Calidad de la inserción laboral

Castells’s (1996, 1997, 1998a) magisterial study is the most serious and sustained attempt yet to give the information society a firm theoretical as well as empirical grounding. Castells finds his main inspiration in the work of Daniel Bell (1974) and Alain Touraine (1988) on post-industrialism, along with Nicos Poulantzas’s (2001) neo-Marxist writings. However, Castells does not really abstract his findings into stringent theory comparable to, for example, Giddens’s Modernity and Self-Identity (1991).

Over the last 15 years radical sociologists such as Beck (1992), Giddens (1990), Hall, Held and McGrew (1992), Harvey (1989, 1996) and Poster (1984, 1990) have attempted to offer their own critical understanding of a society that is globalised and/or informatised. However, it is Manuel Castells (1996-1998) in his monumental work, The Information Age, who has captured the imagination of scholars with his radical notion of a globalised ‘network society’. Castells has the following to say about the network society:

“A network-based social structure is a highly dynamic, open system, susceptible to innovating without threatening its balance. Networks are appropriate instruments for a capitalist economy based on innovation, globalisation, and decentralised concentration; for work, workers, and firms based on flexibility, and adaptability; for a culture of endless deconstruction and reconstruction; for a polity geared towards the instant processing of new values and public moods; and for a social organisation aiming at the suppression of space and the annihilation of time. Yet the network morphology is also a source of dramatic reorganization of power relationships…The convergence of social evolution and information technologies has created a new material basis for the performance of activities throughout the social structure. This material basis, built in networks, earmarks dominant social processes, thus shaping social structure itself (Castells, 1997:470-471).

37 We would argue that widespread usage of the term ‘ICT revolution’ obscures the extent to which actual change has been, and continues to be, incremental.

The objective of this section is not to attempt to cover all of the substantive issues that Castells raises in his grand meta-narrative of the Information Age, which attempts to present a comprehensive view of the current-day global society in all its political, economic, social and cultural aspects, as well as its developmental tendencies. The scale of such an undertaking is clearly beyond the scope of this study. Rather, we will provide an overview of Castells’s work from the perspective of his conceptualisation of the information society.

Firstly, we will give an overview of the basic argument of The Information Age, which is organised in three volumes. Volume One, The Rise of the Network Society (1996), provides an economic and sociological analysis of informationalism, which Castells describes as a new phase of capitalism. Castells theorises on the changing nature of time and space (the ‘space of flows’ as opposed to the ‘space of spaces’)³⁸ in the current era and puts forth his concept of the culture of real virtuality, which has been created by the Internet.³⁹ Castells’s point is that it is within the framework of timeless, placeless, virtual symbolic systems that we construct categories shaping our behaviour. In Volume Two, The Power of Identity (1997), Castells’s central argument is that globalisation and the proliferation of ICT have fundamentally undermined the institutions of civil society upon which the modern democratic order was founded and led to a new form of societal organisation, viz. the network society.

This has resulted in the dissolution of existing shared identities and in reaction to this, the emergence of numerous singly focused resistance identities. Finally, Volume Three, End of Millennium (1998), examines some of the social and political outcomes

38 One of Castells’s most notable and controversial ideas is the hypothesis that the new technologies have spawned a new experience of space and time; one characterised by a logic of networks and flows and of ‘timeless time’ rather than of people and places. Castells’s conception of space-time compression and intensification, the increasing socio-geographic stretch of ‘society’, and the increasing domination of space over time follows from the work of Harvey (1989). The ‘space of flows’ acts as the material support for time-sharing practices and dominant social arrangements. The space of flows is seen as dissolving time “by disordering the sequence of events and making them simultaneous, thus installing society in eternal ephemerality” (Castells, 1996:467).

39 According to Castells (1996:478), “information is the key ingredient of our social organisation and…flows of messages and images between networks constitute the basic thread of our social structure”. Since ‘informationalism’ and the logic of information society pervade every aspect of life and consciousness, the network society also signals a shift to what Castells (1996) calls the culture of real virtuality, i.e. the replacement of stable formations of place, identity and nation with malleable, fungible ‘flows’ drawn across borders. The ‘culture of real virtuality’ is a system in which people’s material and symbolic existence is fully immersed in a world of virtual images that become the experience itself.

of these generative processes, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of Asian economies, the geography of social exclusion and the global criminal economy.

In his trilogy, The Information Age (1996, 1997, 1998a), Castells attempts to understand how technology, the economy and society are changing. Castells attempts to construct a grand theory of technology-driven social change. The central thesis is that a new techno-economic paradigm based on information networks has generated a new mode of development. This new mode of development, which he calls

‘informationalism’, is driven by ‘the action of knowledge upon knowledge’ and is oriented towards technological development and further knowledge generation. This can be contrasted with the previous industrial mode of development which was oriented towards energy use and growth.

