Manuel Castells


Manuel Castells Oliván is a Spanish sociologist especially associated with research on the information society, communication and globalization. In January 2020, he was appointed Minister of Universities in the Sánchez II Government of Spain.
He is Full Professor of Sociology, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, in Barcelona. He is as well University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair Professor of Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, and Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for 24 years. He is a fellow of St. John’s College, University of Cambridge. Professor Castells hold the chair of Network Society, Collège d’Études Mondiales, Paris.
The 2000–2014 research survey of the Social Sciences Citation Index ranks him as the world's fifth most-cited social science scholar, and the foremost-cited communication scholar.
He was awarded the 2012 Holberg Prize, for having "shaped our understanding of the political dynamics of urban and global economies in the network society." In 2013 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Sociology.

Life

Manuel Castells was raised primarily in La Mancha but he moved to Barcelona, where he studied Law and Economics. From a conservative family, Castells says:
My parents were very good parents. It was a conservative family — very strongly conservative family. But I would say that the main thing that shaped my character besides my parents was the fact that I grew up in fascist Spain. It's difficult for people of the younger generation to realize what that means, even for the Spanish younger generation. You had actually to resist the whole environment, and to be yourself, you had to fight and to politicize yourself from the age of fifteen or sixteen".

Castells was politically active in the student anti-Franco movement, an adolescent political activism that forced him to flee Spain for France. In Paris, at the age of 20, he completed his degree studies, then progressed to the University of Paris, where he earned a doctorate in sociology. Castells graduated from the Sorbonne in 1964 and received his Ph.D from the University of Paris in 1967. At the age of twenty-four, Castells became an instructor in several Parisian universities from 1967 to 1979; first at the Paris X University Nanterre, which fired him because of the 1968 student protests, then at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, from 1970 to 1979.
In 1979, the University of California, Berkeley appointed him as professor of sociology, and professor of city and regional planning. In 2001, he was a research professor at the UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona. In 2003, he joined the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication, as a professor of communication and the first Wallis Annenberg-endowed Chair of Communication and Technology. Castells is a founding member of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, and a senior member of the diplomacy center's Faculty Advisory Council; and is a member of the . Castells divides his residence between Spain and the US. Since 2008 he has been a member of the governing board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. He is Minister of Universities in Spain since January 2020. He is father of one daughter and has two grand-children.

Work

The sociological work of Manuel Castells synthesises empirical research literature with combinations of urban sociology, organization studies, internet studies, social movements, sociology of culture, and political economy. About the origins of the network society, he posits that changes to the network form of enterprise predate the electronic internet technologies associated with network organization forms. Moreover, he coined the term "The Fourth World", denoting the sub-population socially excluded from the global society; usual usage denotes the nomadic, pastoral, and hunter-gatherer ways of life beyond the contemporary industrial society norm.
Castells maintains that the Information Age can "unleash the power of the mind", which would dramatically increase the productivity of individuals and lead to greater leisure, allowing individuals to achieve "greater spiritual depth and more environmental consciousness". Such change would be positive, he argues, in that it would cause resource consumption to decrease. The Information Age, The Age of Consumption, and The Network Society are all perspectives attempting to describe modern life as known in the present and to depict the future of society. As Castells suggests, contemporary society may be described as "replacing the antiquated metaphor of the machine with that of the network".
In the 1970s, following the path of Alain Touraine, Castells was a key developer of the variety of Marxist urban sociology that emphasises the role of social movements in the conflictive transformation of the city. He introduced the concept of "collective consumption" comprehending a wide range of social struggles—displaced from the economic stratum to the political stratum via state intervention. Transcending Marxist structures in the early 1980s, he concentrated upon the role of new technologies in the restructuring of an economy. In 1989, he introduced the concept of the "space of flows", the material and immaterial components of global information networks used for the real-time, long-distance co-ordination of the economy. In the 1990s, he combined his two research strands in ', published as a trilogy, ', ', and ' ; two years later, its worldwide, favourable critical acceptance in university seminars, prompted publication of a second edition that is 40 per cent different from the first edition.
The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture comprehends three sociological dimensions—production, power, and experience—stressing that the organisation of the economy, of the state and its institutions, and the ways that people create meaning in their lives through collective action, are irreducible sources of social dynamics—that must be understood as both discrete and inter-related entities. Moreover, he became an established cybernetic culture theoretician with his Internet development analysis stressing the roles of the state, social movements, and business, in shaping the economic infrastructure according to their interests. The Information Age trilogy is his précis: "Our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self"; the "Net" denotes the network organisations replacing vertically integrated hierarchies as the dominant form of social organization, the Self denotes the practices a person uses in reaffirming social identity and meaning in a continually changing cultural landscape.

Publications

Manuel Castells is one of the world's most often-cited social science and communications scholars. He has written more than twenty books, including:

;Selected journal articles