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The practice of organisations adopting performance measurement systems that utilise a range of key performance indicators linked to various aspects of corporate strategy has become widespread. At t...

Industrial ecology, the multidisciplinary study of coupled economic and environmental systems, provides the intellectual basis for understanding and implementing the vision of sustainable development in the firm. Using this approach, AT&T developed a matrix system which, when applied to the firm's products and operations, laid the groundwork for systemic improvements in the firm's environmental performance.

This study examined newspaper coverage of the 1982 breakup of AT&T and the role that the company’s public relations campaign may have played in the way the story was reported. A framing analysis was used to determine the relationship between the company’s public relations objectives and press content. Although most stories were rated as neutral, favorable stories were more frequent than were unfavorable ones. Frames consistent with AT&T’s stated objectives were prevalent, but the linkage of these frames to company sources was not that evident, supporting the conclusion that influences on press coverage of the breakup may have been much broader than just AT&T’s public relations initiative. Jack Glascock is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stephen F. Austin State University in eastern Texas, just north of Houston.

To ensure high network reliability, AT&T employs two basic approaches: preventing failures and responding quickly when failures occur. For AT&T to quickly reroute traffic in the event of a network failure, the network must contain sufficient restoration capacity to carry the displaced demand. A team of AT&T OR experts, network planners, and managers developed a method for determining the appropriate quantity and location of restoration capacity required to restore the demand during any single link failure. The approach centers on a linear programming model to minimize the cost of the restoration network and uses column generation to generate new restoration paths as needed. In about 10 months, the team converted the methodology into a tool to optimize the allocation of restoration capacity. This tool was then extended to plan for the recovery of a switching-center disaster and to reoptimize the entire restoration network. It has contributed to AT&T's achieving high-quality service, while saving valuable resources. It resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings and increased revenues.

How should we understand the relation between decision-making and motivation? Thomas Pink has recently argued (Pink 1996) that decisions perpetuate pre-existing motives, and that whatever motivated the formation of a decision should, after that decision is taken, also motivate the action. In this article I argue that this view has certain problems, and that these problems can be solved if we assume instead that decisions are motive-generating. Pink's concern with this issue derives from his view that our ordinary conception of freedom presupposes that our will, which he understands as our capacity to make decisions, has two important features. First, that taking a particular decision to act counts as an action itself, as something which one deliberately does, and in doing which one may exercise future action control (146). Since actions in general are justified by the likelihood they would lead to a desirable end, this means he endorses the principle: ACTION Any justification at t for then deciding or intending to do A consists in the likelihood at t that so deciding or intending would further a desirable end E (145).

The telephone as we know it was slightly less than a quarter of a century old in 1900. There were just over 1.3 million telephones in service that year in the United States, handling an average of about 7.7 million conversations per day. Almost all telephone connections worldwide were handled by live operators using cord-and-plug switchboards. The idea of supplying subscribers' telephones with electricity from the central office had just been introduced, eliminating the battery that had previously sat under every telephone set. Calls of more than 10 miles or so were still considered long distance, and Pupin had recently described the "loading coil", an inductance device that extended long distance calling many more miles. Still, an east-coast caller could only reach out as far as Omaha, NE, by 1900. Telephone companies were rapidly building trunk lines between cities at the turn of the century, creating the new long-distance service. It became the practice, at AT&T at least, to charge for these calls by the minute, thus they were called "toll" calls. Operators used written tickets to indicate the destination of the call and its duration. The United States, where telephony got its commercial start, did not always have the highest level of telephone service in the early years. At the turn of the century, the percentage of the population with telephone service was considerably higher in Canada than either the United States (with only 17.6 telephones per thousand population) or England.

