Castells, Manuel (1942-)

Manuel Castells is a Spanish sociologist who has worked in Spain, France, and the United States. His early work was a form of Marxist urban sociology that concentrated on the conception of collective consumption, and how that defines the needs of the urban masses and displaces conflict in society from its original Marxist productive site to the site of consumption. He pioneered the idea that social struggle concerned these welfare needs via state intervention in consumption. Castells saw that social movements within broad networks were the key to understanding the potential power of the underclass. His interest in networks led him in his later work to concentrate on information.

Castells has a straightforward understanding of power: the ability of a social actor to impose his or her will over other social actors. Social actors are not individual human beings; their abilities are structural: that is, they lie in relational forces between actors. In Castell's later work, these forces reside in new information technologies that have restructured the economy and society. He sees three sociological dimensions as important to understanding the structure of society: power, production, and experience. These create the organization of the economy and of society, which in turn define the ways in which people create their own identities through their work and through their consumption. Castells has always seen a struggle between individual identity and that of the collective—the manner in which individuals identify themselves with collective processes. In his later work, he sees this dichotomy as between the biological individual human being and the “Net,” the set of organizations that have transcended the traditional hierarchies of the state. In a radically changing cultural environment, people find it more difficult to affirm their individual identities in relation to a social identity. The media provide the social space where power is formulated. The development of interactive and horizontal forms of communication, notably through the Internet, has created a form of mass individual communication as opposed to mass communication through institutional actors such as newspapers or TV channels. Castells sees this as a way in which social movements are able to gain power against the traditional forms of capitalist and state forces. He claims that the mass media and horizontal communication are converging, creating a historically new space of communication that can transform society.

Castells's work is bound up with traditional notions of power through interests and identity, through the importance of collective action through networks of social movements (which themselves bring individual identity), and by the possibilities of transforming society through those social movements. He has been an extremely influential sociologist in both the urban and communication literatures.