Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

NETWORK SOCIETY
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strategies can make a substantial difference in this new world. Effective government
actions steered the likes of Japan and Singapore towards success while the
‘predatory states’ of too much of Africa pushed nations such as Zaïre and Uganda
to the margins of the global network society, condemning them to eke out an
existence by ‘the political economy of begging’ (Castells, 1998, p. 114).
The detailed picture of the world aside, Castells is unambiguous about the
directional outcome of the network’s formation. The newest international division
of labour may be variable, but the general direction is evident, and it leads
towards four forms (Castells, 1996, p. 147), namely, those areas divided into:
• producers of high value (based on informational labour) which concentrate in
North America, Western Europe and Japan
• producers of high volume (based on lower-cost labour) where China is especially
important
• producers of raw materials (based on natural resources) where oil and gas
supplies are crucial
• redundant producers (that are reduced to devalued labour) where there is little
capital, few resources, unstable government and poor infrastructure
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The network enterprise
We have now entered a new epoch that is a ‘network society’ that has emerged
from the coalescence of capitalism and the ‘information revolution’. Castells
believes that this is not just a matter of globalisation, important though that is.
It has also profoundly changed organisational forms since, with the global
integration that has come from the growth of networks, has come about a debureaucratisation
of affairs. What is suggested is that, even where the corporation
is a transnational giant, hierarchies are being pulled down, and power shifting to
the real movers and shakers, those information workers who operate on the
networks, fixing deals here and there, working on a project that finds a market
niche, owing more commitment to people like themselves than to the particular
company which happens to employ them for the time being.
Here Castells shifts away from more orthodox tenets towards endorsement
of ideas fashionable in business schools. To Marxian scholars the spread of information
networks indicates a general trend towards the strengthening of transnational
corporations in the world economy. Peter Dicken (2003), Richard Barnet
and Ronald Müller (1994) and Herbert Schiller (1984b) represent this well-known
analysis, wherein the dramatic and seemingly inexorable rise of transnational
corporations since the Second World War is in close accord with the spread of
information networks that have allegedly been designed and put in place in the
interests of these major corporate clients (Dan Schiller, 1982). Often cited figures
such as that, when the wealth of nations and corporations is scaled, the revenue
of the major transnationals accounts for half the top one hundred units, or that
the major receipts, by far, of telecommunications companies come from international
and inter-business customers, or that around 20 per cent of the world’s
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