The Charismatic Organization: Vision 2000 and Corporate Change in a State-Owned Organization

British Telecom’s 1984 partial privatization set in motion the privatization and deregulation of many international state-owned telecommunications carriers. Most previous research on the privatization and deregulation of state-owned telecommunications carriers has focused on the economic outcomes. However, this was also a time of changes in managerial practice and thinking influenced by organizational theory. This article presents an analysis of the use of the prescriptions of Rosabeth Kanter in the attempted reform of the organizational culture of Australia’s largest business in the 1980s: the government-owned telecommunications monopoly Telecom Australia (now Telstra). It details the attempt to transform Telecom under the incipient threat of the introduction of competition to the telecommunications market and demonstrates how the country’s largest change management program, Vision 2000, represented an alternative approach to telecommunications reform.

Presidential entrepreneurship and policy change: The case of the telecommunications reform in Mexico (1990 – 2015)

This article studies presidential policy change by using the agenda-setting theory of Kingdon (1984) and Baumgartner and Jones (1993). It focuses on studying the reform of the telecommunications sector in Mexico from the administrations of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988 – 1994) to Enrique Peña Nieto (2012 – 2018). The process of creating a common understanding of the problem and its solutions contribute to generating policy change. It considers that the president is an actor that takes an active role in policymaking. This analysis uses a most-similar comparative approach. The analysis shows that policy changes are sensitive to presidential policy entrepreneurship.

Telecommunications Reform in Emerging Markets

For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, the provision of telecommunications services in developing countries was the responsibility of the state. Penetration rates were low, service quality was poor, and the incumbent operator was often unprofitable. Government attempts at improvement focused on securing investment, technical assistance, and financial support. Commencing in the late 1990s, the telecommunications sector in much of the developing world underwent a profound and lasting transformation: governments established new regulatory regimes and institutions, corporatized and privatized their state-owned telecommunications operations, and liberalized markets as part of wide-ranging sector reforms.