Page 124 - Culture Society and Economy

Robotham-06.qxd 1/31/2005 6:24 PM Page 117

NETWORK SOCIETY THEORY

information technology production in both software and hardware is
among the most highly monopolized and contested areas in global capitalist
competition, as the anti-monopoly suit against Microsoft by the European
Union amply illustrates. In this sense the notion of an undifferentiated
‘network society’ is also deeply misleading.
The idealized treatment of these issues in Castells’ work shows itself
vividly when one compares it with the presentation of the very same
issues in the work of Dicken, which also refers to transnational financial
linkages as a network. In Dicken’s analysis, however, a substantial body
58
of data is analyzed to show how concentrated international finance capi-
tal is and the extent to which it is essentially the preserve of a handful of
big banks in three countries – Japan, the United States and Germany.
Likewise, Dicken presents a fascinating account of monopoly practices
and ruthless competition in the global semi-conductor industry which has
undergone repeated restructuring as a result of the bitter fight between
Japanese, American, Taiwanese and now South Korean chip manufactur-
ers. There are now only ten huge global firms which control 50 percent
of total world production of semi-conductors. Three US firms – Intels,
which has the dominant position in the world market, Texas Instruments
and Motorola – control as much as 24 percent of world production. 59
Three Japanese firms – NEC, Toshiba and Hitachi are second with
13 percent of the global market. Three vast European monopolies – led by
Infineon, a subsidiary of Siemens, and receiving massive state assistance –
have recently staged a comeback and now control 9 percent. Most striking,
however, is the growing presence of Samsung – the giant South Korean
electronics firm which was totally absent from the world market until
1990. They have now risen to singlehandedly control 4.2 percent of
world semi conductor production which makes them the fourth largest
producer in the world. 60
This graphic and realistic account tells us far more about the realities
of transnational corporations and the global ‘informational’ economy and
society – who really controls the hardware without which there is no
‘flow’ of global information and no ‘flow’ of trillions of dollars of ‘hot
money’ through the London money market. It is quite obvious that, far
from becoming a new source of a new organizational form – the ‘network
enterprise’ – global information technology has become yet another
source for the accumulation and concentration of capital by global
corporate monopolies.
In general, network society theory averts its eyes from the harsh real-
ities of a world based on developed capitalist relations: huge transnational
firms – the top 52 of which are among the world’s 100 largest ‘economies’;

117