Felix Stalder, University of Applied Arts Social Sciences, Zurich, Switzerland

"Manuel Castells holds a well-deserved place at the centre of debates over the 'information age' that he helped to name. Felix Stalder offers a sustained and careful appraisal of Castells's work, both incisively critical at some points and generously acknowledging the quality of his achievement at others."David Lyon, Queens University, Ontario "This book is a very beautiful model of how one mind engages with another: Felix Stalder has seized the essence of Manuel Castells's work and its immense relevance to our time. Daring to be positively critical, Stalder enlarges and also defines Castells's arguments. Thus the book multiplies Castells by Stalder and the result is an instant expansion of the mind of the reader." Derrick DeKerckhove, University of Toronto

• Acknowledgements ix Introduction 11: Transformation of Baseline 1 Neo-Marxism and the Renewal of Urban Sociology 13 Technology and Social Change 20 Informationalism 28Epistemology 33 The Politics of Research 382: Production 42Postindustrialism 43The Economic Crisis of the 1970s 46Internationalization of the Economy 48Global Financial Markets 50The Network Enterprise 55Individualization of Labor 61Informational Capitalism: Critical Issues 653: Experience 75Social movements as subjects of history 76Social movements beyond the local 81Social movements and the creation of identity 83Two case studies 87Social movements and the culture of real virtuality 994: The network state and informational politics 104The theory of the state 106The crisis of the nation-state 109Informational politics 115The reaffirmation of the state 118The rise of the network state? 122Power and networks 1285: Flows and places 141Castells's theory of space 142The space of flows 145The time of flows 155Cities in the space of flows 1626: The logic of networks 167What is a network? 169Informational networks 181The network logic 185Preeminence of morphology over action 196Conclusion 199Notes 207Bibliography of Manuel Castells 224Other References 241Index 252