The Information Age is a three volume investigation of contemporary global economic, political and social change. It is a work of outstanding penetration, originality and importance. The three volumes are now available to buy as an attractive boxed set.
Table of Contents:
Volume I: > >List of figures. >List of tables. >Acknowledgements. > Prologue: The net and the self. > >Technology, society, and historical change. >Informationalism, industrialism, capitalism, statism: modes of development and modes of development and modes of production. >The self in the informational society. >A word on method. > Part I: The Information Technology Revolution. > >Which revolution? >Lessons from the Industrial Revolution. >The historical sequence of the Information Technology Revolution. >Models, actors, and sites of the Information Technology Revolution. >The information technology paradigm. > Part II: The informational economy and the process of globalization. > >Introduction. >Productivity, competitiveness, and the informational economy. >The global economy: genesis, structure, and dynamics. >The newest international division of labor. >The architecture and geometry of the informational/global economy. >Appendix: Some methodological comments on adjustment policies in Africa and their evaluation. > Part III: The network enterprise: the culture, institutions, and organizations of the informational economy. > >Introduction. >Organizational trajectories in the restructuring of capitalism and in the transition from industrialism to informationalism. >Information technology and the network enterprise. >Culture, institutions, and economic organization: East Asian business networks. >Multinational enterprises, transnational corporations, and international networks. >The spirit of informationalism. > Part IV: The transformation of work and employment: networkers, jobless, and flextimers. > >The historival evolution of employment and occupational structure in advanced capitalist countries: the G-7, 1920-2005. >Is there a global labor force? >The work process in the informational paradigm. >The effects of information technology on employment: toward a jobless society? >Work and the informational divide: flextimers. Information technology and the restructuring of capital-labor relationships: social dualism or fragmented societies? >Appendix A: Statistical tables for chapter 4. >Appendix B: Methodological note and statistical references. > Part V: The culture of real virtuality: the integration of electronic communication, the end of the mass audience, and the rise of interactive networks. > >Introduction. >From the Gutenberg galaxy to the McLuhan galaxy: the rise of mass media culture. >The new media and the diversification of mass audience. >Computer-mediated communication, institutional control, social networks, and virtual communities. >The grand fusion: multimedia as symbolic environment. >The culture of real virtuality. > Part VI: The space of flows. > >Introduction. >Advanced services, information flows, and the global city. >The new industrial space. >Everyday life in the electronic cottage: the end of cities? >The transformation of urban form: the informational city. >The social theory of space and the theory... (Part Contents).
About the Author :
Manuel Castells is Professor of Sociology, and of Planning, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was appointed in 1979, after teaching for 12 years at the University of Paris. He has also taught and researched at the Universities of Madrid, Chile, Montreal, Campinas, Caracas, Mexico, Geneva, Copenhagen, Wisconsin, Boston, Southern California, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Amsterdam, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Hitotsubashi, and Barcelona. He has published 20 books, including The Informational City (1989). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of the C. Wright Mills Award, and of the Robert and Helen Lynd Award. He is a member of the European Academy. The Information Age is being translated into 10 languages.
Review :
"Manuel Castells, one of the age's most extraordinary thinkers, is the guru's guru. Praised by Blair's favorite social scientist, Tony Giddens, Castells has been compared to the nineteenth-century's two intellectual giants, Weber and Karl Marx." The Guardian
"The first great philosopher of cyberspace." Wall Street Journal
"The work as a whole is an extraordinary achievement. It is the most compelling attempt yet made to map the contours of the global information age." Anthony Giddens, The New Statesman
"Get a hold of Manuel Castells three-volume work, The Information Age - a must-read with its more than 1,200 pages of fact-packed, lucid prose." Wired
"Adam Smith explained how capitalism worked and Karl Marx explained why it didn't. Now the social and economic relations of the Information Age have been captured by Manuel Castells." Wall Street Journal
"The Information Age may be the most important analysis of the interaction between technology, economics, politics and religion ever produced." Upside
"The Information Age trilogy stands as a synthesis of Castell's work over the past two decades. As such, it is an excellent source for students and academics alike, offering a range of accessible and usable introductions to the work of one of the most influential theorists." Alan Latham, University of Auckland
"The Information Age highlights the achievements of recent global scholarship, while pointing its readers - whether they be advanced level undergraduate or graduate students, or more established researchers and teachers - towards exciting and challenging research terrains. It is a book which will accompany us into the new millennium and beyond, helping us to make sense of the puzzling mix of newness and the ever-the-same which is 21st century capitalism. A new world indeed." Alan Latham, University of Auckland
"So full are the shelves now with shallow and indulgent works on the postmodern condition, essays trapped in their own technological determinism or narrow moralism or political wishful thinking, that it has seemed unlikely that a space would be found for an enduring work of sociology examining the new world as it is changing. But Manuel Castells has found and filled that space on the shelf - and for a long time to come." Times Higher Education Supplement
"A magnum opus if there ever was one, these three books together constitute, in my view, the finest piece of contemporary social analysis to come available for at least a generation." The British Journal of Sociology
"The Information Age, written by Castells at the height of his intellectual power, launches him into the pre-eminence of those whose work must be read by anyone seriously engaged with trying to make sense of the world today." The British Journal of Sociology
"The Information Age remains a truly stunning achievement. Castells comes as close to being our owl of Minerva (Hegel's canny philosophical spectator who "takes flight only at dusk")as we are likely to have- a scholar who, with remarkable mastery, has brought his experience over a lifetime to bear on astonishingly diversified data sets, pulling them together into a compelling account of the complex relationship between the progressive and reactionary, the globalizing and particularizing forces that are transforming our perplexing world." Book Review, Los Angeles Times
"The three volumes of "The Informational Age," taken together, are a truly stunning achievement." The Los Angeles Times
" Castell's study is to be welcomed for being the most serious and sustained attempt yet to give the 'informational' society firm theoretical as well as empirical grounding. For my part it has come the nearest to persuading me that we do indeed live in an age of information, and that there can be an adequate theory of it." Krishna Kumar, University of Virginia
