The birth of telecognition: Deregulation and technological change in telecommunications in the United States and the United Kingdom (1876-1996)

In a technology intensive industry, how does regulatory change, a macrosocial or system level phenomenon, shape the strategic choices of a company's managers, a within-system occurrence? To understand this two-tiered process I compare the strategic choices in the area of technology of managers of AT&T and BT, firms in the same industry but headquartered in different regulatory systems.;Applying a structuration theoretic model to the historical record shows that the path to the break-up of the Bell System in the US and BT's privatization in the UK in the 1980s was strongly influenced by events a century earlier. Legal barriers between telephony's uncoded (i.e. voice) and telegraphy's coded (i.e. data) communication modes arising from litigation in the 1870s, were institutionalized over the next fifty years. This institutional separation remained even after the development of digital transmission and switching technically integrated voice and data. That anomaly motivated attacks on the institutional structure, eventually causing the regulatory changes of the 1980s.;The technological and institutional integration of voice and data in the 1990s has accelerated the convergence of telecommunications and computing to form a new industry that extends our capabilities, modifies the way we seek information, changes the nature of entertainment and transforms our perception of the world. I coin the term "telecognition" to identify this new industry to reflect the new industry's ability to offer all four components of cognition--the ability to communicate with an object; the ability to see and hear it in motion; the ability to interact with it; and, the ability to store that interaction in memory and recall it at will--but over a distance. This term is also consistent with the nomenclature used for predecessor long-distance communication technologies (i.e. telegraph, telephone and television).;The recursive relationship between regulatory and technological change that emerges from the study suggests the notion of the two-fold duality of regulation: regulation and human action shape each other as they interact directly in the ongoing reproduction of social structure; and regulation shapes strategic choices of human actors in the area of technology, which in turn shapes social structure.