Page 120 - Culture Society and Economy

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NETWORK SOCIETY THEORY

It has nothing to do with the unconquerable ‘spirit’ of the identities at the
core of nations and even less to do with imagined primordial identities of
transnational corporations. It is a pragmatic and empirical argument, as
one would expect from writers such as Carnoy and Cohen who generally
work firmly within the Anglo-American civil society tradition. The domi-
nance of powerful nation–states which allows them to pursue meaningful
macroeconomic policies at the national level derives from the economic
strength of the corporations which originate and remain there. But it is clear
that this dominance can be lost. Indeed, the entire point of Cohen’s chapter
is to warn the United States that it is losing its dominance precisely because
it has allowed its corporations to be by-passed by the latest technological
changes in the production process.
This contrast between a rationalistic technological and an identitarian
culturalist argument stands out even more when one considers Carnoy’s
later work. In this work Carnoy shows great foresight. Four years before
it became a major political issue, he was preoccupied with the severe
crisis which globalization and the new production systems was generating
in the American labor force and in undermining family and community
life, as well as living standards. These concerns have an unmistakably
communitarian ring. Carnoy now is alarmed about the vulnerability of
the professional strata of the American labor force to competition in the
global labor market made possible by information technology. He thus
moves strongly away from his old position and is inclined to reject his old
thesis on the persisting dominance of the nation–state. He is now inclined
to argue that globalization and the transnational corporation are clearly
in the driver’s seat and in danger of triumphing over the nation–state. 48
In defense of his earlier thesis about the persistence of the power of the
nation–state he, rather unconvincingly, resorts to an identitarian argu-
ment for the first time. He simply expresses the hope, without any of his
traditional empirical support, that ‘it is likely that societies with strong
national identities and group cohesiveness provide the kind of stability
under which financial risk can be accurately assessed, productivity can
be raised with new team-based production innovations, and educational
institutions work reasonably well’. 49
Thus, the earlier work of Castells (and of Carnoy) bases itself on tech-
nological, not identity, arguments. When, therefore, Castells moves into
a phase of his thinking which is suffused with notions of identity, he
faces the task of reconciling these ideas with the older, rationalistic, tech-
nological positions. The upshot is an unhappy amalgam. Castells tries to
reconcile the irreconcilable by arguing that technology is not wholly
a rationalistic means–end application of science to production processes.

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