Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

CHAPTER FIVE
Network society: Manuel Castells
Manuel Castells published a three-volume study, The Information Age, between
1996 and 1998, that has enormously influenced the thinking of contemporary
social scientists. The culmination of twenty-five years of research, The Information
Age is a magnum opus. Reprinted many times over, with revised editions quickly
following the original, the trilogy has been translated into over twenty languages.
Castells has become recognised as the leading living thinker on the character
of contemporary society, appearing on television to outline his views and being
profiled in newspapers. Castells’s trilogy, over one thousand pages long, stands
as the most encyclopedic and developed analysis of the role of information in the
present period. Indeed, publication of The Information Age led some commentators
to rank Castells alongside the likes of Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile
Durkheim. I share this estimation, convinced that Castells’s work is the most illuminating,
imaginative and intellectually rigorous account of the major features and
dynamics of the world today. Anyone attempting to examine the role and character
of information – this necessarily involves endeavouring to understand the
mainsprings of social life – and how this is implicated with change and the acceleration
of change itself, must come to terms with the work of Manuel Castells.
There is no better place to begin that task than with the Information Age trilogy.
Born in Barcelona in 1942 in a Francoist family, as a student left-wing radical
Castells fled into exile from Franco’s dictatorship at the age of 20. He went to
Paris where he completed a doctorate, taught at the troubled Nanterre campus
of the University of Paris where he was caught up in the événements of 1968, and
published in 1972 an innovative and influential text, The Urban Question: A Marxist
Approach, which was shaped by the then popular structural Marxism of Louis
Althusser (1918–90). Castells moved in 1979 to the University of California,
Berkeley, where he became Professor of City and Regional Planning and
Sociology for two decades. Recently he has moved back to Barcelona where he
is professor at the Open University of Catalonia, though he maintains positions
in the United States at the University of Southern California on the West Coast,
as well as at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on the East Coast. He
is also an inveterate traveller and has held visiting professorships in about twenty
universities across the world, from Russia to Singapore, Taiwan to Chile.
Manuel Castells’s reputation was long ago established as an analyst of urbanisation
(his title at Berkeley testifies to his concerns). The Urban Question exercised
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