Power of Identity (The Information Age) - Softcover

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Manuel Castells, born in Spain in 1942, is Professor of Sociology and Professor of Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research Professor of Information Society at the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona. Before being appointed to Berkeley in 1979 he was Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris. He has been a visiting professor at 16 universities around the world, and has received honorary doctorates from several universities. He is the recipient of numerous academic awards, including the C. Wright Mills Award, and the Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American Sociological Association. He is a member of the European Academy. He has published 25 books, among which is the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, first published by Blackwell in 1996–8, and translated into 20 languages.

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The Power of Identity is the second volume of Manuel Castells trilogy, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. It deals with the social, political, and cultural dynamics associated with the technological transformation of our societies and with the globalization of the economy. It analyzes the importance of cultural, religious, and national identities as sources of meaning for people, and the implications of these identities for social movements. It studies grassroots mobilizations against the unfettered globalization of wealth and power, and considers the formation of alternative projects of social organization, as represented by the environmental movement and the women s movement. It also analyzes the crisis of the nation-state and its transformation into a network state, and the effects on political democracies of the difficulties of international governance and the submission of political representation to the dictates of media politics and the politics of scandal.

This substantially expanded second edition updates and elaborates the analysis of these themes, adding new sections on al-Qaeda and global terrorist networks, on the anti-globalization movement, on American unilateralism and the conflicts of global governance, on the crisis of political legitimacy throughout the world, and on the theory of the network state.