Territories of Profit: Communications, Capitalist Development, and the Innovative Enterprises of G. F. Swift and Dell Computer (review)

Historians of technology have a tendency to make grand comparisons across decades or even centuries, either to mark moments of discontinuous technological revolution ("the new electrical/petrochemical age!") or to illustrate periods of convergent technological evolution ("the second industrial age!"). Although the value of such comparisons is always limited, they can help us reconceptualize both the times and the technologies that we explore in an intellectually productive way. Gary Fields has made such a fruitful comparison in Territories of Profit, arguing for important parallels between the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth in the ways in which "business users of transport and communications systems learn to reorient their competitive strategies and operational routines," ultimately enabling them to "reshape the geographical territory of profit making" (p. 1). However, this fascinating and well-crafted comparative study is grounded more on organizational research and economic geography than on recent technological history and social theory, and for that reason may be of more interest to scholars of management than to historians of technology.

Fields's book is based on his dissertation in city and regional planning at the University of California. It juxtaposes "new" information-communication-transportation (ICT) technologies of the nineteenth century with those of the present day through a comparison of two "system building" entrepreneurs who figured out how to use those technologies to gain decisive advantages over their competitors: the 1870s–80s purveyor of precut frozen beef Gustavus Swift, and the 1980s–90s manufacturer of customized personal computers Michael Dell. For each man, Fields argues, success meant "both the processing of enormous amounts of real-time information and the manipulation of high-volume flows of goods" (p. 6).

Fields's argument is grounded firmly in recent theories from business history (especially following Alfred Chandler and William Lazonick) and economic geography (the work of Manuel Castells and AnnaLee Saxenian). Both the "visible hand" of management organization and the careful siting of production and distribution nodes in existing "industrial districts" were crucial to the success of Swift and Dell. Surprisingly, however, Fields only briefly mentions theoretical work that deals with the dual nature of technological systems as social systems. He sees success stories in which managers were able to "learn by using" new ICT infrastructures. Such learning fueled a round of capitalist "creative destruction" as both firms decreased production turnover time, reduced risk in procurement and distribution, and removed opportunities for profit and control by intermediate firms. What emerges is a fine set of historically grounded management lessons, but a limited narrative of the relationship between technology and culture.

The most worrying limitation of Fields's firm-centered approach is the near-total removal of three sets of actors who are crucial to his historical analogy: workers, consumers, and the state. Fields focuses on the innovative "learning" of only one historical agent (the firm); the actions of any other historical agents are assumed to be part of the environment that the firm must "learn" about. But workers, consumers, and the state are affected by "communications revolutions" as well, and may be acting in new ways— even "learning" in their own right. For example, both Swift and Dell innovated not only in commodity distribution, but also in the organization of work, each scaling-up a huge low-wage and (presumably) low-skill workforce which had a set of time-space characteristics all its own. Even a cursory glance at the history of ICT infrastructure firms themselves (from Western Union to Microsoft) shows that the responses of workers, customers, and regulator groups matter when trying to plan out a new technological system or construct a new technological landscape—whether for social progress, or owner profit, or both.

All this is not to deny that firms matter; as Fields reminds us, both Swift and Dell grew in size and scale to lead their respective industries—Swift...