Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells: biography and photos

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:54

Manuel Castells is a Spanish left-wing sociologist who has dedicated his life to the study of the information society, communication and the problems of globalization. The Social Science Citation Index in its 2000-2014 survey ranks him as the fifth most cited scientist in the world. He is a laureate of the Holberg Prize (2012) for his contribution to the development of the theory of the information (post-industrial) society. And the following year he received the prestigious Balzan award in sociology. By the way, the Holberg Prize is an analogue of the Nobel Prize, only in the field of social sciences and the humanities. Manuel Castells is currently director of research at the sociological department of the University of Cambridge, and is also a professor at the universities of Los Angeles and Berkeley.

Childhood and youth

Manuel Castells was born in the small town of Elin in the Spanish province of Albacete (La Mancha) in 1942. There he grew up and spent his childhood. But in his youth, the future sociologist often moved. He lived in Albacete, Madrid, Cartagena, Valencia and Barcelona. His parents came from a very conservative family. Since Manuel's youth was spent in Francoist Spain, from childhood he had to resist all his surroundings. Therefore, in order to remain himself, he became interested in politics from the age of fifteen. In Barcelona, the young man entered the university and studied economics and law. There he joined the underground anti-Francoist student movement "Workers' Front". His activities attracted the attention of the country's special services, and then the arrests of his friends began, in connection with which Manuel was forced to emigrate to France.

The beginning of a scientific career

At twenty, Manuel Castells graduated from the Sorbonne. Then he wrote a doctorate in sociology at the University of Paris. One of his teachers was Alain Touraine. At twenty-four, Castells was already an instructor at several universities in France. Then he began to study urban studies and teach the methodology of social studies and urban sociology. He even had a chance to teach the famous Daniel Cohn-Bendit at the University of Paris West - Nanterre-la-Defense. But he was fired from there in connection with the support of student protests in 1968. He then became a lecturer at the Graduate School of Social Sciences, where he worked until 1979.

Later life

In the late 70s of the last century, Manuel Castells became a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He also became responsible for such a discipline as "urban and regional planning". At home, he was also not forgotten - of course, after the death of Franco. In the 1980s and 1990s he worked as director of the Institute for the Sociology of New Technologies at the Autonomous University of Madrid. In 2001 he took up a professorship in Barcelona. This university was called the Open University. In addition, he is invited to lecture at many higher schools around the world. Since 2003, Castells has been a professor of communication at the University of Southern California. He also heads the Center for Public Diplomacy at this institution. Since 2008 he has been a board member of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. Lives in Spain and the USA, spending time here and there.

Russian ties and private life

Interestingly, for such a prominent scientist as Manuel Castells, the study of the city and its problems was also the impetus for personal relationships. A world-famous sociologist came to the Soviet Union in 1984 to attend a conference of the International Sociological Association, which was held in the city of Novosibirsk. There he met the Russian scientist Emma Kiseleva, who later married him. After the collapse of the USSR, Castells came to Russia as part of a group of foreign advisers on reform and planning, but his recommendations were consideredunacceptable. Nevertheless, he continued to write books and articles about the modern information society. Some of them were devoted to the place and role of Russia. They were written in collaboration with Emma Kiseleva. In Russian-language literature, it is generally accepted that Castells is a post-Marxist, but the scientist himself is quite critical of communist ideas and believes that the realization of any utopia leads to totalitarianism.

Theories of Manuel Castells

This sociologist is the author of twenty books and more than one hundred articles. The problems of urban life were the main theme of his first work. But not only this interested such a scientist as Manuel Castells. His main works are devoted to the study of organizations and institutions, the role of the Internet in the life of society, social movements, culture and political economy. In addition, it is believed that Castells is one of the largest sociologists of our time, specializing in the field of knowledge about the information society. His writings on this subject are regarded as classics. The scientist is interested in the state of man and society in the context of the development of the global Internet. He also explored the problems of social change that were the result of the technological revolution. He devoted his monumental trilogy "The Information Age: Economics, Society and Culture" to this. The first volume is called The Rise of the Networked Society, the second is The Power of Identity, and the third is The End of the Millennium. This trilogy has caused a lot of discussion in the scientific community. Her popular resume was the work "Galaxy of the Internet".

Manuel Castells: the concept of the information way of development

The new technologies of the seventies brought about dramatic changes in the social and economic structure of society. Sufficiently rigid institutions and verticals began to be replaced by networks - flexible, mobile and horizontally oriented. It is through them that power is now exercised, and the exchange of resources, and much more. It is very important for Castells to demonstrate that international relations in the field of business and culture and the development of information technology are interdependent and inseparable phenomena. All spheres of life, from the political activity of large states to the everyday life of ordinary people, are changing, getting into global networks. These technologies raise the importance of knowledge and information flows to unprecedented heights in modern society. Theorists of post-industrialism also noted this, but only Manuel Castells proved it in full detail. The Information Age we are currently experiencing has made knowledge and its transfer a major source of productivity and power.

How society became networked

Manuel Castells also analyzes the signs of this phenomenon. One of the characteristic features of the information age is the network structural development of society along a certain logical chain. In addition, this society is changing against the background of acceleration and contradictions of processes.globalization affecting the entire globe. The core of these transformations, according to Castells, is associated with information processing and communication technologies. In particular, Silicon Valley with its computer industry played a huge role here. The effects and consequences of this began to cover all spheres of human life. One of them was, according to Manuel Castells, the network society. It initiates the logic of changes in the social system and leads to the fact that the ability for flexibility, reconfiguration has become the most successful phenomenon. The globalization of the economy has also become such a consequence. After all, the main activities, such as capital, labor, raw materials, technologies, markets, are organized, as a rule, on a global scale with the help of networks connecting working agents.

Manuel Castells: The Power of Communications

One of the latest works of this major contemporary sociologist, written in 2009, but only recently translated into Russian, is a textbook on the political processes of our days that exist in the world of media and the Internet. It shows how power technologies work, using drawing public attention to some event or phenomenon. In addition, communications affect the labor market, provide new opportunities for terrorists, and also lead to the fact that every person on our planet becomes not only a consumer, but also a source of information. At the same time, these technologies have made mind control impossible. They led not only to the creation of "thought factories" that are used bylarge information "whales", but also to the opposite process "from below", when a few messages, picked up by a wave of social networks, can lead to an explosion that can change the system.