This article invokes a provocative view of a changed society poised on the cusp of high potential for innovation because all of us (in developed nations) now function amidst a vast complex of macro-level social networks (and thusly a new framework for the study of sociology needs to be erected). Just when consortium members might think they’re ready to spin hypotheses about promising innovative inroads in technology and organizational culture, Castell comes along with fresh insight into our changed society in ways that possibly alter the rules of engagement in innovation generation.

The author offers a glimpse of some macro-level social and technological networks that amend our current view of society enough to seemingly need to be accounted for in present thinking (yet give sufficient pause to hamper forward progress?).

The author cites information technology, globalization, the WWW, and the dilution of the sovereign nation-state as four axes of significant societal restructuring we’ve undergone. He further describes examples of macro-level networks impacting our lives in ways that have indirectly reshaped society as we’ve known it; these changes brought on by current technology, the author seems to suggest, have spawned a diffusion of innovative “side effects” on the social structure itself.

Citation

Castells, M. (2000). "Toward a Sociology of the Network Society." Contemporary Sociology 29(5): 693-699.