The Network Society - University of Massachusetts Amherst

Societies in Transition to the Network Society 27
Finland, the United States and Singapore are advanced informational
societies. They are also dynamic economies because they are
internationally competitive, have productive companies and are innovative.
But because “(…) technology and the economy are merely a
part of the story” (Castells and Himanen, 2001: 31), one can say that a
society is open if it is so politically, i.e., at the civil society level, and if
it is receptive to global processes. Likewise, its social well-being can
be assessed in terms of its income structure and the coverage offered
to the citizens in terms of health and education.
When looked at in terms of the evolution of development models,
Portugal is a country that is going through a transition process from
the industrial society to the informational society. However, we are
speaking of an industrial society, which, similar to the Italian and
Spanish societies, is to a large extent made up of small and mediumsized
enterprises but that has never asserted itself as a large-scale
industrial producer (Castells, 2002). In the second half of the 20th
century, Portugal assumed what can be termed proto-industrialism
and is now seeking to achieve a proto-informationalism (Castells,
2002). As an example of a society in transition, the analysis of Portugal
reveals that it is a country which, through its multiple affiliation networks
(which range from membership of the European Union to the
maintenance of good relations in terms of defence with the USA and
to the establishment of partnership networks with Brazil, the former
African and Asian colonies and the autonomous regions of neighbouring
Spain), seeks to adapt to the conditions of global economic
change. And that is a pattern common to all societies in transition.
Nowadays, one can frequently read, in documents produced within
the European Union institutions or within the framework of the
OECD or even UN, that the equation for the economic and social
development of countries, cities and zones in the Information Age is
the appropriation of the use of the technological tools and their introduction
into the production and personal relational circuits, requiring
for this that the whole of the country, city or zone in question realize
their effective insertion both into the entrepreneurial fabric and at the
State level (in the management of the republic, in education, in management
and defence of the territory, etc.).
In the latter half of the 1990s, investment in information technologies
as a source of GDP creation in countries such as the USA, United King-