Manuel Castells

Manuel Castells is a Spanish sociologist known for his work on urban social movements and, later, for developing the concept of the network society. In early works such as The Urban Question (1972) and The City and the Grassroots (1983) he analyzed cities as sites of collective consumption and grassroots political mobilization rather than simply the product of market or planning logic. His major later work, the three-volume The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (1996 to 1998), argued that the rise of digital information and communication technologies had reorganized economic, social, and political life around flexible, decentralized networks, producing a network society in which power increasingly operates through the ability to program and connect networks rather than through the older hierarchical structures of the industrial era.