Universal Service from the Bottom Up: A Study of Telephone Penetration in Camden,New Jersey

Ethnographic methods and geographic information systems were used to investigate the extent, causes and consequences of telephone disconnection in Camden, NJ. The results have significant implications for public policies intended to promote universal telephone penetration. Universal service is usually perceived as an issue for rural areas and the elderly, but the most extensive pockets of low telephone penetration are found in inner cities, where the problem is associated with the young, the transient, and ethnic minorities. The basic monthly rate paid by subscribers is usually thought to be the most important factor affecting affordability, but the data suggest that most marginal users are driven off the network by usage-related costs, and more generally by the problem of credit-worthiness. Given prevailing consumption patterns in low-income urban areas, ''electronic redlining'' seems less of a threat than that poor Americans will, upon exposure to the advanced features of the national information infrastructure (NII), buy services that they cannot afford. Intellectuals and policy analysts value telephone service more than cable television service, but residents of inner cities frequently do not agree with this evaluation. In reformulating universal service policy, we must take account of the growing heterogeneity of telecommunications services, and keep in mind the importance of credit risk as a factor affecting the public's ability to access and use telecommunication networks.     

Leaving It Up to the Industry: People With Disabilities and the Telecommunications Act of 1996

This article examines whether Section 255 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act achieves accessibility for people with disabilities. Taking the interest group approach, it shows that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) implemented Section 255 in a way that is favorable to the telecommunications industry and not to people with disabilities. The FCC's regulations only encourage the telecommunication industry to consider accessibility issues for people with disabilities. This proindustry regulatory bias is in keeping with the established pattern of policymaking in other areas concerning people with disabilities. The paper argues that if the FCC continues to rely on the voluntary efforts of the industry, people with disabilities will not enjoy benefits of access to telecommunications systems.     

The Digital Divide as a Complex and Dynamic Phenomenon

The purpose of this article is to propose a fruitful analytical framework for data supposedly related to the concept of the so-called "digital divide." The extent and the nature of this divide depend on the kind of access defined. Considering the possession of hardware, growing divides among different categories of income, employment, education, age, and ethnicity can be proved to have existed in the 1980s and 1990s according to official American and Dutch statistics. If only by effects of saturation, these gaps will more or less close. However, it is shown that differential access of skills and usage is likely to increase. The growth of a usage gap is projected. Multivariate analyses of Dutch official statistics reveal the striking effect of age and gender as compared to education. The usage gap is related to the evolution of the information and network society. Finally, policy perspectives are discussed.     

Places and Spaces: The Historical Interaction of Technology, Home, and Privacy

While recent developments in information and communication technologies have produced heightened concern over privacy issues, technology and privacy have a long history of interaction. The home has served as a key locus for this interaction. By distinguishing inside from outside, the home supports the allocation of particular behaviors and information to different areas, both physical and virtual. This article explores how different technologies, including structural elements, have affected and reflected over time the boundary represented by the home and how that boundary has helped shape the construction of privacy in the West. This illustrates how privacy might be conceptualized as a social condition arising from the interaction of various boundaries, including the principal one separating the public and the private.     

A New Research Programme on Information and Communication Technologies. The E-Society: Understanding the Restructuring of Practices and Institutions in the Digital Age

This is an advance notice of a new research programme, supported by Britain's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), investigating the restructuring of practices and institutions in the digital age. The call for applications is planned for November 2001; first projects are expected to commence in October 2002. The ESRC is currently preparing the recruitment of a Programme Director.Further information on the process will be published in due course and will be available on the ESRC's website at: http:/ /www.esrc.ac.uk/E-Society.htm. Below is the text of the proposal on the basis of which the ESRC decided to fund a research programme in this area. This proposal was developed through a consultancy led by Professor William H. Dutton. Please note that there might be changes to the programme outline once the Programme Director is appointed. Contact: Angelika Hamilton, angelika.hamilton@esrc.ac.uk, with any comments or recommendations.     

The Internet as Hyperbole: A Critical Examination of Adoption Rates

It seems to be a generally accepted belief that the adoption rate of the Internet has exceeded that of earlier mass communication technologies by several magnitudes. This article reviews the historic data related to some of these technologies, draws on actor-network theory as a framework for interpreting such data, traces the transformations and translation of this data throughout the public, political, and scientific discourse, and discusses the use of "facts" in modern society.     

Globalization isn't New; Anti-globalization isn't Either: September 11 and the History of Nations

The September 11 attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center reveals, among other things, a colossal failure of intelligence and radical deficiencies in our understanding of communications in the modern world. The history of nations and the history of communications are continuous, though contradictory, since the eighteenth century, and those continuities and contradictions are revealed by way of analysis of September 11 and its aftermath.     

