claim that Britain is more disorganized than before, and becoming moreso all the time.

But I disagree. It seems that the phenomenon he's describing here is a different form of organization, not simply a lack of it. Perhaps society is becoming decentralized, as people can bring more public consumer goods into their homes (VCRs, for instance) and they can increasingly telecommute (although this was less of a possibility in 1995, when the article was written). But what, then, do we make of AOL/Time Warner, and ClearChannel, and Unilever? These companies may be physically decentralized (spread out across different cities and countries), but they're certainly not disorganized, and their presence is a force of consumer product consolidation. Perhaps this could be related to Greg's post, where he mentions the idea of code interconnecting everything, and making everything dependent on it. Our society seems more decentralized, but behind the scenes, power is consolidating.