The Internationalisation of PTT Telecom: A Cultural Perspective - Free

11 INTRODUCTIONThe study presented in this thesis focuses on the reaction of Dutch PublicTelecom Operator PTT Telecom to the restructuring of the telecom market andconcentrates in particular on the strategy of internationalisation. The researchtakes up the period from 1989 to and including 1997 in which the organisationwas in its first phase of internationalisation. This introduction provides a briefoutline of the study followed by a discussion of its scientific and socialrelevance. The basic assumptions on which the study is based are first explainedafter which the central research questions are introduced. In order to formanswers for the latter a research design is used that explores the field of studyin four stages. At each stage newly collected data are used to select the nextlevel of exploration. The motivations for selecting one telecom operator, twodepartments and three cases of cross-cultural cooperation are discussed.Finally, the structure of the study is given.1.1 The Death of DistanceIn the last decade a wide interest in the fast changing market oftelecommunications has grown. Almost every week, magazines and newspapersreport on new strategic alliances, competition, the Internet, huge profits andtechnological inventions. The technology revolutions, the deregulation oftelecom laws, the privatisation of Public Telecom Operators (PTOs) and thedemand for cheap international telephony by multinational corporations havedramatically changed the context of the domestic telecom operators. For manyyears, national Post, Telephone and Telegraph companies (PTTs) controlled thenational telecom markets. The closed and static structure of these markets hasrecently been restructured to allow for a more open and dynamic marketstructure. In losing their monopoly, national PTTs have had to compete withforeign and new telecom operators and the resulting turbulence in the telecommarket has created an atmosphere of uncertainty, fear and hope for both PublicTelecom Operators (PTOs) and customers.The restructuring of the market of telecom operators started in the UnitedStates of America in the eighties and has since swept across the rest of theworld. As of 1998, European PTOs no longer hold monopolies in their domesticmarkets but instead compete on data networks, cellular telephony and fixedtelephone networks. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly difficult to drawclear boundaries around the telecom sector. In this study the telecom sectorincludes the telecom companies that offer speech and data carrier services.There is now substantial evidence to support the hypothesis that the newtelecom revolution has radically changed the boundaries and structure of themarket for telecom operators. Estabrooks (1995) has observed a technologicalconvergence of information structure, telecom infrastructure, access media andservices and The Economist (1995) has made note of the new competition andthe economic growth of the telecom market. Others focus on the new policies ofrestructuring in the European telecom industry (Crandell and Flamm 1989, Caby