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UnixReview.com
May 2005
Book Review: Transforming Enterprise
Reviewed by Peter H. Salus
Transforming Enterprise: The Economic and Social
Implications of Information Technology
Ed. by William H. Dutton, et al.
MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0-262-54177-7
534 pages
Two Introductory Addresses +
19 papers +
An Appendix with three [more] Introductory Addresses =
A weighty anthology.
I had just finishing reading this book when I turned
to the "Technology Quarterly" section of The
Economist [March 12th 2005], specifically the
article on "the digital divide" (pp. 24f.). The
Economist makes the point that while we customarily
think of the computer and Internet access, the cell
phone is of vastly greater importance in the Third
World.
This insight submarines, for me, most of the contents of the last third of
Transforming Enterprise, including the essay of Wenhong Chen and Barry
Wellman ("Charting Digital Divides: Comparing Socioeconomic, Gender, Life Stage,
and Rural-Urban Internet Access and Use in Five Countries," pp. 467-497). Chen
and Wellman are both at the University of Toronto; the countries treated are
the United States, Germany, Japan, Korea, and China. The focus of the article
in The Economist was India.
In another article, "Calling across the divide," (p. 74,
in the same March 12th issue) Zambia, Indonesia, and the
Philippines are cited. Leonard Waverman, of the London
Business School, and his colleagues have done a detailed
analysis of "the relationship between mobile phones and
economic growth."
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