A review of the original French edition of this book in the American Journal of Sociology hailed it as "the most finished product yet to emerge from the new (Marxist) school of French urban sociology... The aim of the book is nothing less than to reconceptualize the field of urban sociology. It is carried out in two stages: a critique of the literature of urban sociology (and urbanization) and an attempt to lay the Marxist bases for a reconstructed urban sociology."  The problems facing the world's cities, whether problems of development or of decay, cannot be solved until they have been diagnosed. The race riots in Detroit, the shantytowns of Paris, the financial crisis of New York must not be seen in isolation. The mushrooming cities of the third world, demolition and urban sprawl at home are located in a network of economics, social welfare and power politics, and the decisions we are called upon to make elude us in a fog of ideology.  This brilliant exposition of the function of the city in social, economic and symbolic terms illuminates the creation and structuring of space by action—administrative, productive and more immediately human. The interaction of environment and life-style, the complex of market forces and state policy against a background of traditional social practice is scrutinized with the aim of establishing concepts and research methods that will enable us to come to grips with the cities themselves and the way in which we view them.  Castells draws on urban renewal in Paris, the English New Towns, the American megalopolis for concrete data in his empirical and theoretical investigation. In this English edition, a new Part V has been added on urban development in America. The chapters on the pobladores in Chile and the struggle of the FRAP in Quebec have been greatly extended and an Afterword traces the development of research in the past five years.

The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (Social structure and social change)

Politics & Social Sciences

Manuel Castells

Sociology

MIT Press]

the hacker Ethic

Linus Torvalds

Pekka PhD Himanen

Philosophy

Yale University Press

The Hacker Ethic

You may be a hacker and not even know it. Being a hacker has nothing to do with cyberterrorism, and it doesn’t even necessarily relate to the open-source movement. Being a hacker has more to do with your underlying assumptions about stress, time management, work, and play. It’s about harmonizing the rhythms of your creative work with the rhythms of the rest of your life so that they amplify each other. It is a fundamentally new work ethic that is revolutionizing the way business is being done around the world.Without hackers there would be no universal access to e-mail, no Internet, no World Wide Web, but the hacker ethic has spread far beyond the world of computers. It is a mind-set, a philosophy, based on the values of play, passion, sharing, and creativity, that has the potential to enhance every individual’s and company’s productivity and competitiveness. Now there is a greater need than ever for entrepreneurial versatility of the sort that has made hackers the most important innovators of our day. Pekka Himanen shows how we all can make use of this ongoing transformation in the way we approach our working lives.

Business & Money

Pekka Himanen

Industries

Secker Warburg

The Information Age is a three volume investigation of contemporary global economic, political and social change. It is a work of outstanding penetration, originality and importance. The three volumes are now available to buy as an attractive boxed set.

The Information Age, Volumes 1-3: Economy, Society and Culture (Information Age Series)

Social Sciences

Wiley/Blackwell

This collection of Castells' classic writing, which also includes two new essays written specifically for this book, reflects the panoramic breadth of his knowledge, the clarity of his approach, and the scholarly rigor and intellectual depth of his theoretical methods.

The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory

Blackwell*publishers

Urban Question: A Marxist Approach

HODDER STOUGHTON EDUCATIONAL

Networks of Outrage and Hope is an exploration of the new forms of social movements and protests that are erupting in the world today, from the Arab uprisings to the indignadas movement in Spain, from the Occupy Wall Street movement to the social protests in Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere. While these and similar social movements differ in many important ways, there is one thing they share in common: they are all interwoven inextricably with the creation of autonomous communication networks supported by the Internet and wireless communication. In this new edition of his timely and important book, Manuel Castells examines the social, cultural and political roots of these new social movements, studies their innovative forms of self-organization, assesses the precise role of technology in the dynamics of the movements, suggests the reasons for the support they have found in large segments of society, and probes their capacity to induce political change by influencing people's minds. Two new chapters bring the analysis up-to-date and draw out the implications of these social movements and protests for understanding the new forms of social change and political democracy in the global network society.

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age

Polity Press

This book, based on field work in Russia during the years of perestroika, analyzes the collapse of the Soviet Union as a result of the inability of a system based on the control of information to manage the transition to the Information Society. The subsequent lagging of the Soviet Union in information technology and its applications undermined economic growth and military power, prompting Gorbachev s reforms. Because the roots of the problems that Gorbachev tried to address were embedded in the interests of state bureaucrats and party leaders, the reforms spiraled out of political control, paving the way for the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The book offers an original interpretation of one of the most important experiences in history. It also sheds light on the institutional factors conditioning the transition from industrial to information societies.

The Collapse of Soviet Communism: A View from the Information Society

Figueroa Press

Local and Global: The Management of Cities in the Information Age

Jordi Borja

Routledge

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Books by Manuel Castells