This should be a time of renewal for the social sciences. Modern social science arose from the extraordinary changes that created an industrial order out of the ruins of feudal society. Arguably we live today in a period of equally intense and puzzling transformation, signalling perhaps a move beyond the industrial era altogether. Yet where are the great sociological works that chart this transition? Intellectually feeble accounts of the information society and vacuous accounts of postmodernism fill the space which should be occupied by more compelling and substantive social interpretations. Hence the importance of Manuel Castells's multivolume work, in which he seeks to chart the social and economic dynamics of the information age. It would not be fanciful to compare the work to Max Weber's Economy and Society, written almost a century earlier.
Volume one of Castells's work concentrates on economic transformations. Volume two, due to be published in 1997, will discuss political restructuring, personal and communal identity. Volume three will analyse patterns of global integration, stratification and social exclusion.
As the title of his opening volume indicates, Castells sees the information age as marked by the rise of social networks. A network society no longer rests upon fixed realities of time and place: networks are clusters of relationships and as such may span indefinite ranges of time and space. With the advent of new communications technology, for example, it is possible to sustain close friendships across many thousands of miles. Most of the major social institutions, Castells thinks, are becoming reorganised in network form. For instance, the economy now has become globalised and its substance consists of endlessly complex financial flows. The industrial corporation increasingly takes on the form of a network rather than a hierarchy of established offices. Networks, Castells says, are open-ended - they have no clear limits and are able to expand and contract in relation to external changes. They have indefinite boundaries and for the most part have no definite spatial form. The network society sits very uncomfortably indeed with the nation state or any other territorially based form of organisation.
The network society introduces new connections between the net as a whole and the individual self. Where there are continuous global flows of wealth, power and media images, the search for identity becomes acute and difficult. People look for identity and meaning in forms of collective association which run counter to the diffuse and mobile communications of the network society. Often these tend to be archaic - a sort of refuge from the swirling chaos of the new order. People look for identity in the older forms of communal life, such as religion or ethnic community. Fundamentalisms spring up wherever these collective identities take a hard, authoritarian form.
Although keen to avoid technological determinism, Castells believes that the information technology revolution supplies much of the framework for the new society. The network society emerged in microcosm in Silicon Valley, California. Silicon Valley was not only the centre of breakthroughs in the computer industry, it pioneered an emphasis upon networking, decentralised corporate structures and "portfolio careers". It was a centre of intense radicalism, but not of the orthodox political variety. The innovators in Silicon Valley rapidly broke the bounds of their original location: they set up a vast array of global connections and the innovations they pioneered helped directly to intensify globalising processes in economic life and elsewhere. Silicon Valley was the seedbed of the integrated circuit, microprocessors and other core computer technologies. It also played a key role in the origins of genetic engineering and computer software design. Its social and economic innovations, however, were at least as central as the more technical ones.
In the 1990s, Silicon Valley is a microcosm of the globalisation it helped promote. A dazzling variety of non-American companies have an active presence. Like other nodes of the network society, its regionality is now symbolic rather than real: it supplies one cluster of connections in a global system of parallel developments. The clusters of scientific and technical institutions found in areas such as Paris-Sud, the M4 corridor, Hsinchu-Taiwan and many others become tied into the global network. They are, Castells says, the blast furnaces of the information age.
In the network society, information technology and globalisation promote one another. Competitiveness in the global economy depends upon the capacity of units (firms, regions, nations) to generate and apply knowledge-based information. The economy is global because all its core components (capital, labour, raw materials and management) are organised on a global scale and are themselves linked through informational networks. The global economy, Castells stresses, is not just a development of the old-established world economy as identified by the world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein. The old world system was based upon the geographical expansion of capital. The new global economy, which functions only in and through information technology, works on a global scale in real time. Instantaneous electronic communication, made possible by global computer networks and satellite transmission, allows for continuous economic decision-making to be enacted globally. Vast capital sums can be transferred immediately from any part of the planet to any other. Labour appears to be much more static, but to the degree to which work itself becomes a matter of handling information, labour also becomes disposable on a global scale.
In an interesting twist, Castells argues that the informational economy is not postindustrial. According to the thesis of postindustrialism, modern economies are marked by a sharp decline in the importance of manufacturing and a concomitant rise in the service sector. In Castells's view, the informational economy still depends in a fundamental way upon manufacturing. In the United States, for example, he quotes estimates that half of GNP comes either from value added by manufacturing firms or from services linked in a direct way to manufacturing.
Manufacturing, however, has changed. Work processes have become increasingly penetrated by information technology, thereby rapidly eliminating many of the older forms of industrial labour. Information technology, Castells thinks, for the most part upgrades workers' skills. The more the use of advanced information technology expands, the more there is a need for autonomous, educated workers able to supervise whole sequences of work processes.
According to Castells, space organises time in the network society. The new spatial order is a "space of flows", quite different from the "space of places" to which we have been accustomed. People still cluster in specific locales, but these clusterings take their shape from their involvement in global networks. Consider the City of London. The City has been in roughly the same area for many years. It would seem there is a simple continuity from the 19th century to the present day. For Castells, however, this is not so. The changing physical structure of the City over recent years, with its dazzling variety of unorthodox architectural creations, is now dominated by its position in global electronic money markets. London, New York and Tokyo form a financial trading network, carrying on an endless series of transactions. Physical proximity and highly concentrated transactions remain important and even acquire increasing significance - but they have their origin in globalised information flows. They are no longer "places", where "place" is defined as a locale the form and meaning of which are contained within its boundaries.
In this short review I have not been able to give any sense of the rich and detailed empirical material which Castells's book presents. The work contains important new statistical analyses of the economic composition of the global economy. It summarises the results of numerous research studies and contains original data too. Volume one is already substantial. The complete three-volume work will be encyclopedic and is bound to be a major reference source for years to come.
As with any venturesome work of this type, there are many possible avenues of criticism. Like Weber's Economy and Society, the work has a rather strongly descriptive, typological feel: the reader does not get much sense of the main dynamic forces actually driving these transformations. While he tries to side-step technological determinism, Castells does allocate too much influence to information technology in the scenarios he sketches out. In spite of the voluminous nature of the work, Castells says little about certain sorts of economic institutions which might be thought at the core of his argument. There is little direct discussion of money markets. He supplies a chapter on the "network enterprise", but does not say a great deal about the part played by the transnational corporations in the dynamics of the new global system. Yet this is a book that stays in the mind and readers will wait with impatience for the subsequent two volumes.
Anthony Giddens is professor of sociology, University of Cambridge, and director-designate, London School of Economics and Political Science.
The Rise of the Network Society
Author - Manuel Castells
ISBN - 1 55786 617 1
Publisher - Blackwell
Price - £15.99
Pages - 556
