| Manuel Castells |
Article Index for Manuel |
Website Links For Manuel |
Information AboutManuel Castells |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT MANUEL CASTELLS | |
| 1942 births | |
| castells, manuel | |
| living people | |
| spanish anarchists | |
| spanish sociologists | |
| university of southern california faculty | |
| california writers | |
|
Castells lives in Barcelona and Santa Monica, California and is married to Emma Kiselyova . THEORY During the 1970s Castells played a key role in the development of a Marxist Urban Sociology . He emphasized the role of Social Movement s in the conflictive transformation of the urban landscape. He introduced the concept of 'collective consumption' (public transport, public housing, etc.) to frame a wide range of social struggles, displaced from the economic to the political field by state intervention. Abandoning the strictures of Marxism in the early 1980s, he began to focus on the role of new technologies in economic restructuring. In 1989, he introduced the concept of the ' Space Of Flows ' by which he meant the material and immaterial components of the global information networks through which more and more of the economy was coordinated, in real time across distances. In the 1990s, he combined both strands of his research into a massive study, '' Information Age '', published as a trilogy between 1996 and 1998. In response to the critical reception of that work at a number of large seminars held at universities across the world, a second edition was published in 2000 . Castells analysis unfolds along three basic dimensions: Production , Power and Experience . This stresses that the organization of the Economy , of the State and its institutions, and of the ways people create meaning in their lives through collective action are irreducible sources of Social Dynamics . They need to be understood on their own terms as well as relating to one another. Applying such an analysis to the development of the Internet, Castells stresses the roles of the state (military, academia), the social movements (hackers, social activists) and of businesses in shaping the infrastructure according to their (conflicting) agendas. In the trilogy, he condenses this view to the statement "our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self" (1996, p. 3). The Net means the new, networked forms of organization which are replacing vertically integrated hierarchies as the dominant form of social organization. The Self , on the other hand, relates to the multiple practices through which people try to reaffirm Identity and meaning in a landscape of rapid change. Castells also coined the term 4th World . PUBLICATIONS Manuel Castells is extraordinarily prolific. He has written more than 20 books. The most important are:
Relevant papers
Books on Manuel Castells
ON-LINE RESOURCES
|
|
|