Human Resource and Employment Practices in Telecommunications Services, 1980-1998

[Excerpt] In the academic literature on manufacturing, much research and debate have focused on whether firms are adopting some form of “high-performance” or “high-involvement” work organization based on such practices as employee participation, teams, and increased discretion, skills, and training for frontline workers (Ichniowski et al., 1996; Kochan and Osterman, 1994; MacDuffie, 1995). Whereas many firms in the telecommunications industry flirted with these ideas in the 1980s, they did not prove to be a lasting source of inspiration for the redesign of work and employment practices. Rather, work restructuring in telecommunications services has been driven by the ability of firms to leverage network and information technologies to reduce labor costs and create customer segmentation strategies. “Good jobs” versus “bad jobs,” or higher versus lower wage jobs, do not vary according to whether firms adopt a high- involvement model. They vary along two other dimensions: (1) within firms and occupations, by the value-added of the customer segment that an employee group serves; and (2) across firms, by union and nonunion status. We believe that this customer segmentation strategy is becoming a more general model for employment practices in large-scale service | operations; telecommunications services firms may be somewhat more | advanced than other service firms in adopting this strategy because of certain unique industry characteristics. The scale economies of network technology are such that once a company builds the network infrastructure to a customer’s specifications, the cost of additional services is essentially zero. As a result, and notwithstanding technological uncertainty, all of the industry’s major players are attempting to take advantage of system economies inherent in the nature of the product market and technology to provide customized packages of multimedia products to identified market segments. They have organized into market-driven business units providing differentiated services to large businesses and institutions, small businesses, and residential customers. They have used information technologies and process reengineering to customize specific services to different segments according to customer needs and ability to pay. Variation in work and employment practices, or labor market segmentation, follows product market segmentation. As a result, much of the variation in employment practices in this industry is within firms and within occupations according to market segment rather than across firms. In addition, despite market deregulation beginning in 1984 and opportunities for new entrants, a tightly led oligopoly structure is replacing the regulated Bell System monopoly. Former Bell System companies, the giants of the regulated period, continue to dominate market share in the post-1984 period. Older players and new entrants alike are merging and consolidating in order to have access to multimedia markets. What is striking in this industry, therefore, is the relative lack of variation in management and employment practices across firms after more than a decade of experience with deregulation. We attribute this lack of variation to three major sources. (1) Technological advances and network economics provide incentives for mergers, organizational consolidation, and, as indicated above, similar business strategies. (2) The former Bell System companies have deep institutional ties, and they continue to benchmark against and imitate each other so that ideas about restructuring have diffused quickly among them. (3) Despite overall deunionization in the industry, they continue to have high unionization rates; de facto pattern bargaining within the Bell system has remained quite strong. Therefore, similar employment practices based on inherited collective bargaining agreements continue to exist across former Bell System firms

Contested resources: unions, employers, and the adoption of new work practices in US and UK telecommunications

The pattern of adoption of high-performance work practices has been explained in terms of strategic contingency and in terms of union presence. We compare the post-deregulation/privatization changes in work practice at AT&T, Bell Atlantic and British Telecom. On the basis of these cases, we argue that the choice of new work practices should be understood as a consequence not only of the company's resources or changes in its environment, nor of a simple union presence, but also as a consequence of the practices' effects on union power, the nature of the union's engagement, and the union's strategic choices

Telecommunications: Collective Bargaining in an Era of Industry Reconsolidation

[Excerpt] In this paper, we examine the reconsolidation of the industry, between 1995 and 2001, focusing on the merger, acquisition, and business strategies of the major corporate players; union responses to those strategies; and the resulting evolution of union-management relations and collective bargaining outcomes. We argue that the nature of the industry and technology, coupled with its institutional legacy, provides incentives for consolidation and recentralization of the ownership structure. In this process over the last decade, former Bell affiliates have sought union support before regulatory commissions, and the unions have leveraged their political power to make important gains in collective bargaining and in organizing new members. As a result, the outcomes for union members and prospects for union institutional viability are more positive than they otherwise would have been

Panel III: Implications of the New Telecommunications Legislation

We present a method that employs a tree-based Neural Network (NN) for performing classification. The novel mechanism, apart from incorporating the information provided by unlabeled and labeled instances, re-arranges the nodes of the tree as per the laws of Adaptive Data Structures (ADSs). Particularly, we investigate the Pattern Recognition (PR) capabilities of the Tree-Based Topology-Oriented SOM (TTOSOM) when Conditional Rotations (CONROT) [8] are incorporated into the learning scheme. The learning methodology inherits all the properties of the TTOSOM-based classifier designed in [4]. However, we now augment it with the property that frequently accessed nodes are moved closer to the root of the tree. Our experimental results show that on average, the classification capabilities of our proposed strategy are reasonably comparable to those obtained by some of the state-of-the-art classification schemes that only use labeled instances during the training phase. The experiments also show that improved levels of accuracy can be obtained by imposing trees with a larger number of nodes

Business Ethics...A Contradiction in Terms?

