This article analyses labour-intensive workforce strategies in Japan's government-run informational infrastructure (post, telegraph, and telephone) and in the adjunct services associated with their administration in the decades up to the Pacific War. It asks to what extent the growing scale of employment in Japan's communications infrastructure in this period confirms the existence of labour-intensive growth outside the manufacturing sector, and how far the growth of the labour force in post and telecommunications was facilitated by specific labour-absorbing institutions—that is, formal or informal institutions designed to mobilise or incentivise large numbers of employees. The discussion of these two associated questions shows not only that this area of infrastructure provision was highly labour-intensive in terms of the numbers employed and the diverse tasks undertaken, but also that the government-run postal system in effect depended for its growth and development on labour strategies and labour-absorbing institutions analogous to those usually associated with manufacturing development. The article also seeks to establish how far we can see in this sector the gradual improvement in the quality of labour normally associated with the labour-intensive industrialisation process, providing evidence that the evolving institutions were closely associated with a gradual improvement in the quality of labour and its ability to interact with rapidly changing needs and technologies.

This article analyzes the lasting effects of privatization on public-sector telecommunications workers in Argentina's rural interior. I draw on over fifty hours of oral histories carried out from 2015 to 2017 with former ENTel and Telefónica workers in General Pico, in the interior province of La Pampa, Argentina. This unique source base reveals how the material objects themselves acquired symbolic weight in the minds of workers, and how the introduction of new technologies and labor regimes after privatization in 1990 eroded workers' feelings of loyalty toward and ownership over the previously state-run company. This article specifically explores notions of trauma as related to the destruction of the physical materials of work, and the association between that destruction and the mass layoffs that followed. David Harvey's engagement with creative destruction in late capitalism has suggested that “continuous innovation”—whether technological or practical—has meant the devaluation and/or destruction of existing labor relations. I expand this concept to show how this logic of “creative destruction” maps onto spatialized ideas of modernity. The trauma that workers experienced in the 1990s is most productively understood vis-à-vis the unfulfilled promises of “progress” which claimed to bring efficiency, growth, and long-term stability but instead delivered job loss, atomization, and the breakdown of social relations of labor.

Historical accounts of the Internet's origins tend to emphasize U.S. government investment and university-based researchers. In contrast, this article introduces actors who have been overlooked: the entrepreneurs and private firms that developed standards, evaluated competing standards, educated consumers about the value of new products, and built products to sell. Start-up companies such as 3Com and Cisco Systems succeeded because they met rapidly rising demand from users, particularly those in large organizations, who were connecting computers into networks and networks into internetworks. We consider a relatively brief yet dynamic period, from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, when regulators attacked incumbent American firms, entrepreneurs flourished in new market niches, and engineers set industry standards for networking and internetworking. As a consequence, their combined efforts forged new processes and institutions for so-called open standards that, in turn, created the conditions favorable for the “network effects” that sustained the formative years of the digital economy.

British Telecom’s 1984 partial privatization set in motion the privatization and deregulation of many international state-owned telecommunications carriers. Most previous research on the privatization and deregulation of state-owned telecommunications carriers has focused on the economic outcomes. However, this was also a time of changes in managerial practice and thinking influenced by organizational theory. This article presents an analysis of the use of the prescriptions of Rosabeth Kanter in the attempted reform of the organizational culture of Australia’s largest business in the 1980s: the government-owned telecommunications monopoly Telecom Australia (now Telstra). It details the attempt to transform Telecom under the incipient threat of the introduction of competition to the telecommunications market and demonstrates how the country’s largest change management program, Vision 2000, represented an alternative approach to telecommunications reform.

