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28 Manuel Castellsand statist); that is, the organization characterized by high-volume, standardizedmass production, and vertical control of the labor process according to atop-down rationalized scheme (“scientific management” and Taylorism, themethods that prompted Lenin’s admiration, leading to its imitation in theSoviet Union). Under Fordism, consumers were supposed to like all carsaccording to the Ford model T – and in black. And workers just had to followthe instructions of engineers to improve the efficiency of their physical movementson the assembly line, as immortalized by Charles Chaplin in ModernTimes. Although there are still hundreds of thousands of workers in similarlyrun factories, the value-producing activities in the commanding heights of theproduction process (research and development, innovation, design, marketing,management, and high volume, customized flexible production) depend on anentirely different type of firm, and, therefore, of a different type of workprocess, and of labor: the network enterprise.This is not a network of enterprises. It is a network made from either firmsor segments of firms, and/or from the internal segmentation of firms. Thus,large corporations are internally decentralized as networks. Small and mediumbusinesses are connected in networks, thus ensuring the critical mass of theircontribution, while keeping their main asset: their flexibility. Small andmedium business networks are often ancillary to large corporations, in mostcases to several of them, except in the Japanese keiretsu and Korean chaebol.Large corporations, and their subsidiary networks, usually form networks ofcooperation, called, in business parlance, strategic alliances or partnerships.But these alliances are rarely permanent cooperative structures. This is not aprocess of oligopolistic cartelization. These complex networks link up onspecific business projects, and reconfigure their cooperation in differentnetworks with each new project.The usual business practice in this networked economy is one of alliances,partnerships, and collaborations that are specific to a given product, process,time, and space. These collaborations are based on sharing capital and labor,but most fundamentally information and knowledge, in order to win marketshare. So these are primarily information networks, which link suppliers andcustomers through the networked firm. The unit of the production process isnot the firm but the business project, enacted by a network, the network enterprise.The firm continues to be the legal unit of capital accumulation. Butsince the value of the firm ultimately depends on its financial valuation in thestock market, the unit of capital accumulation, the firm, becomes itself a nodein a global network of financial flows. Thus, in the network economy, thedominant layer is the global financial market, the mother of all valuations.This global financial market works only partly according to market rules. Itis also shaped and moved by information turbulences of various origins,processed and communicated by the computer networks that constitute the