Manuel Castells: The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (2000/2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · city, economy, internet, network society, society, technology
This first book in Castells’ groundbreaking trilogy, with a substantial new preface, highlights the economic and social dynamics of the information age and shows how the network society has now fully risen on a global scale.
* Groundbreaking volume on the impact of the age of information on all aspects of society
* Includes coverage of the influence of the internet and the net-economy
* Describes the accelerating pace of innovation and social transformation
* Based on research in the USA, Asia, Latin America, and Europe
2nd Edition with a New Preface
Publisher John Wiley and Sons, 2009
Volume 1 of Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture
ISBN 1405196866, 9781405196864
Length 656 pages
Manuel Castells: End of Millennium, 2nd ed. (1998/2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · culture, economy, globalisation, labor, network society, networks, politics, society, statism
This final volume in Manuel Castells’ trilogy, with a substantial new preface, is devoted to processes of global social change induced by the transition from the old industrial society to the emerging global network society.
* Explains why China, rather than Japan, is the economic and political actor that is revolutionizing the global system
* Reflects on the contradictions of European unification, proposing the concept of the network state
* Substantial new preface assesses the validity of the theoretical construction presented in the conclusion of the trilogy, proposing some conceptual modifications in light of the observed experience
With a New Preface
Volume 3 of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture
Verlag Wiley-Blackwell, 2000
ISBN 978-1-4051-9688-8
488 pages
Nicholas Carr: The Big Switch. Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · business, cloud computing, computer industry, computing, economics, economy, electrification, google, history, internet, software, technology
A hundred years ago, companies stopped generating their own power with steam engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities didn’t just change how businesses operate. It set off a chain reaction of economic and social transformations that brought the modern world into existence. Today, a similar revolution is under way. Hooked up to the Internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants have begun pumping data and software code into our homes and businesses. This time, it’s computing that’s turning into a utility.
The shift is already remaking the computer industry, bringing new competitors like Google and Salesforce.com to the fore and threatening stalwarts like Microsoft and Dell. But the effects will reach much further. Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. We can already see the early effects — in the shift of control over media from institutions to individuals, in debates over the value of privacy, in the export of the jobs of knowledge workers, even in the growing concentration of wealth. As information utilities expand, the changes will only broaden, and their pace will only accelerate.
Nicholas Carr is the ideal guide to explain this historic upheaval. Writing in a lucid, engaging style, he weaves together history, economics and technology to describe how and why computers are changing — and what it means for all of us. From the software business to the newspaper business, from job creation to community formation, from national defense to personal identity, The Big Switch provides a panoramic view of the new world being conjured from the circuits of the “World Wide Computer.”
Publisher W. W. Norton & Co., 2008
ISBN 0393062287, 9780393062281
Length 278 pages
Chris Anderson: Free: The Future of a Radical Price (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · business, economy, marketing, money
The online economy offers challenges to traditional businesses as well as incredible opportunities. Chris Anderson makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can succeed best by giving away more than they charge for. Known as “Freemium,” this combination of free and paid is emerging as one of the most powerful digital business models. In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how it can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike. In the twenty-first century, Free is more than just a promotional gimmick: It’s a business strategy that is essential to a company’s successful future.
Publisher Hyperion Books, 2009
ISBN 978-1-4013-9451-6
Length 274 pages
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Manuel Castells: The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, 2nd ed. (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · economy, globalisation, identity, information society, network culture, networks, politics, social movements, technology, terrorism, women
In this second volume of The Information Age trilogy, with an extensive new preface following the recent global economic crisis, Manuel Castells deals with the social, political, and cultural dynamics associated with the technological transformation of our societies and with the globalization of the economy.
* Extensive new preface examines how dramatic recent events have transformed the socio-political landscape of our world
* Applies Castells’ hypotheses to contemporary issues such as Al Qaeda and global terrorist networks, American unilateralism and the crisis of political legitimacy throughout the world
* A brilliant account of social, cultural, and political conflict and struggle all over the world
* Analyzes the importance of cultural, religious, and national identity as sources of meaning for people, and its implications for social movement
* Throws new light on the dynamics of global and local change
Publisher John Wiley and Sons, 2009
Information Age Series, Manuel Castells
ISBN 1405196874, 9781405196871
Length 584 pages
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Kevin Kelly: New Rules for the New Economy. 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · economy, networks, technology
Forget supply and demand. Forget computers. The old rules are broken. Today, communication, not computation, drives change. We are rushing into a world where connectivity is everything, and where old business know-how means nothing. In this new economic order, success flows primarily from understanding networks, and networks have their own rules. In New Rules for the New Economy, Kelly presents ten fundamental principles of the connected economy that invert the traditional wisdom of the industrial world.
