Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society
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http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/CCT510/Sources/Castells-Theory_of_Network_Society-2000.pdf
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Information Society | SociologyAbstract:
This article aims at proposing some elements for a grounded theory of the network society. The network society is the social structure characteristic of the Information Age, as tentatively identified by empirical, cross-cultural investigation. It permeates most societies in the world, in various cultural and institutional manifestations, as the industrial society characterized the social structure of both capitalism and statism for most of the twentieth century.
Social structures are organized around relationships of production/consumption, power, and experience, whose spatio-temporal configurations constitute cultures. They are enacted, reproduced, and ultimately transformed by social actors, rooted in the social structure, yet freely engaging in conflictive social practices, with unpredictable outcomes. A fundamental feature of social structure in the Information Age is its reliance on networks as the key feature of social morphology. While networks are old forms of social organization, they are now empowered by new information/communication technologies, so that they become able to cope at the same time with flexible decentralization, and with focused decision-making. The article examines the specific interaction between network morphology and relationships of production/consumption, power, experience, and culture, in the historical making of the emerging social structure at the turn of the Millennium.
Notes:
Provided by Paco Lupiáñez. Paco’s notes:
The network society is a specic form of social structure tentatively identified by empirical research as being characteristic of the Information Age.
By social structure I understand the organizational arrangements of humans in relationships of production/consumption, experience, and power, as expressed in meaningful interaction framed by culture.
By Information Age I refer to a historical period in which human societies perform their activities in a technological paradigm constituted around microelectronics-based information/communication technologies, and genetic engineering. It replaces/subsumes the technological paradigm of the Industrial Age, organized primarily around the production and distribution of energy.
CONCEPTUALIZING SOCIAL STRUCTURE
This social structure is formed by the interplay between relationships of production/consumption; relationships of experience; and relationships of power.
Meaning is constantly produced and reproduced through symbolic interaction between actors framed by this social structure, and, at the same time, acting to change it or to reproduce it. By meaning, I understand the symbolic identification by an actor of the purpose of her/his/their action.
The consolidation of shared meaning through crystallization of practices in spatio–temporal configurations creates cultures, that is systems of values and beliefs informing codes of behaviour.
Production is the action of humankind on matter (nature), to appropriate it and transform it for its benefit by obtaining a product, consuming (unevenly) part of it, and accumulating the surplus for investment, according to socially decided goals.
Consumption is the appropriation of the product by humans for their individual benefit.
Experience is the action of humans on themselves, determined by the interplay between their biological and cultural identities, and in relationship to their social and natural environment.
Power is the action of humans on other humans to impose their will on others, by the use, potential or actual, of symbolic or physical violence. Institutions of society are built to enforce power relationships existing in each historical period, including the controls, limits, and social contracts, achieved in the power struggles.
More particularly, production is organized in class relationships (or relationships of production) that define the process by which some humans, on the basis of their position in the production process decide the organization of production, the sharing and uses of the product vis-à-vis consumption, and investment, as well as the differential appropriation of the product (consumption).
Experience is structured around sexual/gender relationships, historically organized around the family, and characterized hitherto by the domination of men over women and children.
Power is founded upon the ability to exercise violence. Historically, it is the monopoly of physical violence, embodied in the state, which has been the main expression of power relationships.
However, symbolic violence has always been a fundamental dimension of power, and it
increases in importance over time, as societies make progress in establishing institutional limits to the arbitrary exercise of physical violence. By symbolic violence I mean the capacity of a given symbolic code to delete a different code from the individual brain upon whom power is exercised.
Symbolic communication between humans, and the relationship between humans and nature through production/consumption, experience, and power, crystallize over history in specific territories, thus generating cultures which go on to live a life on their own. Individuals may adopt/adapt to cultures, so building their identities. Or else, they may construct their own, individual identities through the interaction between available cultures, and their own symbolic recombinant capacity, influenced by their specific experience.
There is another layer that is folded in production/consumption, experience, power, and culture. This is technology. By technology I mean ‘the use of scientific knowledge to specify ways of doing things in a reproducible manner’.
I would like to use for conceptualizing technology as a layer of the social structure, the Tourainian concept of ‘mode of development’ (also consistent with Bell’s analytical framework), that I will define, in my own terms, as: ‘the technological arrangements through which humans act upon matter (nature), upon themselves, and upon other humans’.
