This book provides a comprehensive theoretic framework explaining the “strategic restructuring” of government policies and institutions associated with policies promoting the adoption of new information and communications technologies (ICTs). It also provides detailed case study chapters on Brazil, Ghana, and China, concluding with two chapters placing ICTs in a global perspective. The Chinese case study should be of interest to many readers, given China's political and economic importance. Brazil has a long history of state-guided and supported development strategies in this sector, combining import substitution and partnerships with transnational corporations. Ghana occupies a more peripheral position in global political economy, lacking the size and industrialization of the other countries examined.
Ernest Wilson has produced an exemplary piece of scholarship in a number of ways. The book builds from a thoughtful theoretic discussion, extending existing research and theories of technical change and implementation, and combining a focus on the agency of groups and individuals with a careful and historical approach to institutional change. Although it focuses mainly on elite decision making and action, the framework provides a view of the wider context that would also be useful in research on community based network initiatives. The political and institutional model of technology policy change is a welcome corrective to the sometimes deterministic public and policy discourse on new technologies and the digital divide. In many popular and scholarly accounts, the lack of access to and use of new technologies is presented as the problem, and higher levels of access are presented as the solution. What is missing in these simple formulations are the cultural, social, political, and institutional elements of the use or nonuse of communications technologies, and the complex and multifaceted struggles that accompany attempts to introduce new technologies, policies, and practices.
Wilson's work here provides a sense of these complexities, working in a political and institutional scope, rather than the programmatic level of analysis alone. Empirically, it is built from careful and detailed research on cases of policy innovations and new technical implementation. What is unique about the national studies is that they are not reports on one project focusing on the implementation of new technology in one specific organization over a short period of time, as is often the case. Rather, these are case examinations of the introduction of new approaches to technology policy and programs in governments and throughout societies over time. This wider institutional and temporal scope requires at once an account of what individuals and groups of leaders are trying to do, but also a fairly high level of abstraction to provide a treatment of the larger picture in a short book chapter. While the country case chapters are brief for the material they cover, they are very useful in providing guides for the elements that must be included, or that the researcher must be open to, in trying to understand new technology adoption and use in differing national institutional contexts.
The necessities of a brief coverage of each country are offset by the strengths of the comparative consideration of national cases. Specific conflicts in politics and institutions may be so important in a single country case study that researchers, or more probably readers, may be tempted implicitly to draw general lessons from a single instance. By including three case studies here, with widely differing outcomes, Wilson provides an important caution to those who would try to jump to quick and easy generalizations about ICT leadership and institutions.
The agency-institution paradox at the core of these cases raises a number of theoretic and research quandaries. As Wilson notes (p. 47), the modified structural approach “requires considerable commitment by the analyst to conduct complementary research at the macro, meso, and micro levels.” Individual and group action does make a difference, given the set of resources and institutions in which these national leaders try to make history. The author focuses upon groups of leaders working in institutional and political contexts who advocated and effectively shepherded the introduction of new policies and institutional reform. The stories are not just about individual heroes or short-term success. Rather, policy and technology initiatives depended upon building political support and tenuously and skillfully constructing alliances. While some argue that every change has a changer, this approach may tend to shift the analytic focus away from the contextual parameters in international institutions that restrict the range of possibilities available to policymakers in developing world contexts, and more toward the qualities of domestic political agents working with limited resources.
The chapter on the digital divide provides a similarly well-informed and nuanced analysis. Wilson points to the multiple dimensions of the widely discussed idea of “access” to ICTs, including physical, financial, cognitive, design, content, production, institutional, and political access, both among and within countries. He proposes moving beyond the term “access” to focusing upon participation and engagement in each of these dimensions as a strategy to understand and address the digital divide. Demographic factors, such as gender, geographic location, income, education, occupation, and ethnicity, are the “most determinative features” (p. 307) of digital divides. In discussing patterns of diffusion and adoption of ICTs, he cites optimistic, pessimistic, and structuralist perspectives on whether future levels of ICT access among different populations will diverge (a deepening digital divide) or converge (more equal digital participation). On the basis of his research conducted along with Francisco Rodriguez, Wilson concludes that the “ICT gap is bad and getting worse” (p. 321), in part due to the accelerated growth of ICT services in the developed world. To set the priorities for the importance of future research on this question, “Wilson's Law” is proposed: “The actual and opportunity costs of exclusion from an interactive communications network are multidimensional (economic, political, and social), increase over time, and are borne by both the excluded and society” (pp. 329–30).
At the international level, Wilson argues that in the last decade, decision elites focused mainly upon defining property rights, efficiency (market forms), and the private sector role in the emerging global ICT governance regime. Only then have distributional concerns been considered. As noted (p. 339), “This pinched conception of equity subsequently hampered more ambitious efforts to redress the digital divide.” The chapter “Strategic Restructuring in the Global System” recounts a number of proposals by various organizations and task forces in the late 1990s, some of which partnered public leaders and private groups, to address issues of the digital divide. While open trade and initiatives to strengthen intellectual property rights led to significant institutional reform in the World Trade Organization, the International Telecommunication Union, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (among other sites), international public–private partnerships and private-sector initiatives addressing distribution and access issues made less headway. However, Wilson sees in these elite efforts models of new forms of international cooperation and action, what he calls “netstitutions,” operating alongside and outside of established international organizations with broader memberships.
The thoughtful presentation in this book points to some limits of policy research and public action to further ICT use and national development in national institutions and global markets typified by dynamic and rapid technical change, and should be included in the reading list of those undertaking work in this field.