The potential for using a cash balance pension plan as a restructuring tool is one reason it is gaining favor throughout corporate America. Another reason is that it can give employees a better understanding and appreciation of their retirement benefits. Both reasons are important at a time when companies are changing rapidly and sometimes downsizing and when employees are less likely to stay in one place long enough to anticipate reaping the rewards of a defined bene-fit plan. Cash balance plans combine some of the best features of defined contribution (DC) and defined benefit (DB) plans. For employers, they provide more flexibility than traditional DB plans and help companies achieve their strategic objectives. For employees, they better meet the needs of a changing workforce by delivering portable, easily understood benefits. Since 1985, more than 200 companies have replaced their DB pension plans with a cash bal-ance design. One of the newest and most enthu-siastic proponents is AT&T, which, with the help of consulting firm ASA, Inc., designed a cash bal-. ance plan to help meet its restructuring goals.

This article examines the efforts of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) to organize the workers of the NCR Corporation after it had been acquired by AT&T. It documents extreme "union busting" mea sures by the corporation at the same time AT&T was engaged in a "part nership" with the union in the already unionized parts of the parent com pany. Three issues are analyzed from the case: (1) the failure of U.S. labor law to protect workers wishing to organize into unions; (2) impli cations for unions dealing with "union friendly" companies like AT&T; (3) implications for organizing strategy for unions. The article concludes with some thoughts on union organizing and the power relationship be tween unions and large employers in the United States today.

Fifty years after the end of World War II, the Holocaust is being utilized as a symbolic resource by US social movements. This article investigates social movement “framing” processes, looking at the use of Holocaust rhetoric and imagery by social movement organizations and actors. I explore how competing movements, the lesbian/gay movement and the Christian right, battle over the same symbolic territory, and how the Holocaust frame is deployed by each. Two forms of symbolic appropriation in relation to the Holocaust are documented: metaphor creation and revisionism.

The late twentieth century has witnessed the rapid expansion of a global telecommunications infrastructure and flows of information. Few case studies of individual corporations in this industry exist. Following the breakup of its U.S. monopoly in 1984, AT&T, the world's largest telecommunications provider, steadily expanded its international operations. This paper examines the institutional and spatial dynamics that underpin AT&T's global strategies, including transoceanic fiber cables, employment, manufacturing facilities, joint ventures, and operations in every major market area around the world. It ascertains these efforts in light of the emergence of post-Fordist regime theory and argues that corporate-specific case studies continue to remain an important part of economic geography.

In a recent article and book (Pink 1991, 1996), Thomas Pink considers the question: "What psychological attitudes rationalize or justify the formation of intentions or decisions [Pink identifies the two] to act (or not to act)?", where an attitude can justify a decision and the action decided upon, even if it does not actually motivate-is not the actual reason whyan agent makes that decision. As Pink recognizes, the conventional answer to this question is: "The same attitudes which explain the performance of the actions decides upon." In other words, convention asserts an Identity thesis: an agent's justification at any time t for then deciding to do action A (or deciding not to do A) later is identical with his justification at t for doing A (or not doing A) later.' The Identity thesis is plausible because decisions are about actions we will perform. We decide how we will act, and a decision to act issues in an intention to act. Moreover, what recommends an action to us are reasons to perform it. Thus, in deliberation about which actions to perform, we are considering them in light of the reasons which justify them. When we decide and, thereby, intend to perform A, we explain that decision and intention to do A by a reason for doing A itself. If this were not the case, a reason for deciding to do A which is not a reason to do A would leave an agent intending to do A with no reason to do A. But no rational agent intends to perform an action which he has no reason to perform. Hence, the truth of the Identity thesis. Pink asserts that an implication of the Identity thesis is that a decision, unlike decided upon and intended actions, is not means-end justifiable. Stated differently, our justifications for deciding to do A are not purposes for deciding to do A per se, where deciding to do A itself is required as a means to an end about which we deliberate. Rather, our justifications for deciding to do A are justifications for performing the decided upon action A, which alone is viewed as a means to an end.