By technological arrangements I mean the set of tools, rules, and procedures, through which scientific knowledge is applied to a given task in a reproducible
manner. Modes of development are defined by their central technological paradigm and by their principle of performance.
Following, and adapting to sociology, Christopher Freeman’s definition of a technoeconomic paradigm, I would characterize as a technological paradigm a cluster of inter-related technical, organizational, and managerial innovations, whose advantages are to be found in their superior productivity and eficiency in accomplishing an assigned goal, as a result of synergy between its components (1982). Each paradigm is constituted around a fundamental set of technologies, specific to the paradigm, and whose coming together into a synergistic set establishes the paradigm.
Technology as a material tool, and meaning as symbolic construction, through relationships of production/consumption, experience, and power, are the fundamental ingredients of human action – an action that ultimately produces and modifies social structure.
THE NETWORK SOCIETY: AN OVERVIEW
We have entered a new technological paradigm, centred around microelectronics-based, information/communication technologies, and genetic engineering.
- What is also characteristic of this technological paradigm is the use of knowledgebased, information technologies to enhance and accelerate the production of knowledge and information, in a self-expanding, virtuous circle. Because information processing is at the source of life, and of social action, every domain of our eco-social system is thereby transformed.
We live in a new economy, characterized by three fundamental features.
- First, it is informational , that is, the capacity of generating knowledge and
processing/managing information determine the productivity and competitiveness
of all kinds of economic units, be they firms, regions, or countries. - is global in the precise sense that its core, strategic activities, have the capacity to work as a unit on a planetar y scale in real time or chosen time.
- Third, the new economy is networked. Furthermore, these co-operations are based increasingly on sharing of information. These are information networks, which, in the
limit, link up suppliers and customers through one firm, with this firm being essentially an intermediary of supply and demand, collecting a fee for its ability to process information.
Work and employment are substantially transformed in/by the new economy.
Shifting to the cultural realm, we see the emergence of a similar pattern of networking, flexibility, and ephemeral symbolic communication, in a culture organized primarily around an integrated system of electronic media, obviously including the Internet.
- I call a culture of ‘real virtuality’. Our symbolic environment is, by and large, structured by this flexible, inclusive hypertext, in which many people surf each day. The virtuality of this text is in fact a fundamental dimension of reality, providing the symbols and icons from which we think and thus exist.
As with all historical transformations, the emergence of a new social structure is linked to a redefinition of the material foundations of our life, of time and space.
- timeless time is defined by the use of new information/communication technologies in a relentless effort to annihilate time. On the one hand, time is compressed and on the other hand, time is de-sequenced, past, present, and future occurring in a random sequence.
- The space of flows refers to the technological and organizational possibility of organizing the simultaneity of social practices without geographical contiguity. However, the space of flows does include a territorial dimension, as it requires a technological infrastructure that operates from certain locations, and as it connects functions and people located in specific places. Yet, the meaning and function of the space of flows depend on the flows processed within the networks, by contrast with the space of places, in which meaning, function, and locality are closely interrelated.
The central power-holding institution of human history, the state, is also undergoing a process of dramatic transformation.
There are two common trends in these processes of transformation that, together, signal a new historical landscape.
- First, none of them could have taken place without new information/communication technologies. Thus, while technology is not the cause of the transformation, it is indeed the indispensable medium. And in fact, it is what constitutes the historical novelty of this multidimensional transformation.
- Second, all processes are enacted by organizational forms that are built upon networks, or to be more specific, upon information networks.
SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL MORPHOLOGY: FROM NETWORKS TO INFORMATION NETWORKS
A network is a set of interconnected nodes. A node is the point where the curve intersects itself.
- They are the most flexible, and adaptable forms of organization, able to evolve with their environment and with the evolution of the nodes that compose the network.
- They have considerable difficulty in co-ordinating functions, in focusing resources on
specific goals, in managing the complexity of a given task beyond a certain size of the network.
But for the first time, the introduction of new information/communication technologies allows networks to keep their flexibility and adaptability, thus asserting their evolutionary nature. While, at the same time, these technologies allow for co-ordination and management of complexity, in an interactive system which features feedback effects, and communication patterns from anywhere to everywhere within the networks. It follows an unprecedented combination of flexibility and task implementation, of co-ordinated decision making, and decentralized execution, which provide a superior social morphology for all
human action.
