"We live today in a period of intense and puzzling transformation, signaling perhaps a move beyond the industrial era altogether. Yet where are the great sociological works that chart this transition? Hence the importance of Castell's multi- volume work in which he seeks to chart the social and economic dynamics of the information age".

- Anthony Giddens

Networks, according to Manuel Castells, constitute the new social structure or morphology of the informational society. The characteristic feature of such a society is the pre- eminence of social morphology over social action.

"The network society in its various institutional expressions, for the time being, is a capitalist society". This mode of capitalism for the first time in history shapes social relationships over the entire planet. But this brand of capitalism is profoundly different from its historical predecessors. It has two fundamental distinctive features: it is global and it is structured to a large extent around a network of financial flows. Capital works globally as a unit in real time, and it is realized, invented and accumulated mainly in the sphere of circulation, that is, as finance capital.

While finance capital has generally been among the dominant fractions of capital, we are witnessing the emergence of something different: capital accumulation proceeds, and its value- making is generated, increasingly in the global financial markets, enacted by information networks in the timeless space of financial flows.

Under the new technological, organizational and economic conditions, who are the capitalists?

Neither managers nor the traditional bourgeoisie control the actual, systemic movements of capital. The actors controlling it are numerous and vary from country to country. In Japan, they indeed are managers, in Russia the former nomenklatura, in the USA a colorful array of traditional bankers, nouveau rich speculators, self made geniuses turned entrepreneurs, global tycoons and multinational managers. In France, it is public corporations that are the main actors. In overseas Chinese business networks, they are more like the traditional capitalists bonded by shared culture and language. While capitalism still rules, the capitalists are randomly incarnated.

At its core, capital is global. As a rule labor is local. Informationalism in its historical reality leads to the concentration of capital, precisely by using the decentralizing power of networks. Labor is dis- aggregated in its performance, fragmented in its organization, diversified in its existence and divided in its collective action.

Who are the owners, who the managers and who the servants become increasingly blurred in a production system of variable geometry, of teamwork of networking, outsourcing and sub contracting. So, while capitalist relationships of production still persist, capital and labor increasingly tend to exist in different spaces and time: the "space of flows" and the "space of places". Capital tends to escape in its hyperspace of pure circulation while labor dissolves its collective entity into an infinite variation of individual existences. Under the conditions of the network society, capital is globally coordinated, labor is individualized. The struggle between diverse capitalists and miscellaneous working classes is subsumed into the more fundamental opposition between the bare logic of capital flows and the cultural values of human experience.

As for the social effects of information technologies, Castells proposes the hypothesis that the depth of their impact is a function of the pervasiveness of information throughout the social structure. Thus while printing did substantially affect European societies in the modern age, as well as medieval China to a lesser extent, its effects were somewhat limited because of widespread illiteracy in the population and because of the low intensity of information in the productive structure. Thus, the industrial society, by educating its citizens and by gradually organizing the economy around knowledge and information prepared the ground for empowering of the human mind when new technologies become available.

What characterizes the current technological revolution is not the centrality of knowledge and information but the application of such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information processing/ communication devices in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation.

Another characteristic feature of the IT revolution in comparison with its historical predecessors is that technological revolutions took place only in a few societies and diffused in a relatively limited geographical area after living in isolated space and time vis-a-vis other regions of the planet. In contrast IT has spread throughout the globe with lightening speed in less than two decades from mid 1970s to mid 1990s displaying a logic that is characteristic of IT: the immediate application to its own development of technologies it generates connecting the world through information technology.

Furthermore, the speed of technological diffusion is selective both socially and functionally. Differential timing in access to the power of technology for people, for countries and regions is a critical source of inequality in society. The switched off areas are culturally and spatially discontinuous: they are in the American inner cities or in the French banlieus as much as in the shanty towns of Africa or in the deprived rural areas of China and India. Yet the dominant functions, social groups and territories across the globe were connected by the mid- 1990s in a new technological system that, as such, started to take shape only in the 1970s.

The author also concludes that IT has followed a course of creative destruction. It has effectively created more jobs than it has destroyed. He also points out that it has also led to longer average working hours in both the USA and Japan. The third economy that has imbibed IT is Europe where the number of average working hours has declined. Castells argues that this is because of strong social and political institutional orders that will eventually retard the growth of the productive forces.

Castells considers internal regionalization to be a systemic attribute of the informational/ global economy. This is because states are expression of societies, not of economies. "What becomes crucial, in the informational economy, is the complex interaction between historically rooted political institutions and increasingly globalized economic agents".

Castells' canvas is vast and his 3- volume work has been said to be of Hegelian dimensions, though a limited comparison with Braudel's "Capitalism and Civilization" may not be out of place either. Among the vast array of subjects that he has discussed in the present volume is the examination of the role of state and technology in a historical perspective. For example, he relates medieval Chinese society's inability to take advantage of its many scientific inventions on the same scale as modern Europe later did, to the role played (or not played) by the feudal Chinese state.

He highlights the role of the counter culture of the 1960s in leading to the advancement in computing technologies that grew out of the same universities that experienced the strong liberating impact of 1960s counter culture, for example Berkeley. He also traces the roots of ethical foundations of the informational society and its complex relationship with globalization and the market. He demolishes a number of popular perceptions about much hyped phenomenon like flexi- time.

A chapter each is devoted to the role of the media, primarily the television and another fascinating chapter one on contemporary architecture. On television, he contests contemporary academic criticism of the television expressed, for example, in Pierre Bordieu's "On Television" where Bordieu states that far from reflecting the tastes of the majority, television, particularly television journalism, imposes ever-lower levels of political and social discourse on the viewers. Castells differs and points to specific incidents that reflect the articulation of popular aspirations in TV programs.

Castells has been criticized, and rightly so, for using rather highfalutin, sometimes almost metaphorical language, but then it perhaps reflects the inability of existing language to describe the evolving phenomenon. Castells has coined a number of terms like "space of flows" and "space of places" to provide the IT society with its defining vocabulary.

Not only is the study vast and the author's bold originality evident, it is backed by carefully researched data that sets it apart from the pop futurology of Alvin Toffler and Peter Nasbitt. Castell's ideas may not be palatable to many. Despite his impeccably Marxist grooming he has been castigated for not being Marxist enough. He has been termed "Marxoid" and the reasons are not far to seek- he sways too much away from radical positions. Despite the setback to socialist theory (not to say practice) socialists still do not take kindly to a criticism of their strongly and passionately held beliefs. The discerning reader may be reminded here of the spirited reaction to Bernstein's advocation of evolutionary social democracy a century ago.

To many Castells may suspiciously sound like the scholarly version of the socialist governments of the West today (Schroeder in Germany, Blair in Britain, Jospin in France, and Clinton in the US). All of them support things that were anathema to the Old, and even the New Left (like trade liberalization). It is not incidental that Anthony Giddens (who is quoted copiously in the book) is considered by many to be the ideological and theoretical mentor of Tony Blair's New Labor.

Notwithstanding the criticism that Castells has attracted and despite its evident drawback of studying a phenomenon that makes everything appear fleeting, it is already a classic that is significantly influencing the debate around networked society.

Bhupinder
bhupi@bigfoot.com
May Day 2000

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