Castells’ defi nition of the global
economy is an ‘economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time, or to
choose time, on a planetary scale’, and involving global fi nancial markets, the globalization
of trade, the spread of international production networks, and the selective
globalization of science and technology. A key institution of this new economy
is the ‘networked enterprise’, which Castells sees as the vanguard of a more general
form of social organization, the network society itself. This involves a new organizational
logic based on the network structure in interaction with the new technological
paradigm. The network form of social organization is manifested in different
forms in various cultural and institutional contexts