Bright Networks and Dark Spaces: Implications of Manuel Castells for Higher Education

Academe, May/Jun 2004 by Marginson, Simon

This networking logic introduces a social determination at a level higher than that of the specific social interests expressed through the networks: the power of flows takes precedence over the flows of power. Presence or absence in the networks and the dynamics of each network vis-a-vis others are critical sources of domination and change in our society, Castells believes.

Nevertheless, because networking facilitates horizontal collaboration and hierarchy, and because networks are readily configured both to include and to exclude, we as human beings can choose the kind of world we want using these technologies. Of course, it all depends on whose interests are served by the networks, and who controls them. Castells is centrally interested in relations of power as a means of explaining the world, and in the capacity and limits of political action. Inevitably, large synthetic sociological projects find themselves in the backlots of other disciplines. Castells draws on conceptual and quantitative techniques from history, political economy, political analysis, and the material side of cultural studies. That may sound messy, but the world is complex and messy. No single social science can really encompass it.

Three features set Castells's work apart. First, its dimensions. Castells draws on conceptual and quantitative techniques from history, political economy, political analysis, and the material side of cultural studies. He writes original monograph- or essay-length studies of the global economy. He focuses on finance; trade, foreign investment, and multinational corporations; the networking of information and communications technologies and the network enterprise as an organizational form; the communications industry; the Internet; the sociology of work, where he is particularly convincing; space-time and the culture of virtuality; architecture and urban spaces; responses to globalization, including nationalism, fundamentalism, and the feminist and environmental movements; reproduction, sexuality, the family, and children; the nation-state and its geopolitical variations; war, terror, and the armaments industry; the global criminal economy; the collapse of the Soviet Union; world regions, including the European Union, Russia and Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia (Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan), and Southeast Asia; and racism and socioeconomic inequality in the United States. The "digital divide" is much discussed. The Information Age also provides a comprehensive review of the literature on globalization and the information society.

Second, Castells makes the complexity accessible. He is clear and readable. His examples are vivid, and his quantitative data are readily understood by nonspecialists.

Third, Castells is not didactic. "I believe, in spite of a long tradition of sometimes tragic intellectual errors, that observing, analyzing, and theorizing are a way of helping to build a different, better world," he writes. His biases are toward democracy, multiculturalism, and nonmilitarism. Although he can imagine no economy beyond an informationalist market one, his data challenge inequality, coercion, and exploitation everywhere. Moreover, he sets out to explain the world as it is becoming, not to prescribe it. He leaves it to the reader to determine the forks in the roadmap, the choices, and the solutions.