The last several years have been an exciting time at AT&T in the field of advanced speech applications for telecommunications: technical progress and platform/processor advances have enabled the identification, development and testing of a range of new services. During this period, prior to the divestiture of AT&T of Lucent Technologies and NCR, AT&T brought together, under a single corporate `roof', a research laboratory committed to advancing speech technology, business organizations building platforms to leverage this technology for telecommunications applications, and yet other business organizations with responsibility for deploying speech-enabled services to facilitate the use and reduce the cost of telecommunications services for both consumers and businesses. While this period of our corporate history has drawn to a close, we can look back to provide an overview of how technical progress, platform advances and network services needs and opportunities interacted to make speech technology an everyday experience for millions of people – and some of the lessons we learned along the way.

The Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act of 1996 has significantly changed the market in which telecommunications providers compete. This column clarifies some of the important sections of the act and the implications of the changes for those involved in the provision and use of telecommunications services.

From July 1, 1989, until November 23, 1995, the FCC used price caps to regulate long distance telephony. There has been heated debate over whether the decline in AT & T's rates was due to the price caps, or to the efficiencies that price caps were meant to foster. I show that, for basic schedule per call residential services, the rates fell most when Equal Access (1-Plus dialing) became widespread, several years before price caps began. In addition, the decline in access charges does not fully compensate for the decline in AT & T's rates.

A quarter of a century has elapsed since the Federal Communications Commission launched a massive investigation of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). In this study, known as Docket 19129, the Commission sought to determine whether the Bell operating companies (BOC's) were paying too much for equipment purchased from AT&T's supply affiliate, Western Electric. Stated as a question, did AT&T's integration of telephone service and telephone manufacturing benefit the telephone rate payer? AT&T's ownership of telephone service and equipment manufacturing was hardly a recent development in U.S. telecommunications. Western Electric had been a part of the Bell system since the early 1880s. Despite some one hundred years of supply ownership, the policy questions attending Bell's vertical relationship kept recurring over time. In 1 934, for example, the very first inquiry by the newly created Federal Communications Commission was none other than AT&T's ownership of Western Electric. The Commission's examination of Western's prices and costs ran through most of the 1930s and drew to a close as war clouds gathered over Europe. By 1939, the FCC essentially opted for AT&T's structural status quo. The FCC's intention to revisit AT&T's integration in 1972 was thus not an action without precedent. To a certain extent, the Commission backed into the Western Electric problem. Initially, the FCC sought to determine whether the price of long distance service was reasonable and prudent. That question inevitably triggered another. How could the FCC justify telephone rates without some knowledge of equipment costs? Equipment costs led the commission to look into Western Electric prices. The billing of equipment to the Bell operating companies constituted an internal corporate transaction. Did those transactions redound to the benefit of the telephone user?

Suppose you intend now to φ at some future time t. However, when t has come you do not φ. Something has gone wrong. This failing is not just a causal but also a normative failing. This raises the question how to characterize this failing. I discuss three alternative views. On the first view, the fact that you do not execute your intention to φ is blameworthy only if the balance of reasons pointed to φ-ing. The fact that you intended to u does not add to the reasons for φ-ing at t. On the second view, the fact that you do not execute your intention to φ is blameworthy because you violate a requirement of rationality. Both these views have in common that they deny that intending to φ at t creates a reason to φ at t. The third alternative, the one I defend, claims that you often create reasons to φ by intending to φ.

The global marketplace in the 1990s demands that multinational companies have access to an increasingly sophisticated, seamless communications network. Transnational strategic alliances (TSAs) are a way of meeting these needs in the context of limited available resources. The current map of TSAs in telecom industry is dominated by five groups of players; WorldPartners, Concert, Global One, Unisource, and C&W. Firms select the type of alliance depending on their relative positions with respect to size, profitability, capital structure, and R&D capability. The critical issues in TSAs are trade reciprocity, legal environment, and financing. Although competition is the flip side of the coin in strategic alliances, managing this duality effectively is a key to the success of the alliances.

