Manuel Castells

The Network Society

Manuel Castells – one of the world’s pre-eminent social scientists – has drawn together a stellar group of contributors to explore the patterns and dynamics of the network society in its cultural and institutional diversity. The book analyzes the technological, cultural and institutional transformation of societies around the world in terms of the critical role of electronic communication networks in business, everyday life, public services, social interaction and politics. The contributors demonstrate that the network society is the new form of social organization in the Information age, replacing the Industrial society.

The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance

The public sphere is the space of communication of ideas and projects that emerge from society and are addressed to the decision makers in the institutions of society. The global civil society is the organized expression of the values and interests of society. The relationships between government and civil society and their interaction via the public sphere define the polity of society. The process of globalization has shifted the debate from the national domain to the global debate, prompting the emergence of a global civil society and of ad hoc forms of global governance. Accordingly, the public sphere as the space of debate on public affairs has also shifted from the national to the global and is increasingly constructed around global communication networks. Public diplomacy, as the diplomacy of the public, not of the government, intervenes in this global public sphere, laying the ground for traditional forms of diplomacy to act beyond the strict negotiation of power relationships by building on shared cultural meaning, the essence of communication.

The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volume I: The Rise of the Network Society

Manuel Castells, (bivši) neomarksist, autor je kapitalnih djela s područja urbane sociologije i urbanih društvenih pokreta. Predavao je na dvadesetak prestižnih svjetskih sveučilišta, a redovni je profesor na Berkeleyu. Njegov magnum opus, rezultat desetogodišnjeg izučavanja suvremenih društava, kroz brojne interkulturalne analize oslikava čovječanstvo na prijelazu u informacijsko doba, razapeto između net i self; između funkcije i značenja.

Immigrant Workers and Class Struggles in Advanced Capitalism: the Western European Experience

Since the great social upheaval of May 1968 in France, class struggles in Western Europe seem to have re-entered a period of progressive development, both through a strengthening of trade-union and traditional political practices and through the appearance of new issues and the mobilization of new social strata around these issues. Thus the ’old mole’ was far from dormant and its underground workings lead sometimes to explosions of mass rage, and sometimes to the consolidation of new bases of protest and opposition to the system. Among these new developments, the issue of immigration and the mobilization of migrants are particularly prominent. As the major trump card in capitalist expansion, and as the bogy scapegoat of the bourgeoisie always ready to feed the fires of xenophobia and racism, as a pretext for a reluctantly renewed charity, as a myth in mobilizing the European left and as a source of confusion for trade-unions and left-wing parties, immigrant workers constitute both in the reality of their daily oppression and in their

Toward a Sociology of the Network Society

The Call to Sociology The twenty-first century of the Common Era did not necessarily have to usher in a new society. But it did. People around the world feel the winds of multidimensional social change without truly understanding it, let alone feeling a grasp upon the process of change. Thus the challenge to sociology, as the science of study of society. More than ever society needs sociology, but not just any kind of sociology. The sociology that people need is not a normative meta-discipline instructing them, from the authoritative towers of academia, about what is to be done. It is even less a pseudo-sociology made up of empty word games and intellectual narcissism, expressed in terms deliberately incomprehensible for anyone without access to a French-Greek

Grassrooting the Space of Flows.

The “space of flows,” the concept I advocated a decade ago, represents the material arrangements that allow for simultaneity of social practices without territorial contiguity. In this article, I refer to a series of dimensions of autonomous expression of social meaning in the space of flows, with emphasis on electronic spaces, but in interaction with the space of places. I argue that a new dynamics is operating, a dynamics of interpenetration of uniformity and autonomy, of domination and resistance, and of instrumentality and experience, within the space of flows. The geography of the new history will not be made of the separation between places and flows, but out of the interface between places and flows and between cultures and social interests, both in the space of flows and in the space of places.

Local and Global: Cities in the Network Society

Over the past year or so, I have expanded my work in both areas of my current research. I have explored deeper the interaction between information technology and society, some outcomes of which have recently been published on the internet (Castells 2001). I have also continued my analysis of spatial transformation through an interdisciplinary approach to the problems of cities and regions. This paper summarises my current ideas for research on urban transformation.

Globalization, the knowledge society, and the Network State: Poulantzas at the millennium

In State, Power, Socialism, Nicos Poulantzas conceptualized a state that materializes and concentrates power and displaces the class struggle from the economic to the political arena. In the past twenty years, much has changed. We argue that economic relations have been transformed by economic globalization, work reorganization, and the compression of space, time, and knowledge transmission through an information and communications revolution. Knowledge is far more central to production, and the locus of the relation between power and knowledge has moved out of the nation state that was so fundamental to Poulantzas’ analysis.

The Information Have-Less: Inequality, Mobility, and Translocal Networks in Chinese Cities

The “information have-less” is a social, economic, and political category for millions of rural-to-urban migrants and laid-off workers, who populate the vast gray zone of Chinas digital divide. Disengaged from institutions of agricultural and industrial production, the information have-less make use of such inexpensive ICT services as Internet cafés, prepaid phone cards, and Little Smart mobile phones. These low-end digital technologies are critical to enhancing labor mobility (both physical and social) and to the formation of “translocal networks”. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary assessment of ICT usage in, key city-regions in China and consider the consequences of translocal network formations for evolving information inequality in China. These networks raise key theoretical issues related to regionalism, mobility, and state-firm relationships that impinge on low-end service provision, and stratified patterns of information access and utilization within the have-less populations. We view translocal networks an important socio-economic asset of the information have-less and an arena for the articulation of labor mobility in China’s industrialization process and latest wave of urbanization.

Global Restructuring and Territorial Development

INTRODUCTION Techno-Economic Restructuring, Socio-Political Processes and Spatial Transformation - Manuel Castells and Jeffrey Henderson A Global Perspective CAPITAL, LABOUR AND THE DYNAMICS OF GLOBAL RESTRUCTURING Global Factory and Company Town - Richard Child Hill The Changing Division of Labour in the International Automobile Industry US-Japanese Competition and the Worldwide Restructuring of the Electronics Industry - Dieter Ernst A European View Issues of Core and Periphery - Saskia Sassen-Koob Labour Migration and Global Restructuring Policing the Frontiers - Robin Cohen The State and the Migrant in the International Division of Labour Women Electronics Workers in Southeast Asia - Vivian Lin The Emergence of a Working Class REGIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF GLOBAL RESTRUCTURING Exploring the Spatial Effects of the Internationalization of the Mexican Economy - Manuel Perlo Cohen Social Forces, the State and the International Division of Labour - Kamal Salih and Mei Ling Young The Case of Malaysia THE URBAN DIMENSION OF GLOBAL RESTRUCTURING The Fixers - Nigel Thrift The Urban Geography of International Commercial Capital Global Capital Restructuring and Local Political Crises in the US Cities - Michael Peter Smith