ABSTRACT
Manuel Castells is the stand-out scholar of information issues and has been so for a generation. His trilogy The Information Age , the fi rst edition of which appeared between 1996 and 1998, offered a systematic understanding of what Castells conceives of as the ‘network society’. The Information Age was reprinted often and has been translated into over twenty languages. Reviewers even ranked Castells alongside the classics of social thought. Impressed by the encyclopaedic character of his study and its remarkable conjoining of empirical data and bold theorization, many regard Castells as a fi tting successor to Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim.
