How Societies Embrace Information Technology: Lessons for Management and the Rest of Us (review)

James Cortada has carved out a useful role as a historian who reviews and offers comprehensive surveys of the literature dealing with computing and societies. His past work includes the Annotated Bibliography on the History of Data Processing (Greenwood Press, 1983), the similar A Bibliographic Guide to the History of Computing, Computers and the Information Processing Industry (Greenwood Press, 1990), the Archives of Data-Processing History: a Guide to Major Collections (Greenwood Press, 1990), and Best Practices in Information Technology (Prentice Hall, 1998). Cortada also has published numerous monographs, including Before the Computer (Princeton University Press, 1993) and The Digital Hand, three volumes published by Oxford University Press over the past decade on how computers changed American manufacturing.

This record of scholarship is continued in the present text, How Societies Embrace Information Technology, which examines the many reasons and contexts in which governments, companies, and other organizations have taken up computing. The focus is on today's world, but throughout, developments are placed in a historical perspective with valuable insights.

Cortada starts by painting a big picture of the "megatrends" that dominate the contexts of information technology use. These megatrends are not surprising and include globalization and the demographic movement toward older populations in some parts of the world but not others. He also describes the broad ways in which technologies in general are taken up and used in societies. There are, explains Cortada, "eight discernible patterns of diffusion" of information technologies (p. 20). The list (p. 32) is worth examining and considering.

The first is "government supported/ private-sector driven." Much history of computing fits this model, including the development of mainframe computing in the US and the Silicon Valley phenomenon. The British case of Lyons & Co, the teashop that built the first LEO computers for commercial applications in the 1950s, also fits the pattern, as do examples from countries from the Netherlands and Germany in the 1970s to South Korea in the 1990s. The second pattern is that of "national champions." Cortada is thinking here primarily of French policies from Machines Bull to CII-HB. The third pattern is found in Asian countries such as South Korea (again), Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan, where government did not pick champions but rather encouraged and supported home industry to acquire know-how and international partnerships. The fourth model, the planned economy, is used to describe both the largely extinct practices of the Soviet Union and the current approach of China and some African countries. It is a large and perhaps blunt category.

The first four models therefore place government policy and whole sector matters at their heart. The final four are diffusion models that focus instead on how individual firms behave: industry-driven, corporate, application, and technology standards diffusion models. The industry-driven model is really more about the specific vendors and user groups that promote information technologies, and therefore could have been more sharply named. Corporate-driven diffusion places the agency away from the sellers toward instead the corporate buyers. Application diffusion is a variant of the corporate-driven model, but it emphasizes the importance of particular applications as "must haves"— examples include iPods and ATMs. Finally, the standards model covers cases where standardization has created the kinds of path dependency evident in the familiar cases of qwerty and Microsoft's DOS.

Crucially, Cortada relates these eight modes back to the megatrends and notes that the eight patterns of deployment can blur and lose their distinctiveness. In turn, the eight patterns of diffusion have helped support the integration of the global economy that is such an important aspect of globalization.

The other chapter of major interest to historians of computing comes toward the end of the book. Cortada asks, "Do we now live in the information age?" Cortada's answer is gently skeptical, especially toward notions that we live in a singular, uncontested, and easily identifiable Information Age. In fact, this is also the chapter that...