Anytime, Anywhere: Entrepreneurship and the Creation of a Wireless World (review)

Anytime, Anywhere is a history of the rise of the wireless communications industry. Louis Galambos and Eric John Abrahamson are particularly interested in analyzing and chronicling the profound organizational, economic, and political transformations that accompanied the development of this new industry. They argue that understanding the industry is central to understanding recent developments in telecommunications, as companies around the world have adjusted to privatization, deregulation, and global competition. Their book details how managers mostly trained and socialized in the organizational culture of national regulated monopolies adapted to new political realities.

Galambos and Abrahamson focus on the history of the wireless company AirTouch and its founder, Sam Ginn. But in detailing the history of AirTouch—drawing on more than one hundred interviews with participants and archival sources held by the company—they also chronicle the history of the entire wireless industry. AirTouch became a global company, forming alliances with telecommunications firms around the world and interacting with such major players in the United States as Verizon, AT&T, and Cingular. Then, in 2000, AirTouch merged with another young, aggressive business, Vodafone. After the merger, Vodafone became the third biggest publicly traded business in the United Kingdom.

Most of the leaders of these new companies were not outsiders but inside players originally employed by traditional companies. Sam Ginn began as a loyal employee in the Bell System. He mainly learned about entrepreneurship when he spent a year in a business education fellowship at Stanford University. When he decided to form his own company, Ginn created an organizational culture combining Bell System traditions of technological and managerial excellence with a new emphasis on flexibility, competition, and decentralized decision making.

Galambos and Abrahamson stress the crucial role of individual entrepreneurs and their personal development. We learn that the industry was not developed by actors making rational calculations and decisions in accordance with narrow economic models. In negotiating the transition from a manager employed by the Bell System to an independent entrepreneur, Sam Ginn had to learn to be more open as a leader, less distant and formal. Another major player in the early industry, Craig McCaw, was described by another participant as making decisions as if he were playing a Nintendo computer game.

In addition to biography, we also learn about the crucial role of political context in the development of the wireless industry. The new emphasis on markets, competition, and risk taking was driven by new political ideology, particularly in the United States during the 1990s. But despite the important role of deregulation in telecommunications, government involvement remained centrally important. European companies were more successful than companies in the United States with advanced wireless technology because they were encouraged by government regulators to develop a standard for all of Europe. In the United States the Federal Communications Commission took a hands-off approach. Instead of agreeing on a single standard, companies there ended up with differing and incompatible systems. As a result, the U.S. wireless industry found itself ten years behind the Europeans.

This book's goal is to analyze entrepreneurship and to celebrate entrepreneurs. The authors address aspects of the downside, such as the intensely intrusive nature of wireless technology, but only briefly. They acknowledge the rise of "global oligopolies" in the wireless industry, but this development is characterized as a largely unavoidable result of technological innovation. While Galambos and Abrahamson are not primarily concerned with the relationship between technological innovation and social developments, historians of technology interested in the telecommunications industry will find this book very rewarding.