Succinct and memorable, New Rules explains why these powerful laws are already hardwired into the new economy, and how they play out in all kinds of business — both low and high tech — all over the world. More than an overview of new economic principles, it prescribes clear and specific strategies for success in the network economy. For any worker, CEO, or middle manager, New Rules is the survival kit for the new economy.
Publisher Penguin Books, 1999
ISBN 014028060X, 9780140280609
Length 179 pages
Robert Hassan: Media, Politics and the Network Society (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · civil society, cyborgs, digital divide, economy, fordism, information technology, internet, mass media, media, network society, politics, tactical media, ubiquitous computing
The rise of the network society ? the suffusion of much of the economy, culture and society with digital interconnectivity ? is a development of immense significance. In this innovative book, Robert Hassan unpacks the dynamics of this new information order and shows how they have affected both the way media and politics are `played?, and how these are set to reshape and reorder our world. Using many of the current ideas in media theory, cultural studies and the politics of the newly evolving `networked civil society?, Hassan argues that the network society is steeped with contradictions and in a state of deep flux.
* What is the network society?
* What effects does it have upon media, culture and politics?
* What are the competing forces in the network society, and how are they reshaping the world?
This is a key text for undergraduate students in media studies, politics, cultural studies and sociology, and will be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand the network society and play a part in shaping it.
Series: Issues in cultural and media studies
Publisher McGraw-Hill International, 2004
ISBN 0335213154, 9780335213153
Length 158 pages
Nathan Rosenberg: Schumpeter and the Endogeneity of Technology. Some American Perspectives (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · chemical engineering, economy, fiber optics, innovation, technology, transistor
Schumpeter’s profoundly influential work developed the notion of the endogeneity of technology, and offered illuminating historical analyses of how and why some social systems have managed to generate innovation. This new interpretation explores Schumpeter’s central ideas, and examines the ways in which the concept of endogeneity can illuminate recent American economic history.
Publisher Routledge, 2000
ISBN 041522652X, 9780415226523
Length 125 pages
Douglas Rushkoff: Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, corporatism, economy
In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.
This fascinating journey, from the late Middle Ages to today, reveals the roots of our debacle. From the founding of the first chartered monopoly to the branding of the self; from the invention of central currency to the privatization of banking; from the birth of the modern, self-interested individual to his exploitation through the false ideal of the single-family home; from the Victorian Great Exhibition to the solipsism of MySpace–the corporation has infiltrated all aspects of our daily lives. Life Inc. exposes why we see our homes as investments rather than places to live, our 401(k) plans as the ultimate measure of success, and the Internet as just another place to do business.
Most of all, Life Inc. shows how the current financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reverse this six-hundred-year-old trend and to begin to create, invest, and transact directly rather than outsource all this activity to institutions that exist solely for their own sakes.
Corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living–the operating system on which we are now running our social software–was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory.
Rushkoff illuminates both how we’ve become disconnected from our world and how we can reconnect to our towns, to the value we can create, and, mostly, to one another. As the speculative economy collapses under its own weight, Life Inc. shows us how to build a real and human-scaled society to take its place.
Publisher Random House, 2009
ISBN 1400066891, 9781400066896
Length 274 pages
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Georg Lukács: History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923/1972)
Filed under book | Tags: · bourgeoisie, capitalism, communism, economy, historical materialism, history, marxism, philosophy, political economy, political theory, proletariat, social democracy
Written between 1919 and 1922 and first published in 1923, History and Class Consciousness initiated the current of thought that came to be known as Western Marxism. The book is notable for contributing to debates concerning Marxism and its relation to sociology, politics and philosophy, and for reconstructing many elements of Marx’s theory of alienation before most of the works of the Young Marx, in which it is expounded, had been published. Lukács’s work elaborates and expands upon Marxist theories such as ideology, false consciousness, reification and class consciousness.
