This should be a time of renewal for the social sciences. Modern social science arose from the extraordinary changes that created an industrial order out of the ruins of feudal society. Arguably we live today in a period of equally intense and puzzling transformation, signalling perhaps a move beyond the industrial era altogether. Yet where are the great sociological works that chart this transition? Intellectually feeble accounts of the information society and vacuous accounts of postmodernism fill the space which should be occupied by more compelling and substantive social interpretations. Hence the importance of Manuel Castells’s multivolume work, in which he seeks to chart the social and economic dynamics of the information age. It would not be fanciful to compare the work to Max Weber’s Economy and Society, written almost a century earlier.
Volume one of Castells’s work concentrates on economic transformations. Volume two, due to be published in 1997, will discuss political restructuring, personal and communal identity. Volume three will analyse patterns of global integration, stratification and social exclusion.
via Out of place | Sociology & Social Policy | Times Higher Education.