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SIX Network Society Theory
The analysis of globalization as a ‘space of flows’ is developed more fully
1
in the work of Manuel Castells. In an eclectic and wide-ranging analy-
sis, Castells’ work contains the most comprehensive assertions on the
effect of the then new information technology on the entire character of
world society. Published at the height of the dot.com boom, we are here
confronted with a kind of dot.sociology in which the technological
changes in the production process are presented as ushering in an
entirely new historical era with a new social formation – the ‘informa-
tional’ society. While similar to many of the ideas presented in the work
of Lash and Urry as discussed above, the work of Castells actually pro-
ceeds from an altogether different inspiration and therefore has to be
treated separately.
Lash and Urry’s work, like that of Giddens, is a relatively sober
Anglo-Saxon exercise in rational analysis – evaluating social ‘risk’ and the
crisis of the bourgeois individual – while eschewing communitarianism
and its accompanying identity politics. But Castells’ entire point of depar-
ture is precisely a lament for the loss of community – Catalonia, Chiapas,
the local or national community, ‘place’, ‘culture’, ‘nation’ – and a search
for its restoration by means of modern communications technology and
the ‘network enterprise’. Unlike both Giddens and Lash and Urry, Castells
is a champion of identity politics. The issues covered are similar, but
Castells’ analysis both departs from and arrives at a wholly different place.
In this sense, Castells’ work is much closer in spirit and inspiration to the
mysticism of Heidegger which Lash and Urry rightly rejected.
Here is a classic example of Castells’ romantic ‘identitarianism’ and
colorful language which recur frequently throughout the text in the three
volumes. He is discussing what he regards as tendencies to the postmod-
ern in contemporary European architecture – its reliance on ‘the space of
