LAIZER EDWIN N

BAPRM 42691

The network society in corporate communication

The concept of the network society is closely associated with interpretation of the social implications of globalisation and the role of electronic communications technologies in society. The definition of a network society given by the foremost theorist of the concept, Manuel Castells (2004 p. 3 is that it is a society whose social structure is made up of networks powered by micro-electronics-based information and communications technologies.

The ability of networks to introduce new actors and new contents in the process of social organization, with relative independence to the power centers, increased over time with technological change, and more precisely, with the evolution of communication technologies. This was particularly the case with the possibility of relying on a distributed energy network that characterized the advent of the industrial revolution: railways, ocean liners, and the telegraph constituted the first infrastructure for a quasi-global network with self-reconfiguring capacity. However, the industrial society (both in its capitalist and its statist versions) was predominantly structured around large scale, vertical production organizations and extremely hierarchical state apparatuses, in some instances evolving into totalitarian systems. This is to say that early, electrically based communication technologies, were not powerful enough to equip networks with autonomy in all its nodes, as this autonomy that would have required multidirectionality and a continuous flow of interactive information processing. But it also means that the

Availability of proper technology is a necessary, but not sufficient condition, for the transformation of the social structure. It was only under the conditions of a mature industrial society that autonomous projects of organizational networking could emerge. When they did, they could use the potential of micro-electronics based communication technologies.

Networks became the most efficient organizational forms as a result of three major features of networks that benefitted from the new technological environment: flexibility, scalability, and survivability. Flexibility: they can reconfigurate according to changing environments, keeping their goals while changing their components. They go around blocking points of communication channels to find new connections. Scalability: they can expand or shrink in size with little disruption. Survivability: because they have no Center, and can operate in a wide range of configurations, they can resist attacks to their nodes and codes, because the codes of the network are contained in multiple nodes that can reproduce the instructions and find new ways to perform. So, only the material ability to destroy the connecting points can eliminate the network.

At the core of this technological change that unleashed the power of networks, there was the transformation of information and communication technologies, based on the microelectronics revolution that took shape in the 1940s and 1950s. It constituted the foundation of a new technological paradigm, consolidated in the 1970s, mainly in the United States, and rapidly diffused around the world, ushering in what I have characterized, descriptively, as the

Information Age