Publisher MIT Press, 1972
ISBN 0262620200, 9780262620208
Length 404 pages
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Comment (0)Manuel De Landa: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997/2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · abstract machine, economy, history, linguistics, meshwork, non-linear history, philosophy, self-organization
Following in the wake of his groundbreaking work War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a brilliant, radical synthesis of historical development of the last thousand years. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, while engaging — in an entirely unprecedented manner — the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile, semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages.
De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In each case, De Landa discloses the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress and, even more important, free of any deterministic source for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete forms in the West’s history, rather, is shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself.
Publisher Zone Books, 1997
Original from the University of Michigan
ISBN 0-942299-32-9
Length 333 pages
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Comment (1)Keith Hart: Memory Bank. Money in an Unequal World (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, culture, economy, internet, money
Hart believes that humanity stands on the threshold of a new era in which there will be a pressing need to develop, conceptually and in practice, an awareness of the common problems facing world society as a whole. We have scarcely begun to contemplate how to establish and maintain the social, technological and cultural infrastructures we will need to survive in the 21st century. In a polarized world characterized by staggering economic inequalities, recent advances in technology offer radical possibilities for the development of human freedom and equality. Hart’s particular focus in this book is the Internet, which he argues holds the potential for a re-personalization of economic relations. In this world, new means of exchange could be harnessed to the ends of a truer economic democracy. Money is the problem, but it is also the solution. Hart, an anthropologist by training, offers a new view on the interaction between money, capitalism, and culture – now, in the future, and throughout history. The many important strands of thought and experience in this book will challenge established views from all quarters of economic, political, and social thought.
Publisher Texere, 2001
ISBN 1587990970, 9781587990977
Length 320 pages
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Christian Siefkes: From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production Into the Physical World (2008) [English/German]
Filed under book | Tags: · commons, economy, floss, peer production, software
A new mode of production has emerged in the areas of software and content production. This mode, which is based on sharing and cooperation, has spawned whole mature operating systems such as GNU/Linux as well as innumerable other free software applications; giant knowledge bases such as the Wikipedia; a large free culture movement; and a new, wholly decentralized medium for spreading, analyzing and discussing news and knowledge, the so-called blogosphere.
So far, this new mode of production–peer production–has been limited to certain niches of production, such as information goods. This book discusses whether this limitation is necessary or whether the potential of peer production extends farther. In other words: Is a society possible in which peer production is the primary mode of production? If so, how could such a society be organized?
Is a society possible where production is driven by demand and not by profit? Where there is no need to sell anything and hence no unemployment? Where competition is more a game than a struggle for survival? Where there is no distinction between people with capital and those without? A society where it would be silly to keep your ideas and knowledge secret instead of sharing them; and where scarcity is no longer a precondition of economic success, but a problem to be worked around?
It is, and this book describes how.
Length 156 pages
The text can be modified and copied under the conditions of the Creative Commons NonCommercial-ShareAlike-Licence.
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English edition: Christian Siefkes. From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World. Edition C. Siefkes, Berlin, 2007. ISBN 978-3-940736-00-0.
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German translation: Christian Siefkes. Beitragen statt tauschen. Materielle Produktion nach dem Modell Freier Software. AG SPAK Bücher, Neu-Ulm, 2008. ISBN 978-3-930830-99-2.
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Saskia Sassen: Globalization and Its Discontents. Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (1998)
Filed under book | Tags: · city, economy, global city, globalisation, immigration, migration, mobility
Groundbreaking essays on the new global economy from an “expert observer” (Forecast). Saskia Sassen is an internationally recognized expert on globalization whose writings have appeared in journals and magazines worldwide. Now available in paperback, Globalization and Its Discontents is a collection of Sassen’s essays dealing with topics such as the “global city,” gender and migration (reconceived as the globalization of labor), information technology, and the new dynamics of inequality. Sassen brings together cultural and literary studies, feminist theory, political economics, sociology, and political science, showing how vast the chasm between metropolitan business centers and low-income inner cities has become. Incisive and original, she takes on common political, cultural, and economic misconceptions of globalization and offers a thoughtful, provocative new look at our increasingly global society.
Published by New Press, 1998
Trim: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 288 pages
ISBN: 978-1-56584-518-3
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David Graeber: Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value. The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, economy, gift economy, theory of value
This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2001
ISBN 0312240457, 9780312240455
Length 337 pages
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