Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells: biography and photos

Manuel Castells is a Spanish sociologist with leftist views who devoted his life to studying the information society, communication and globalization problems. The index of citing social sciences in its review for 2000-2014 gives him the fifth place among the world's most mentioned scientists in the press. 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 the field of sociology. By the way, the Holberg Prize is an analogue of the Nobel Prize, only in the field of social and human sciences. Currently, Manuel Castells is the Director of Studies at the Sociology Department of Cambridge University, and is also a professor of higher education in 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 the youth of Manuel was held in Franco's Spain, he had to resist all his surroundings from childhood. Therefore, to remain himself, he became interested in politics from the age of fifteen. In Barcelona, a young man entered the university and studied economics and law. There he joined the underground anti-Franco student movement "Workers Front". His activities attracted the attention of the country's special services, and then the arrests of his friends began, and in this connection Manuel was forced to emigrate to France.

The beginning of an academic 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 studying urban studies and teaching the methodology of public research and urban sociology. He even had occasion to teach the famous Daniel Cohn-Bendit at the University of Western Paris-Nanterre-La Défense. But he was fired from there in connection with the support of student protests in 1968. Then he became a teacher at the Higher School of Social Sciences, where he worked until 1979.

Future life

In the late 70-ies of the last century, Manuel Castells became a professor of sociology at the University of California , Berkeley. He also became responsible for such discipline as "urban and regional planning". His homeland, too, was not forgotten - of course, after the death of Franco. In the 80-90s he worked as the director of the Institute of Sociology of New Technologies at the Autonomous University of Madrid. In 2001 he became a professor in Barcelona. This university was called the Open University. In addition, he is invited to lecture at many of the world's higher schools. Since 2003, Castells has become a professor of communications at the University of Southern California. He also heads the Center for Public Diplomacy at this school. Since 2008, he is a member of the board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. He lives in Spain and the United States, spending time in one or another place.

Relations with Russia and private life

It is interesting that for such a great scientist as Manuel Castells, the study of the city and its problems has become an impetus for personal relationships. A sociologist with a world name came to the Soviet Union in 1984 for a conference of the International Sociological Association, which was held in the city of Novosibirsk. There he became acquainted with the Russian scientist Emma Kiseleva, who subsequently married him. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Castells came to Russia as part of a group of foreign advisers on reform and planning, but his recommendations were deemed unacceptable. 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 are written in co-authorship with Emma Kiseleva. In the Russian-language literature it is considered 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 a hundred articles. The problems of city life were the main theme of his first work. But not only this was interested in 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 works on this topic are rated as classical. The scientist is interested in the state of a person and society in the context of the development of the global Internet. He also investigated the problems of social change, which resulted from the technological revolution. To this he dedicated his monumental trilogy "Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture". The first volume of it is called "The emergence of a networked society", the second - "The power of identity", and the third - "The End of the Millennium". This trilogy caused a lot of discussions in the academic environment. Her resume was the work "Galaxy Internet".

Manuel Castells: the concept of an information way of development

New technologies of the seventies made sharp changes in the social and economic structure of society. Rigid institutions and verticals began to be replaced by networks - flexible, mobile and horizontally oriented. It is through them that now power and resources are being exchanged, and much more. It is very important for Castells to demonstrate that international relations in business and culture and the development of information technology are interdependent and inextricable. All spheres of life, ranging from the political activities of large states and ending with the daily routine of ordinary people, change, falling into global networks. These technologies raise the importance of knowledge and information flows to an unprecedented height in modern society. Theorists of post-industrialism also noted this, but Manuel Castells proved it. The information age, which we observe at this time, has made knowledge and their transmission the main source of productivity and power.

How the society became a network

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 according to a certain logical chain. In addition, this society is changing against the backdrop of the acceleration and contradictions of the processes of globalization, affecting the entire globe. The core of these transformations, according to Castells, is related to information processing and communications technologies. In particular, the huge role played here by Silicon Valley with its computer industry. The effects and consequences of this began to cover all spheres of human life. One of them was, according to Manuel Castells, a network society. It initiates the logic of changes in the social system and leads to the fact that the most successful phenomenon was the ability to flexibility, reconfiguration. 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 linking workers' agents.

Manuel Castells: "The Power of Communications"

One of the last works of this largest modern sociologist, written in 2009, but only recently translated into Russian, is a textbook on the political processes of our days, existing in the world of media and the Internet. It shows how the technologies of power use that draw public attention to an event or phenomenon. In addition, communications affect the labor market, give new opportunities to 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 made it impossible to control consciousness. They led not only to the creation of "factories of thought", which are used by large information "whales", but also to the opposite process "from below", when several messages, picked up by a wave of social networks, can lead to an explosion capable of changing the system.