Manuel Castells

On this edition of Conversations with History, UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler welcomes social theorist Manuel Castells, Professor of Sociology and Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, to discuss identity and change in the network society.

By wikipedia Raised primarily in Barcelona as part of a conservative family, Castells became politically active in the student anti-Franco movement as a teenager. His political activism necessitated fleeing the country: he finished his degree at the age of twenty in Paris. After completing a doctorate in Sociology at the University of Paris, he taught at the university between 1967 and 1979, first at the Nanterre Campus, from which he was expelled after the 1968 student protest, and then, from 1970 to 1979, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. In 1979, he was appointed Professor of Sociology and Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2001, he also became a research professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), Barcelona. In 2003, he left UC Berkeley to join the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School for Communication as a professor of communication and the first Wallis Annenberg endowed Chair of Communication and Technology. He is a founding member of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy and a senior member of the Center's Faculty Advisory Council. Castells is also a member of the Annenberg Research Network on International Communication. He received numerous honorary doctorates and other honours in recognition of his work.

Theory

During the 1970s, Castells played a key role in the development of a Marxist urban sociology. He emphasised the role of social movements in the conflictive transformation of the urban landscape. In this he followed in the footsteps of Alain Touraine who Castells has described as his intleectual "father." ^[1] He introduced the concept of "collective consumption" (public transport, public housing, et cetera) to frame a wide range of social struggles, displaced from the economic to the political field by state intervention. Abandoning the strictures of Marxism in the early 1980s, he began to focus on the role of new technologies in economic restructuring. In 1989, he introduced the concept of the "space of flows", by which he meant the material and immaterial components of the global information networks through which more and more of the economy was coordinated, in real time across distances. In the 1990s, he combined both strands of his research into a massive study, Information Age, published as a trilogy between 1996 and 1998. In response to the critical reception of that work at a number of large seminars held at universities across the world, a second edition was published in 2000. According to Castells, the 2000 edition is "40% different" from the 1996, although it is unclear what he means by differen