| The dissertation seeks to lay bare the underlying causes of the current wave of institutional reform in telecommunication systems throughout the world. Various attempts to comprehend the phenomenon have failed to identify adequately the fundamental driving force of the process. They provide, at best, partial answers to the questions of "how?" The "why?" part remains unanswered.;Contemporaneous with institutional reform in the telecommunications sector, the world has undergone a significant structural change over the last decades described variously as 'internationalization of state,' or globalization. Trading blocs--a bloc of Americas (the United State, Canada, Mexico and possibly other Latin American countries), a European bloc, and an inchoate Asian bloc have also emerged. Increased trade is crucial to the formation of these global and regional systems. Telecommunication, which is fundamentally a connecting mechanism, is crucial to trade. The enhanced importance of trade is identified as the causal mechanism which, in conjunction with concrete conditions, yields the various manifestations of institutional reform in telecommunication. The current wave of institutional reforms in telecommunications is a result of conditions in each nation-state interacting with the causal mechanism.;The dissertation utilizes Anthony Giddens' metatheoretical framework of structuration and other substantive theory to analyze the interaction between causal mechanisms and conditions in the exemplar of Mexico's telecommunication reforms. The magnitude of the Telmex privatization, one of the largest in the developing world, and Mexico's pivotal role in the developing countries justifies the selection.;Two contrasting longue durees of the Echeverria and Salinas administrations which had significantly different understandings of the Mexico's position in the global economy show diametrically opposed trade, foreign investment and telecommunications policies. The Telmex privatization is a part of the structuration process, i.e., generating a system of trading blocs and participating in the global economy through changes of rules of structures (market, telecommunications). The recent approval of the Uruguay Round agreement and the World Trade Organization by leading trading nations including the U.S. and Japan strengthens the relevance of this dissertation. |
