Page 121 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

It is this but much more. Technology is a cultural phenomenon which
springs out of and is closely tied to the peculiarities and identities of par-
ticular national groups. ‘It can be shown’, wrote Castells, ‘that patterns
of business organizations in East Asian societies are produced by the
interplay of culture, history, and institutions with the latter being the fun-
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damental factor in the formation of specific business systems.’ Castells
regards this as an updating of the Weberian thesis and even attempts to
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locate and characterize a ‘spirit of informationalism’. Thus, information
technology may have originated in the United States and network forms
of business organization may have originated in Japan but they are then
‘diffused’, nineteenth-century style, from their centers of origin to various
locations around the world, ‘leading to a multi-cultural frame of refer-
ence’, to which all countries have to adapt. Castells denies that this argu-
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ment is based on ‘cultural economics’ on the ground that for culture to
be economically effective, it has to be institutionalized and these institu-
tions are means–ends organizations ‘invested with the necessary authority
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to perform some specific tasks on behalf of society as a whole’. In other
words, culture may be the source of technology and organizational forms
but when operating in the economic sphere these forms have to pass a
pragmatic test: do they serve the material needs of the nation in the com-
petition with other nations or not – do they deliver high rates of GDP
growth? Thus, in the economic sphere culture has to give way to such
means–ends issues and in this sense Castells rejects the notion that cul-
ture is the main determinant of economic institutions. Culture may be
the source of particular economic practices but the extent to which these
practices sustain themselves and becomes ‘institutionalized’ depends on
the demonstrated means–ends effectiveness of these practices.
This does introduce a certain flexibility into Castells’ notion of the
relationship between culture and the economy. It is not a straight line
relationship and is not simply a matter of ‘identity’. Because of this
means–ends criterion, economic institutions, which originate in one cul-
ture, will ‘diffuse’ to another as these institutions demonstrate their supe-
rior effectiveness even as, at the same time, they necessarily have to
adapt to the specific cultural context of the particular ‘identity’ to which
they are diffused. This flexibility, however, does not alter the main point:
‘identity’ is at the root of all aspects of society, including technology and
the economy. Moreover, the objectives which economic institutions ulti-
mately serve have to do not with the interests of individuals or of classes
or of ‘humanity’ – as in the liberal or socialist traditions. The pragmatic
means–ends test which all economic institutions (and corporations?)
must pass is the test of serving the needs of their given ‘identity’. Thus

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