Broadening Approaches
Business in the New Globalization: The Telecommunications Equipment Industry from Captive Markets to Outsourcing Strategy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Angel Calvo
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, global telecommunications underwent major changes, including the passage from captive markets to outsourcing, defined as contracting with a service provider for the management and completion of a certain amount of work, for a specified cost, length of time, and level of service (Oshri et al., 2009, p. 8). If we stick to the national fractions of that world market, we observe remarkable peculiarities, which imprinted differential features according to the countries. This paper examines new episodes of the reorganization of the oligopolistic structure of the European telecommunications equipment industry from the perspective of the French multinational ALCATEL in the 1990s and the first years of the new millennium, after the dot.com bubble, in which the bulk of the academic debate focused more on the scope of outsourcing than on the reality of it, with very different views (New York Times, June 19, 2005). The French multinational ALCATEL is presented as a magnificent example of the transformations that took place on a global scale. The case is used as an artifact to confirm that a correct understanding of the adjustment in the world economy requires elucidating how large companies were restructured. The paper is based on business sources, on reports from large international organizations, on parliamentary documents from various countries and on meticulous work at newspapers archives.
Global Inspiration for US Urban Transport Innovation: America Looks to Sustainable Urban Transport Best Practices Abroad
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joseph Kott, Michelle DeRobertis
Since the era of urban transport reform and focus on more sustainable mobility in America began in earnest in the early 1990s, Americans have looked abroad for inspiration. Americans have studied, then eventually implemented, bicycle transport innovations from the Netherlands and Copenhagen; bus rapid transit solutions from Curitiba, Brazil, and Bogota; Columbia, rail passenger transport; and land use integration in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Singapore; public transport planning in Canada; residential traffic management ("traffic calming") ideas from the Netherlands, Britain, and Australia; a "Vision Zero" (no traffic deaths) approach to traffic safety from Scandinavia; and safer ways of managing traffic at street and road junctions from western Europe and Australia; among many other innovative ideas. The intellectual and technological transfer of ideas from abroad has been facilitated by US federal transport agencies, academic institutions, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the experience of individual American urban transport scholars and practitioners, and the proliferation of information available in print and digital form. America, which has long seen itself as "exceptional", thus sui generis in all things including transport, has reached out globally for solutions to pressing urban transport problems. How and why this is so is a story of successful globalization.
