Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

NETWORK SOCIETY
one a mode of production and the other a mode of development, one that
provides wealth, the other that arranges and organises that wealth. It is illuminating
here to evoke the pioneering work of Daniel Bell. It is well known that
Bell originated the concept of ‘post-industrial society’, later terming it the ‘information
society’, though he developed his argument from within a resolutely
Weberian framework. Manuel Castells (1996), while he situates himself in a more
radical intellectual tradition than that of Bell, is conscious of his debt to his predecessor
whom he acknowledges as a ‘forebear . . . of informationalism’ (p. 26).
However, the affinities are much more profound than this passing note suggests,
and they are ones which raise major question marks over the approach of
Castells.
In this context it is useful to be reminded of Daniel Bell’s theoretical premises
because they reflect so closely those of Castells. It is especially useful in what
follows to hold in mind that Bell’s argument originated in an engagement with
Marxism, a starting point congruent with that of Castells. In The Coming of Post-
Industrial Society the thesis of an emerging ‘information age’ revolves around
Bell’s claim that the techniques and technologies of production have become
more important than the particular social system which is erected on them. That
is, while Marxists might claim that fundamental change is a matter of moving
through slavery, feudalism and capitalism, Bell asserts that the most telling
change is through agriculture, industrialism and post-industrialism, with the last
stage being characterised as an information society. In Bell’s (quasi-Marxist)
language, ‘the forces of production [technology] replace social relations [property]
as the major axis of society’ (Bell, 1973, p. 80).
What Bell does here is trump Marx with Weber. The class struggles of the
‘relations of production’ turned out to be of less import than the dull compulsion
of the spread of the ethos of ‘more for less’, the drive of efficiency manifest especially
in technological innovation. Ineluctably, and whatever his avowals to the
contrary, Bell’s argument for change thereby hinges on a technologically determinist
principle, since this is what underpins all social and political life. True to
the Weberian tradition of American sociology, Bell concludes by stating that the
major historical transitions are marked by the move from pre-industrialism,
through industrialism, to post-industrialism, each fracture being marked by technical
advances that generate enormous increases in productivity.
This is much the same argumentation that we get from Castells. While his
analytical distinction between a mode of production and an informational mode
of development allows him to acknowledge that we are actually in a period of
‘informational capitalism’, it is clear that the real motor of change is a ‘technological
revolution, centred around information technologies, [which] is reshaping,
at accelerated pace, the material basis of society’ (1996, p. 1). Castells endorses
throughout the principle that it is the ‘information technology revolution’ that
is the edifice on which all else of the ‘network society’ is built. Unavoidably, it
means that Castells, his radicalism notwithstanding, is committed to a technocratic
view of development, just as much as is Daniel Bell and, indeed, all other
theorists of the ‘information age’ (Kumar, 2005). Given the assumption that the
‘network society’ comes about, if to an unspecified extent, through changes in
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