Since IT networks provide the material foundation for Castells’s society, networks become the major structural form through which social power is formulated and exercised. Power resides in social networks whose members can exploit the ability of IT systems to flexibly adapt to new opportunities. The organisational morphologies most suited to informationalism are the ones that can behave like networks and switch and adapt to bring workers and managers online as they are needed. The flexibility and adaptiveness of this new organisational morphology, and its dependence on ICT, means that the traditional importance of geographical location is being superseded by flows of information. This priority of ‘flows’ over ‘spaces’ means that competitiveness and relative development depend on being part of networks rather than being located in particular places.

Castells argues that at the end of the 20^th century a transformation of the social landscape of human life as profound as the industrial revolution was taking place.

Castells traces the origins of the new global order in the intersection of three developments: the world-wide crisis in the political economy of capitalism in the early 1970s, the ICT revolution underway at the same time and the cultural transformations then being expressed in the so-called ‘new social movements’. None of these developments, Castells shows, is reducible to the others or in some sense prime. But the crisis of capitalism is the precipitating factor in the narrative. The crisis is itself complex, taking different forms in different countries and regions,

though the reaching of limits of the Keynesian model of economic development, disturbing mixed patterns of productivity growth and the infamous oil crises are always involved. Whatever its precise components, the crisis is experienced as a crisis of profitability. In capitalist economies driven unrelentingly by the profit motive and geared towards maximising the competitiveness of their constituent economies, capitalists tried all available means to increase profits, including reduction of production costs, especially labour costs. But the preferred strategy, Castells argues, was the broadening of markets and the fight for market share to absorb a growing capacity in the production of goods and services.

Castells discusses at length the new geography of social exclusion and the power dynamics structuring the network society. These two themes are briefly discussed below.

3.2.1.1 Social Exclusion

The concept of networks is used by Castells (2001) to explain the growing social inequality within and between nations. The ability to take part in networks, and the position one takes in them, is partly determined by one’s cultural capital, which is, in turn, related to one’s education level. Castells (1998a) provides a devastating critique of growing economic and social polarisation which has resulted in pockets of systematic social exclusion he terms black holes of informational capitalism (Castells, 1998a:162). These black holes largely overlap with areas whose people lack the equipment, tools or training to access or use ICT. This is part of a broader polarisation between generic labour, i.e. those who have non-reprogrammable skills and thus can be replaced by other workers or machines, and self-programmable labour, i.e. those who through education have acquired the capability to constantly redefine the necessary skills for a given task and to access the sources for learning these skills.

Castells (1998a:Chapter 2) introduces the concept of the ‘Fourth World’, and includes under this one term Africa and the inner-city ghettos of the United States.⁴⁰ Castells’s

40In this age of informationalism Africa suffers from what Castells (1998a, 2001) calls ‘technological apartheid’. Africa is kept out of the information revolution because of various modern shortcomings, including an unreliable supply of electricity, a shortage of telephone lines and a lack of human and

Fourth World reveals the extent to which the phenomena traditionally associated with the less developed countries are global, i.e. produced by universalising processes and found everywhere. The author attributes the growing inequality in developing countries to the rate of rural-urban migration and the growing inequality in the industrialised countries to the various declines in the welfare state, wage levels and labour’s bargaining power. The Fourth World is a world of rising inequality and social exclusion that is part and parcel of informational capitalism. The analyses of

‘Africa’s plight’, of ‘dual America’, of the over-exploitation and slaughter of children the world around, and of the shanty-towns in the mega-cities of Asia and Latin America, reveal the “black holes of informational capitalism” (Castells, 1998a:162).

These black holes “concentrate in their density all the destructive energy that affects humanity from multiple sources” (Castells, 1998a:162). In them, the “homeless, incarcerated, prostituted, criminalized, brutalized, stigmatized, sick and illiterate” are killed as subjects of the network society even before they die prematurely and often violently (Castells, 1998a:162).

The socially excluded lack positions within networks, and lack the power to enter them, and consequently form the excluded social underclass at the national level and the excluded Fourth World at the level of nation states. “The rise of informationalism in this end of millennium is intertwined with rising inequality and social exclusion throughout the world” (Castells, 1998a:70). While the historic causes of their exclusion vary from case to case, they nevertheless form an entity, the Fourth World, because they all entered the Information Age in positions in which their exclusion is reinforced by the structural dynamic of informationalism. The new ability is to effectively switch off areas which are viewed as non-valuable from the perspective of the dominant social logic, embedded in the ‘space of flows’, which has created black holes of informational capitalism: regions from where there is, statistically speaking, no escape from suffering and deprivation.

technical support. The region’s inability to keep up with the rest of the world’s technology also leaves its commodity production lagging behind the rest of the developing countries.