Innovation as a social bubble: The example of the Human Genome Project

In this paper we present a detailed synthesis of the development of the Human Genome Project (HGP) from the mid 1980s through 2000, in order to test our hypothesis of “social bubbles”, which claims that strong social interactions between enthusiastic supporters weave a network of reinforcing feedbacks that lead to widespread endorsement and extraordinary commitment by those involved, beyond what would be rationalized by a standard cost-benefit analysis in the presence of extraordinary uncertainties and risks. The HGP was initiated as a public project funded by government agencies, starting at a moderate pace. The progressive introduction of different actors and the development of various interests catalyzed the project, which eventually became eminent both in the public and private sectors. The competition between the public and the private sector played greatly in favor of both: the financial burden as well as the horizon of the public project were significantly reduced, the private project(s) gained from the hype of the public project, yet had to play an active and collaborative role in order to remain in the game. This is at the core of the social bubble hypothesis. To further our argument, we present quantitative analysis of the development of the biotech sector within the financial stock market. Lastly, we point to the fact that the hypes fueling the bubble during its growth have not been followed by real tangible outcomes over the short expected time horizons. Indeed, at the time of writing (May, 2011), the consensus of the scientific community is that it will take decades to exploit the fruits of the HGP.     

技术创新与社会创新:社会发展的原动力

技术创新和社会创新是社会发展的两大动力。技术创新与社会创新协同作用推动着人类社会由前工业-工业到后工业社会的转型。当代中国的社会转型具有跨越发展、多种社会形态并存以及后发、叠加、渐进、自主等特质,在器物、制度和文化三个层面均面临着特有的难题,解决问题的对策还在于技术创新与社会创新的协同发展,尤其是要重视制度创新和文化创新建设。     

Representing Islam in the Wake of September 11: A Comparison of US Television and CNN Online Messageboard Discourses

This paper contrasts the immediate representations of Islam on US television and CNN's online messageboard by focusing on the noun phrases for 'Islamic' used in both media fora from September 11 to 16. The study found some notable congruities and differences in the associations made with Islam in each context. It considers these findings in terms of previous research on the representation of Islam and terrorism in 'Western' media; the official insistence that 'we' are not at war with Islam; and media theories of 'framing' and 'reception'.     

The emergence of entrepreneurship as an academic field: A personal essay on institutional entrepreneurship

The academic field of entrepreneurship research has grown from groups of isolated scholars doing research on small businesses to an international community of departments, institutes, and foundations promoting research on new and high-growth firms. Growth has produced increasingly systematic and interconnected knowledge and growing numbers of knowledge producers and knowledge users share core concepts, principles, and research methods, and a handful of highly cited scholars have emerged as thought leaders within research subfields. The field is increasingly formalized and anchored in a small set of intellectual bases, although there are also some signs of differentiation and fragmentation. Using an institutional theory perspective and drawing upon my experience in the field, I explore six forces creating the institutional infrastructure. First, social networking mechanisms have created a social structure facilitating connections between researchers. Second, publication opportunities have increased dramatically. Third, training and mentoring has moved to a collective rather than individual apprenticeship model. Fourth, major foundations and many other smaller funding sources have changed the scale and scope of entrepreneurship research. Fifth, new mechanisms have emerged that recognize and reward individual scholarship, reinforcing the identity of entrepreneurship research as a field and attracting new scholars into it. Sixth, globalizing forces have affected all of these trends. I conclude with some thoughts about the consequences of these developments with regard to the giving of practical and timely advice to entrepreneurs, the effects of American hegemony on choices of research topics and methods, and the possible loss of theoretical eclecticism.     

Power,Rules of the Game and the Limits to Knowledge Management: Lessons from Japan and Anglo-Saxon Alarms

Much of the Knowledge Management (KM) literature assumes that all relevant knowledge can be represented as information and 'managed'. But the meaning of information is always context-specific and open to subsequent reinterpretation. Moving over time or between contexts affords scope for new meanings to emerge. Making sense of information signals (speech, body language, tone-of-voice or whatever)--Aand the absence of such signals--Ainvolves dimensions of individual and collective tacit knowledge that are frequently misrepresented or ignored in mainstream KM. By relating power and knowledge to 'rules of the game', it is possible to consider how the contexts in which information is rendered meaningful are bounded, as well as crucially related in the stretch between macro-level processes and micro-level practices. In the knowledge debate, Japan stands as a counterfactual to Anglo-Saxon expectations about formal rules, liberal individualism and market-rational entrepreneurship. While seminal accounts of knowledge creation in Japanese companies impelled the West towards KM, there has been no corresponding KM-boom in Japan. Our interpretation of the processes by which Japanese and Anglo-Saxon practices are situated suggests that KM is limited by the separation of knowledge from power and information from meaning.     

