Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

NETWORK SOCIETY
industrial and agricultural production is accounted for by just 600 or so giant
corporations, lend support to this line of argument.
However, Castells, arguing that integration has resulted in upheaval for
everything and everyone, will have none of this. Of course he is not blind to the
presence of transnational corporations in this ‘network society’, but his assertion
is that they, like everyone else, are profoundly threatened by it, so much so that
they must themselves change or risk collapse. In consequence, claims Castells,
transnational corporations are moving from being vertically integrated to being
so disintegrated as to transform into the ‘horizontal corporation’ (Castells, 1996,
p. 166). He argues that, because in a ‘network society’ everything is about speed
of response and adaptability in a global market, what counts above all else is
networks. In turn, however centralised and hierarchically arranged the corporation
might appear in a formal sense, what delivers products and services on time
and at a favourable price is the networks that are made and constantly remade
by the players inside or outside the company. In short, what we have is the ‘transformation
of corporations into networks’ (p. 115), where strategic alliances are
made and abandoned depending on particular circumstances and participants,
and where what Toyota management thinkers call the ‘five zeros’ (zero defect,
zero mischief [i.e. zero technical faults], zero delay, zero paperwork and zero
inventory) are the recipe for success.
Castells’s suggestion is that, even if transnational corporations continue to
exist, they have been dramatically changed. Gone are the days of a global empire
planned and operated by centralised command from the metropolitan centre. In
the information economy ‘the large corporation . . . is not, and will no longer be,
self-contained and self-sufficient’ (p. 163). Instead it must devolve power to those
with access to the network of ‘self-programmed, self-directed units based on
decentralisation, participation, and co-ordination’ (p. 166). In such ways the
‘globalisation of competition dissolves the large corporation in a web of multidirectional
networks’ (p. 193).
There is a strong echo of post-Fordist theory in all of this (see Chapter 4),
and the post-Fordist mantra ‘flexibility’ is repeated throughout Castells’s books.
While Castells rarely refers explicitly to Fordist literature, he has suggested
(2000b) that today’s paradigmatic corporation is Cisco, a company whose website
is the locus of its business and through which 80 per cent of its business is
conducted. For Castells (2000e), while the Ford company’s huge manufacturing
plants, standardised production and top-down management structures epitomised
the era of industrial capitalism, the Cisco corporation is the archetypical
‘network enterprise’ of the information age (pp. 180–4).
This is au courant with management theory and can be read about regularly
in the pages of the Financial Times and in the columns written by Tom Friedman
for the New York Times. To be sure, the global economy is fast-moving, unstable
and risky to pretty well everyone, a condition that owes much to the processes
of globalisation that have brought once relatively immune (by virtue of their
protected domestic markets) corporate players into fierce competition on a world
scale. But what Castells is postulating is something at once much simpler and
more profound. He baldly states that ‘the logic of the network is more powerful
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