The Telecommunications industry

The telecommunications industry underwent two large-scale transformations in the 20th century, the first having to do with the structure of service delivery and the second having to do with technological innovation and the structure of business models. Both instances of transformation carried implications for management practices. That is the subject of this research.

Although the telephone and the whole range of telecommunications equipment are undoubtedly instrumental in cross-industry business operations, telecommunications is also an industry unto itself, and with the exceptions of space travel and computers, perhaps no other single industry was as affected by scientific innovation in the 20th century as it was. Yet even from its earliest entry into the marketplace, telephone technology was conceptualized in product terms, not in terms of its multiple implicit instrumental uses of telephone communications as a service. Additionally, the product was conceptualized in sharply local terms. Accordingly, industry actors, who were often local-area business operators, labored mightily to exert control over the technology, its use, its dispersal, and its operation. In other words, the industry sought standing as a monopoly, not a public utility. This was operationalized in various ways.

For example, a telephone directory published in Clarendon, Texas, in 1920 declared that telephones "are for SUBSCRIBERS ONLY and MUST NOT BE USED BY NEIGHBORS. Non-subscribers impose on their ne

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ional practices. To put it another way, AT&T monopolized telecommunications in a manner that modeled the principles of scientific management. The structure of AT&T was suited to the principles of scientific management. As promulgated by Frederick Taylor and the Gilbreths in the United States, the thrust of scientific management was that if a finite body of rules and techniques could be learned . . . essential problems of managing large groups of people would be more or less solved" (Peters & Waterman, 1984, p. 92). This model of management was authoritarian in character, and occurred in the closed system of the business organization characteristic of monopoly. The technological focus of AT&T amplified that effect. In that connection, Rochlin (1997) cites the "replacement of craft with production work at the turn of the [19th to 20th] century," [which] "transformed the representation of work, gradually moving the worker from being the direct creator of a product to one who operated a machine." Rochlin observes in particular that "interconnection and communication via the telegraph, and more important, the telephone, [] made possible the expansion of the span and scope of managerial control" (1997). Rochlin also argues that the con

Category: Business - T