Business ethics occupies a unique position in the field of ethics. It consists of uneasy applications of some very general ethical principles (ie: duty or utility) to rather specific and often unique situations and crises. Unlike the professions of medicine and law, business ethics is concerned with an area of hum.an enterprise whose practitioners do not, for the most part, enjoy professional status and whose motives, to put it mildly, are often thought (and said) to be less than noble. Breed is often cited as the sole purpose of business, and much of the history of business ethics, accordingly, is not very flattering to business. The subject of business ethics, as currently practiced, is not much over a decade old. Only a few years ago, the subject was still an awkward routine review of ethical theories, general considerations about the fairness of capitalism, and a number of already standard business cases, most of them disgraces, scandals, and disasters displaying the corporate world at its worst and its most irresponsible. Today, new applications and a renewed sophistication in ethical theory have allowed the introduction of a more formal analysis in business ethics. Business ethics has evolved from a wholly critical attack on capitalism and the profit motive to a more productive and constructive examination of the underlying rules and practices of business. Accordingly, the first task in business ethics is to clear the way through the highly incriminating myths and metaphors, which obscure rather than clarify the underlying ethos that make business possible

Estimating the Welfare Effects of Digital Infrastructure

While much economic policy presumes that more information infrastructure yields higher economic returns, little empirical work measures the magnitudes of these returns. We examine investment by local exchange telephone companies in fiber optic cable, ISDN lines and signal seven software, infrastructure which plays an essential role in bringing digital technology to local telephone networks. We estimate the elasticity of the derived demand for infrastructure investment faced by local exchange companies, controlling for factors such as local economic activity and the political disposition of state regulators. Our model postulates a regulated profit maximizing local exchange firm and a regulatory agency with predetermined political leanings in favor of consumer prices or firm profits. The model accounts for variation in state regulation and local economic conditions. In all our estimates we find that consumer demand is sensitive to investment in modern infrastructure, particularly as represented by fiber optic cable. Our estimates imply that infrastructure investment is responsible for a substantial fraction of the recent growth in consumer surplus and business revenue in local telecommunication services.

Institutional Determinants of Deregulation and Restructuring in Telecommunications: Britain, Germany, and United States Compared

Virtually all countries are undergoing deregulation and privatisation of their telecommunications sectors. Yet despite the globalisation of markets, technological borrowing, and great similarities in public sector legacies across countries, the outcomes of deregulation and restructuring are not converging to a single point. Rather, the differences in national and sub-national industrial relations institutions have allowed key stakeholders to shape new market rules, or re-regulate the market in ways that privilege some actors more than others. The new rules, in turn, more or less constrain managerial prerogative and lead to substantially different outcomes for key stakeholders, including firms, unions, workers, managers, and consumers. This article uses evidence from British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, AT&T, and the Regional Bell Operating Companies in the United States to elaborate this thesis

CAHRS hrSpectrum (November - December 2002)

HRSpec02_12.pdf: 85 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Integration of traditional imaging, expert systems, and neural network techniques for enhanced recognition of handwritten information

Includes bibliographical references (p. 33-37).Research supported by the I.F.S.R.C. at M.I.T.Amar Gupta, John Riordan, Evelyn Roman

Deregulation and Restructuring in Telecommunications Services in the United States and Germany

[Excerpt] Because of the slower pace of reform, however, Telekom also stands to learn from the mistakes made in the United States, where deregulation has led to increased inequality among consumers and workers. For consumers, the restructuring has benefited businesses because they no longer pay rates that subsidize universal residential service. Both business and high-end retail customers can take advantage of falling prices for long-distance calling, high-speed networks, or enhanced features such as voice messaging. For lower-income consumers, however, the basic costs of local service have risen, and these consumers are less likely to be able to take advantage of new products or enhanced features, even if they are less costly than before (Keefe and Boroff 1994, p. 318). For labor, restructuring has not only displaced employees and reduced union strength, but it has also created more unequal labor market conditions both within and between union and nonunion segments. To the extent that Germany wishes to preserve equality for consumers and workers, this chapter provides an analysis of how inequality in U.S. outcomes has occurred