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NETWORK SOCIETY THEORY

while Castells’ approach bears a superficial resemblance to Weber’s, it is
fundamentally different. He does not demystify ‘identities’ into various
status groups rationally pursuing their self-interests, competing with each
other and deploying Realpolitik to weaken their opponents and to strengthen
their position in the ‘nation’. Unlike Weber, Castells does not see that the
claims of ‘meaning’ presented by the particular groups who compose the
‘identity’, while sincerely held, also embody certain fundamental (status
group) situational interests. Castells does not share Weber’s sense that
identities are strategic creations ultimately to be understood rationalistically.
One cannot simply take the primordialist claims of identities seriously as
Castells is inclined to do.
Only after one has understood these fundamental orientations of
Castells’ thought can one begin to understand the particular manner in
which he analyzes the global economy and what his concept of ‘network
society’ actually implies. For his concepts of the global economy and of
transnational corporations have to subordinate themselves to his ‘identi-
tarianism’. It is essential for him to paint a picture of relatively weakened
and transformed transnational corporations which link or exclude but do
not penetrate national identities – other than, of course, their own national
identity of origin. These corporations remain the champions of their own
nation’s identity. But as for their global operations, these giant business
enterprises and immense concentrations of speculative financial capital
must be presented as somehow not engulfing the nation–states whose
economies they penetrate and often undermine. Castells achieves this in
the following manner.
He argues that a new technical basis for economic life has arisen
throughout the globe. In an analogy with the notion of industrial society,
Castells dubs this ‘informational society’. This includes not only Japanese
production techniques and keiretsu forms of business organization, the
Korean chaebol and the family-based business of the overseas Chinese,
but the regional economies of Emilia-Romagna in Northern Italy as well
as the restructured organizations of American corporations in the early
1990s. In one way or another, and taking account of the different cultural
contexts, these business organizations have one fundamental thing in
common, according to Castells: they are all based on networks. The inter-
esting point though is the character of these networks. His key point is
that this inexorable tendency to business networks has become so strong
that it has undermined and transformed the traditional ‘vertical’ organi-
zations and even the power of transnational corporations at the global
level. This is an astonishing claim but one which it is necessary to make
if the ontological primacy of national identities is to be maintained.

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