Social Contradictions in Informational Capitalism: The Case of Finnish Wage Earners and Their Labor Market Situation

Along with the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs), work processes are becoming ever more knowledge intensive. In keeping with this trend, the number of informational (or knowledge) workers in Finland has more than tripled from 12% in 1988 to 39% in 2000. What makes the Finnish case unique and interesting is the exceptional speed with which the information sector of the economy has grown. A few years after facing the most severe economic recession in its history in the early 1990s, Finland is now considered to have an advanced information economy. However, our empirical analysis--based on survey data from 1988, 1994, and 2000--yields a somewhat more critical picture of the Finnish information society than what usually comes across in the mainstream media. The opportunities for social equality offered by the growth of informational work are far more limited than was the case with the transition from agricultural to industrial production.     

Embeddedness, social epistemology and breakthrough innovation: The case of the development of statins

Radical, breakthrough innovations create not only great industrial possibilities, but also great social uncertainties. When a breakthrough medical technology is discovered, the question arises as to whether to accept the possible risks involved, or to defer implementing the innovation until more data is available, and, specifically, until others have taken up the innovation and demonstrated both its efficacy, its relative safety and market acceptance. Specifically, when a firm discovers a new candidate substance for a first in its class drug, how to evaluate the potential risks becomes a key predicament for management. This paper focuses on the role of a firm's social networks and national innovation system context in influencing the social epistemology around potential breakthrough innovations. Through an examination of the processes of drug development related to the same candidate substance in a Japanese firm and an American firm, we suggest that, in addition to organizational capabilities at the corporate level, social capital, specifically formed under a certain innovation system, plays a key role in leading to the successful introduction of breakthrough innovations.     

"If I Want It, It's OK": Usenet and the (Outer) Limits of Free Speech

Usenet is an international communications system composed of thousands of topically named discussion groups, called newsgroups, which enable anyone with an Internet connection and the proper software to read messages, post new messages, or reply to existing ones. Remarkable for its culture of 'anything-goes' free speech, Usenet tradition recognizes only one kind of legitimate restriction on content: that which is abusive to the Net's ability to function as an effective discussion system. This article shows that this consensus stems from a long and often painful struggle, as Usenet's designers, administrators, and users attempted to comprehend, define, and govern the communication system they had created. The result is a forum that is not quite as free as Usenet's defenders like to imagine, and one given to excesses that seem destined to attract the attention of government censors.     

Regulatory policy as innovation: Constructing rules of engagement for a technological zone of tissue engineering in the European Union

This paper addresses the question of the part that regulation plays in processes of innovation in sectors of technology. The politico-economic phenomenon of ‘Europe’ is partly constituted by regulatory regime-building, and new technologies are one of the major sites of regime-building. A constructionist social theory perspective shows that study of the conflictual processes of regulatory policymaking affords insights into the formation of the rules of engagement that constitute technology domains. Adopting the concept of emergent ‘technological zone’ in preference to industrial ‘sector’ or technoscientific network, the paper presents, using empirical research, a detailed account of the case of the debate and development of regulatory policy for therapeutic tissue engineering in the European Union's policy institutions and stakeholder networks. It describes how the jurisdiction of an emergent zone has been formed through such negotiations, providing a counter-example to the common view that regulation ‘lags behind’ innovation. The analysis takes account particularly of the part played by the malleability of the definition of the material technology itself in such constructive governance processes, and it also suggests various consequences for the array of producers of the technology, for market structuring and for the innovation pathways taken by tissue engineering technology. Concluding, the paper argues that there is conceptual advance to be made by bringing together constructionist social theory with innovation studies approaches that highlight the part played by non-firm, public institutions in shaping innovation ecologies.     

群体思维的跨文化效应:中国、美国和日本的比较

本文在文化人类学研究的基础上，结合现有的群体思维研究理论，主要比较了美国、日本和中国这三种不同的社会文化对群体思维现象发生的影响，提出了一些有待进一步证实的命题，以期引起这方面的研究注意。     

"The joy in believing": the Cardiff giant, commercial deceptions, and styles of observation in Gilded Age America

This essay presents a historical epistemology of the nineteenth-century controversy concerning a scientific hoax, the Cardiff giant. My focus is on the shifting meanings given to the giant, which were based on epistemologies derived from scientific authority, religious belief, and market relations. In 1869 a farmer in Cardiff, New York, claimed to have discovered the fossilized remains of a prehistoric, perhaps biblical, giant on his property. While some scientists stressed the need to cooperate with commercial showmen, enthusiasm for the giant incited the ire of others, who sought to debunk it and the culture that sustained it. Drawing on local newspaper reports, memoirs, nineteenth-century exposés, and publicity materials associated with the giant's display, I link the episode to the history of popular and scientific observation. The giant was a particularly troubling spectacle because as an object of inquiry it blurred the modern boundaries separating nature, society, and religion.