Manuel Castells’ groundbreaking trilogy, The Rise of the Network Society (1996, 1997, 1998), exemplifies a ‘technologistic’ approach to globalization. While his theory shares with world-system and global capitalism approaches an analysis of the capitalist system and its dynamics, it is not the logic of capitalist development but that of technological change that is seen to exercise underlying causal determi-nation in the myriad of processes referred to as globalization. Castells’ approach has been closely associated with the notion of globalization as representing a new
‘age of information’. In his construct, two analytically separate processes came together in the latter decades of the twentieth century to result in the rise of the network society. One was the development of new information technology (IT), in particular, computers and the Internet, representing a new technological paradigm and leading to a new ‘mode of development’ that Castells terms ‘informationalism’. The other was capitalist retooling using the power of this technology and ushering in a new system of ‘information capitalism’, what Castells and others have alterna-tively referred to as the ‘new economy’