Page 118 - Culture Society and Economy

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NETWORK SOCIETY THEORY

expressions of their particular nation – champions, and the necessary
economic underpinning, of national identity. Thus, he wrote that ‘German
multinationals (such as Volkswagen) have disinvested in West European
countries to undertake financially risky investments in East Germany
to fulfill the national ideal of German unification.’ 37 In Castells’ com-
munitarian world, even powerful transnational capitalist corporations are
regarded as ‘identities’. They no longer make their decisions primarily on
the basis of rationalistic calculations of profits – for example, the immense
tax and other incentives offered to West German investors in East
Germany. Nor does he attempt to explain the quite marked tendency
of German automobile and other manufacturing companies to invest
overseas in order to avoid the relatively higher labor costs in Germany.
Corporations are governed by ‘national ideals’ not by profit and loss and
by the unforgiving quarterly evaluations of the stock market. If those in
the very vanguard of capitalist globalization – transnational corporations –
are themselves embodiments of identity, then globalization necessarily
has strict limits indeed. But how would this utterly naïve outlook explain
the ruthlessness with which American corporations have unhesitatingly
transferred millions of American jobs overseas? Or the similar actions of
British finance capital at the end of the nineteenth century?
This approach to transnational corporations helps to explain an appar-
ent inconsistency in his work. On the one hand, Castells’ argument is
structured along the lines of technological determinism. The first volume
is largely about technology and its effects, and the very first chapter in
this volume (after the Prologue) is The Information Technology Revolution.
Information technology develops and then transforms the business and
other operations across the world, creating a ‘network society’. On the
other hand, Castells denies that his is a technological determinism – ‘the
new organizational changes I have described are not the mechanical con-
sequence of technological change’. 38 They ‘required a change of mental-
ity rather than a change of machinery’. 39 Significant cultural variations
continue to persist between nations, and the world is one of permanently
differentiated national identities and their associated regional blocs
(civilizations?). Castells insists that ‘Japanese uniqueness or Spain’s dif-
ference are not going to fade away in a process of cultural differentiation,
40
marching anew towards universal modernization’. Powerful though the
role of technology may be – and a simple examination of the structure of
the three volumes will easily reveal that technology is the driving force
in his argument – it is not powerful enough to undermine the cultural dif-
ferences established by ‘history’ and long-standing primordial identities.
These continue to have an irreducible character.

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