Bio: (1942-) Spanish sociologist. Manuel Castells received his doctorate and taught in France, and in 1979 he went to teach at the University of California Berkeley. At the beginning of his career he was, close to Althusser's Marxism, while his later orientation could be described as post-Marxism.

Castells became a famous sociologist at a very young age with his books dealing with issues of the city and urbanism. He believed that conflicts and decision-making processes have the greatest impact on the organization of urban space. The basic research question is how the relations of social groups, which have different interests, shape the housing and infrastructure policy of the city.

Castells believes that in monopolistic state capitalism, the state apparatus directly intervenes in favor of big capital by investing in collective consumption at the city level (housing, education, health, parks, cultural facilities), thus reducing labor market reproduction below market prices. In his opinion, the focus of interest should be the process of urban planning.

Castells also studies social movements. In his works from the 1980s, he saw the source of the urban social movements in the impossibility of reconciling the demands for the concentration of labor in the city centers and the increasing costs for maintaining urban collective consumption. In recent works, he has focused on the question of how social movements function in the age of the Internet, as well as on information technology and network society. He believes that both the economic crisis of the 1970s and the development of information and communication technologies produced a new type of society. Castells uses the terms "information capitalism" and "information age" to describe current development trends. Networks in the modern age affect all areas of human behavior, thus creating a "network society". Globalization and networks have led to accelerating change at the global level. Networking leads to fewer opportunities for nation-states to influence the economy.

Main works

La Question Urbaine (1972);

City, Class and Power (1978);

The Economic Crisis and American Society (1980);

The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (1983);

The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban Regional Process (1989);

Technopoles of the World: The Making of 21st Century Industrial Complexes (1994);

The Information Age: The Rise of Network Society (1996); 

The Information Age: The Power of Identity (1997); 

End of Millennium (1998);

The Internet Galaxy (2001);

The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model (2001);

The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (2004); 

The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy (2006);

Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective (2006);

Communication Power (2009);

Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis (2012); 

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (2012);

Reconceptualizing Development in the Global Information Age (2014);

Another Economy is Possible: Culture and Economy in a Time of Crises (2017a);

Europe’s Crises (2017b);

Rupture: the Crisis of Liberal Democracy (2018).