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This is an account of the two great and conflicting trends now
shaping the world: globalization and identity. The information technology revolution
and the restructuring of capitalism have induced the network society, and ushered
in the globalization of strategic economic activities, flexibility and instability
of work, and a culture of real virtuality. But, alongside
the transformation of capitalism and the demise of statism, there has been a powerful
surge of expressions of collective identity. These challenge globalization on
behalf of cultural singularity and control over life and environment. Manuel Castells
describes the origins, purpose, and effect of proactive movements, such as feminism
and environmentalism, which aim to transform human relationships at their most
fundamental level; and of reactive movements that build trenches of resistance
on behalf of God, nation, ethnicity, family, or locality. The
fundamental categories of existence, the author shows, are threatened by the combined,
contradictory assault of techno-economic forces and transformative social movements,
each using the new power of the media to promote their ambitions. Caught between
these opposing trends, he argues, the nation-state is called into question, drawing
into its crisis the very notion of political democracy. The author moves thematically
between the United States, Western Europe, Russia, Mexico, Bolivia, the Islamic
World, China, and Japan, seeking to understand a variety of social processes that
are, he contends, closely interrelated in function and meaning. This
is a book of profound importance for understanding how the world will have been
transformed by the beginning of the next century. Manuel
Castells, born in Spain in 1942, is Professor of Sociology and of Planning, and
Chair of the Center for Western European Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley, where he was appointed in 1979. He has been professor of sociology at
the Universities of Paris and Madrid, and a visiting professor at the Universities
of Chile, Montreal, Campinas, Caracas, Mexico, Geneva, Copenhagen, Wisconsin-Madison,
Boston, Southern California, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Amsterdam, Moscow,
and Hitotsubashi. He has published 17 books, including The City and the Grassroots,
winner of the 1983 C. Wright Mills Award, and The Informational City. He
was appointed in 1995/96 to the European Commission's High Level Expert Group
on the Information Society. He is a member of the European Academy.
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