The COVID-19 pandemic is nowhere near over. Some things, however, seem relatively clear. So far, the agendas of the world's most powerful actors seem unchanged—or, indeed, accelerated. Partly as a result, disease mortality and economic losses have fallen largely on poorer people, though deaths so far have been concentrated among poorer people in rich countries. Consequently, the pandemic's implications look very different at the local, subnational, and international levels—although at all levels, they thus far reflect accelerations of preexisting trends more than new departures. Many developments reflect remarkable gains in human capacity to cope with disasters—a point highlighted by comparisons to the 1919 flu and other historical events pandemics made by the authors in this forum. Those gains are particularly evident in Asia, though they look more precarious in South Asia and Southeast Asia than in East Asia; this has contributed to a marked shift in rhetoric about global “sickness” and health and seems consistent with prophecies of a coming “Asian century.” However, COVID-19 may not be a singular event like 1919 but may portend a wave of environmental emergencies; in that scenario, no world region has exhibited as much resilience as it would need.

This article examines the role of internet service providers (ISPs) as guardians of personal information and protectors of privacy, with a particular focus on how telecom companies in Canada have historically negotiated these responsibilities. Communications intermediaries have long been expected to act as privacy custodians by their users, while simultaneously being subject to pressures to collect, utilize, and disclose personal information. As service providers gain custody over increasing volumes of highly-sensitive information, their importance as privacy custodians has been brought into starker relief and explicitly recognized as a core responsibility.

Some ISPs have adopted a more positive orientation to this responsibility, actively taking steps to advance it, rather that treating privacy protection as a set of limitations on conduct. However, commitments to privacy stewardship are often neutralized through contradictory legal obligations (such as mandated surveillance access) and are recurrently threatened by commercial pressures to monetize personal information.

Research on regulation has focussed on explaining the independence of sector regulators and assessing the effects of regulations on markets. This article broadens the scope of such research by studying and explaining how regulatory actors interact at the de facto level in a multi-actor regulatory arrangement when making regulatory decisions in the telecommunications sector of Colombia. We propose that regulatory decisions depend on the manner in which actors influence each other. In this article, we are not only focussing on the policy outcome itself but also on the regulatory decision-making process. We performed a social network analysis and used an exponential random graph model to analyse the data. Our findings suggest that actors’ level of influence is affected by the access they have to other organisations, the divergence of positions they have with these other organisations and the power resources of an organisation. In addition, there are structural network characteristics that affect regulatory decisionmaking.

Discussions about deunionisation usually focus on lower levels of the workforce with managers seen as the initiators of deunionisation strategies. Managers, however, occupy contradictory positions as agents of capital, employees and possibly trade unionists. This can place them in the position of being both recipients and conduits in deunionisation strategies. The focus of the study is on Telstra, the major telecommunications carrier in Australia. Using a range of sources such as interviews and company and union materials, this qualitative research shows how between 1992 and 2000 Telstra's senior management's concerns over middle management agency prompted them to reframe the concept of a manager by using a set of managerial practices from the mining company CRA and the provisions of the Workplace Relations Act (1996) to individualise and deunionise their managerial ranks as a precursor to the deunionisation of the wider workforce.

This paper examines the extent to which diffusion mechanisms have been important for the privatization of telecommunications in the OECD world. It analyzes a panel dataset for 18 OECD countries between 1980 and 2007 using spatial econometric techniques. The sample includes 18 OECD countries between 1980 and 2007. The empirical findings strongly suggest that spatial interdependencies are significant for privatization policies. First, closely related countries from a geographical or economic perspective influence each other to a greater extent than non-related countries. Second, there is no evidence that governments adopt policies of countries with a similar cultural background or the policies of those countries where privatization has been shown to lead to the intended economic results at the company level. Third, the importance of diffusion is highly influenced by national characteristics such the openness of the economy.

The legal framework of telecommunications regulation is about to change. This is due to the reform package which the Commission submitted in November 2007. The European Parliament and the Council of Ministers are still to approve. There is ongoing political debate. Unfortunately, it does not cover the crucial issue: is the sector-specific ex ante telecommunications regulation still justified after ten years of liberalisation and a partly dramatic evolution towards competition? The author replies in the negative from a historical, a regulatory policy and an analytical perspective. De lege lata, the three-criteria test, if applied correctly, induces this outcome. De lege ferenda, a sunset rule, if need be a qualified one, would be useful.