Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries (review)

Reviewing a book written by the originator of an influential school of historical interpretation presents a unique challenge. The most succinct description of Inventing the Electronic Century is that it is a Chandlerian history of the consumer electronics industry. Had the book been written by anyone other than Alfred D. Chandler himself, this would have been the essence of my review. Because Chandler is indeed the author, however, this otherwise apt description seems a bit of a cop-out.

The story of the consumer electronics industry begins for Chandler with the formation of the Radio Corporation of America in the early 1920s. RCA is central to his history of commercial radio for two reasons: because it is a "first mover" that set the agenda for the entire industry, and because its disastrous diversification strategy of the late 1960s neatly supports Chandler's argument that successful firms must follow "paths of learning" that capitalize on existing strengths in development, production, and marketing.

From radio, Chandler moves to television and videocassette recorders, tracing the shift in the center of gravity of these industries from the United States to Japan. In contrast to the United States, he argues, Japanese firms such as Sony and Matsushita cultivated "integrated learning bases" that allowed them to expand into global enterprises through the development of "closely related technologies and product lines." In each of these industries the story is similar: key firms develop core organizational competencies that allow them to benefit from economies of scale and scope that then serve as almost insurmountable barriers to entry for competitors.

It is in the discussion of the computer industry that the limitations of Chandler's schematic historiography become most apparent. Even more so than most other "Chandlerian" accounts of this history, the source material of Inventing the Electronic Century seems to be shoehorned into the historiographical framework. Anything that does not fit is ignored, and what remains is often grossly distorted. For example, the rise to dominance of IBM is told as a triumphal story of a company taking advantage of its "integrated learning base" to move from strength to strength. Although IBM was indeed able to capitalize on its long experience in the business machines industry to establish a foothold in, and eventually dominate, the computer industry, its transition from electromechanical tabulating machines to electronic computers was risky, fitful, and uneven. Unlike its competitors, however, IBM was able to fund its developmental projects with the revenue stream from its profitable tabulating machine business. And while Chandler mentions briefly the massive military subsidies that provided IBM with its first experience with electronic computing, he characteristically downplays the important role that the government had in shaping the early computer industry as patron, consumer, and regulator.

But the single greatest shortcoming of Chandler's narrative is his overreliance on the explanatory capability of his "integrated learning base." In principle, this concept incorporates many of the elements of what historians of technology would refer to as the sociotechnical system: technologies, practices, organizational modes, marketing strategies, legal and financial structures. In practice, however, Chandler treats it as a catchall explanation: when companies succeed, it is because they managed to develop an integrated learning base; if they fail, then they obviously did not. Almost every section of the book ends with such a similarly tautological assertion. Even when we are provided with clues as to what might comprise a given integrated learning base, its essential elements are often so idiosyncratic to a particular time and place that the concept loses much of its analytical value. Firms that might seem to possess an integrated learning base, such as Fairchild Semiconductor, often turn out to lack some critical, unanticipated organizational capability. What these capabilities might be, or how Fairchild's successor Intel managed to develop them, are never explained. In the case of Intel, this integrated learning base is clearly technological and production-oriented; in...