Globalization and financial markets: the challenges of a new era

Abstract

From a global perspective and based on a broad review of the main world events in recent history, Castells highlights the interaction of two significant processes at the end of the twentieth century, which will continue to permeate the world environment at least in the coming decades: global capitalist restructuring, and the emergence of informationalism as the dominant technological paradigm. The latter is based, from his perspective, on the growing importance of knowledge itself in state-of-the-art productive processes, and the former is associated with the exhaustion of Keynesianism and the various processes of change in the organization of economic life, undertaken from a pragmatist viewpoint.