Award Committee: Suzanne Berger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chair; Sanjib Baruah, Bard College; and Jean Blondel, European University Institute Badia Fies.

Recipient: Manuel Castells, University of Southern California; Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Citation: The scientific works of Manuel Castells, like those of Ithiel de Sola Pool, are bold and broad contributions to the most important debates of our times about how new technologies reshape the terrain of democratic politics. His research spans the fields of political sociology, urban studies, information technology, and social movements. Like Ithiel de Sola Pool, Manuel Castells has not only contributed to scholarship, but to public deliberation, as an advisor to governments and a member of major commissions in Spain, Russia, the United Nations, Chile, and the European Union. Castells is a public intellectual whose work has contributed to building an community of research on globalization and democracy-an intellectual community with neither disciplinary nor national borders.

Castells carried out his graduate studies in public law, political economy, and sociology in Spain and France. His books in the 1970s and 1980s focused mainly on urban problems and politics. Among them, the best known are The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (1972), The City and the Grass Roots (1983), The City, Class and Power (1978) and The Informational City (1989). These are works that started from Marxist perspectives on political economy and broadened to accord greater significance to locality and to the autonomous force of political organization and action. A second stream of research in the 1980s focused on the impact of changes in the macroeconomy on class and social structure, and his book The Economic Crisis and American Society (1980) represents this body of work.

Most influential of Castells' contributions are the three volumes he wrote in the 1990s on globalization and its impact on society and politics: The Rise of the Network Society (1996), The Power of Identity (1997), and End of Millennium (1998). These works start from the revolutionary impact of new information and communication technologies on the structures of work, community, and nation . In the scholarly and public debates over globalization, Castells has made a clear and powerful case for the novelty and significance of the transformations at work in contemporary societies. One measure of the impact of this work is the fact that the books have already been translated into twenty languages!

The committee's selection honors a scholar whose extraordinary production has already been widely recognized. Castells has honorary doctorates from universities in Brazil, Spain, England, Finland, Canada, Netherlands, and Bolivia, and many of his books have been awarded prizes.