3.2.1.2 Power

In the network society power lies in “information exchange and symbol manipulation, which relate social actors, institutions and cultural movements” (Castells, 1998a:368).

Power resides in institutions that exploit ICT networks to transmit inter-linked cultural codes. As a result power has drifted away from the traditional institutions of the labour union, the political party and the geographically constrained nation state towards global investment banks, news networks and NGOs like Greenpeace.

For Castells (1998) power has become primarily a matter of symbolic manipulation;

elites are ephemeral and situation specific, while classes decline in significance. In opposition to the Net, i.e. the universalism and instrumentalism of global networks, stands the Self, i.e. the individual defined and self-defined increasingly in terms of primordial identities (gender, race, religion and ethnicity) and engaged in identity movements that have become the central arena of political struggle in this end-of-millennium time. The antithesis of the Net is a social reaction to the way modern informational capitalism strips away identity. The instrumentalising and globalising nature of economic life disrupts older forms of community and creates the need for people to reinvent themselves. They typically do this by building on new social movements.

3.2.2 A Summary and Critique

The main theme of Castells’s (1996, 1997, 1998a) work is the emergence of a new society, a ‘network society’, that is fundamentally different from societies of the past.

This contemporary society has emerged as a result of a number of processes converging in the last half of the 20^th century including, most importantly, the restructuring of capitalism and the introduction of new ICTs. Both of these processes have reacted to, facilitated and accelerated processes of globalisation. They also operate inexorably on each other. The force of these processes has been so great that Castells (2001) postulates a fundamental change in social relations, in cultural milieus and in the form and experience of power in society.

Each mode of development is said to possess a structurally determined performance principle around which technological processes are organised. According to this schema, the most recent informational mode of development is oriented towards the

accumulation of knowledge and higher levels of complexity in information processing. Castells (1998b) claims that the defining characteristics of the new technological paradigm that has emerged is its pervasiveness, flexibility, networking logic and informational nature. The basic theme is that the transition from industrial society to an informational society, in which the creation of wealth is based on the production, manipulation and control of information, leads to massive changes in all areas of human life. Within societies it leads to the disruption of traditional forms of work and even of family life. It also leads to greater inequalities between social groups, regions, countries and continents, with the increasing wealth and power of those with access to the new technology, and the increasing impoverishment of those excluded from it.

By assembling the morphological elements of the information/network society, Castells (1996, 1997, 1998a) wants to establish that he has discovered not just some socio-economic consequences of technological change, but a new mode of human existence developing out of a new mode of production, albeit within capitalism.

While Castells (1996:5) goes to great lengths to deny being a technological determinist, the theory that technology determines the mode of production, which, in turn, determines social relations clearly is. In Castells’s trilogy there is no serious analysis of how society influences technology. The technological determinism and reductionism seriously constrain the explanations on offer in the trilogy. The technological reductionism reveals itself in an over-emphasis on ICTs and the constant invocation of networks as underlying causal mechanisms even for phenomena in which evidence of their causal presence is dubious. ICT networks are important but they do not, and cannot, explain everything. Techno-economic paradigms are cumulative and build on one another, and are not alternatives that displace all previous generations of technology (see Dosi et al., 1988; Archibugi, Howells & Michie, 1999; Archibugi & Michie, 1997; Lundvall, 1995).

Moreover, Castells’s argument that informational capitalism is necessarily a ‘new’

form of structural exclusion within a ‘new’ form of society is questionable.⁴¹ While

41 The academic debates centre on whether the information society should be understood as a new social system or merely an extension of past social forms. Lyon (1995:56) notes that we should ask

the new ICTs have impacted on our society and forms of social organisation, this does not necessarily mean that a ‘new society’ with ‘new’ forms of exclusion has emerged.

Instead this new technology has put additional strains on people who are already living within the global structures of poverty. It is premature to focus exclusively on the new ‘black holes’ that are emerging when we have yet to deal with long-term and resilient social structures that have created poverty far wider than simply ‘information poverty’. Information poverty is nothing new, but rather an additional dimension of being poor.

Castells provides, at best, an incomplete picture of the social processes he studies.

Technological change is not governed simply by its own internal logic. The factors influencing the rate, directions and specific forms of technical change are social, cultural, political and economic as well as technical. It is to this theme that we now turn.