Electronic Technology, Corporate Strategy, and World Transformation

How are the new electronic technologies transforming business here and abroad — indeed, the entire world economy — and what new strategies must business develop to meet the challenges of this transformation? Economist, writer, and communications executive Maurice Estabrooks provides a readable, comprehensive survey of how businesses are using microchips, computers, and telecommunications to reshape the entire world of work — its cultures, organization, and economic systems. With insight and impeccable scholarship he provides concrete evidence of the emergence of artificially intelligent, cybernetic, network-based entities that are creating new linkages between businesses, markets, and technology itself — linkages that will profoundly affect the way businesses create and implement their corporate survival and growth strategies in the future.

Drawing on the work of economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter, Estabrooks shows how Schumpeterian dynamics have played a key role in the breakup of AT&T and the Bell System, and in the deregulation of telecommunications, broadcasting, banking, finance, and other economically critical industries. What has emerged, he maintains, is an increasingly integrated, global information- and software-based services economy. Optical fibers, satellites, and wireless communications systems have already made possible the development of electronic superhighways, but in doing so they have also initiated a massive redistribution of economic power and wealth throughout the world, the implications of which are only now being understood. Historical, analytical, descriptive, Estabrooks' book will speak not only to academics and others who observe world transformations from relatively theoretical perspectives, but also to corporate and other executives whose organizations, and certainly their personal work lives, will be changed dramatically by the developments he describes in practical day-to-day situations.

MAURICE ESTABROOKS is an author and senior economist in the Department of Industry in Canada. With more than 20 years experience in information and communications management, he has studied the art and science of strategic thinking and management, and the interplay between technology, corporate strategy, and the market economy in particular. Trained in the physical, social, and managerial sciences, he is the author of a previous book, Programmed Capitalism: A Computer-Mediated Global Society which describes the role computers played in the stock market crash of 1987.