Manuel Castells (born 1942) is a Spanish sociologist especially associated with research on the information society, communication and globalization.The 2000–09 research survey of the Social Sciences Citation Index ranks him as the world’s fifth most-cited social science scholar, and the foremost-cited communication scholar.He was awarded the 2012 Holberg Prize,for having "shaped our understanding of the political dynamics of urban and global economies in the network society."