As master's-level hospitality programs continue to grow in size and number, concerns still remain over the acceptability and recognition of such programs by the hotel industry. In order to understand the challenges faced by these programs, it was considered appropriate to conduct an empirical investigation that would reveal the gap between perceptions of corporate hotel executives and master's level hospitality students. The study reported in this article investigated the career path, educational background, and perceptions of 106 corporate hotel executives compared to the educational preparation, anticipated career path, and perceptions of 130 master's- level students in the United States. There were significant differences between the career-paths of hotel executives and the anticipated career-paths of students. Students appeared to have unrealistic expectations of securing corporate-level positions immediately upon graduation when executives' experiences are that most of them started their careers at t...

The 1972 consent decree between AT&T and the combined forces of the Equal Opportunity Commission, the Department of Labor, and the Federal Communications Commission was a landmark victory for women and minority men seeking well-paid jobs in corporate America. The personal experiences presented here are a micro illustration of the real-life outcome of the consent decree, and point to the strengths and weaknesses central to that agreement.

The concept of data warehousing originated from the observation that the systems used to run businesses on a daily basis differ fundamentally from those employed to help plan and develop future businesses. For example, operational systems are generally focused on specific functional views based on the needs of a single aspect of the business. However, managers need information that shows relationships, trends, and correlations about different kinds of data, integrating several functions into a broader view. Historically, systems and manual processes were established to gather management data from the various operational data sources — one for each kind of decision. Extracting and combining such data from different systems is time consuming and often leads to inconsistent results. Users must accommodate printed reports, manual reentry of data into spreadsheets, and significant rework to produce summary reports that match the way they manage the business. Furthermore, by the time some of these reports are ready, the data are no longer current. The Warehouse of Information for Network Systems (WINS) provides needed information to AT&T Network Systems (AT&T-NS) managers world wide. WINS transforms operational and financial data into consolidated business views that are used to analyze certain activities and to make management decisions. This paper discusses the importance of WINS to the business management strategy of AT&T-NS, the WINS technical architecture, the status of WINS, and plans for future implementation.

The history and divestiture of the Bell System is of immediate importance to several economies around the globe, especially those undergoing the change from state owned operations to private ownership. Similarly, those economies experiencing rapid expansion of telecommunications can also learn from the experiences of AT&T's development, maturity, and subsequent divestiture. In addition to a brief history, this study examines preliminary empirical evidence which suggests agency costs, particularly those associated with free cash flow, were reduced following the divestiture.

ATT the need to meet customer requirements and demands; and the need to enlarge market access and generate continuous competitive advantage. Over the long term, environmental competence and offerings — especially in services that reduce material and energy consumption — will become increasingly important, and they will ensure that AT&T continues in a leadership position into the next century. Thus, all AT&T stakeholders — including customers, employees, shareowners, and the communities within which AT&T has a presence — attach crucial importance to both industrial ecology and DFE. In short, environmental concerns that once were considered overhead now have assumed strategic importance.

AT&T has successfully applied the methodologies and tools of total quality management (TQM) to resolve environmental issues and, with the use of policy deployment, has exceeded its environmental goals. The original goals were oriented toward preventing pollution and specifically focused on wastes and emissions. As the company continues efforts in these areas, new goals are emerging that are more system focused — to fully integrate environmental concerns into our business and management processes. The new processes will help identify root causes of environmental quality failures and help address them in the up-front design of products and services.

AT&T's goal is to be a leader in applying sound environmental policies in the manufacture and operations of its products. To provide a benchmark assessment for one of AT&T's major product lines, this paper reviews the design for environment (DFE) attributes of the AT&T 5ESS® switch. Although formal DFE processes did not start in 5ESS design until 1993, the efforts thus far have resulted in a 5ESS design and assembly process that is environmentally responsible. This benchmarking exercise also is an opportunity to identify items in design and assembly that can be improved on, and modifications suggested by this review are now being made to the design rules used by AT&T Network Systems' physical designers.

This issue of the AT&T Technical Journal is dedicated to exploring the implications the rapid integration of science, technology, and the environment holds for AT&T and its customers, its shareholders, and the communities in which AT&T has a presence. Moreover, the issue explains how AT&T is responding to the challenges of such integration now, and describes some important initiatives designed to help preserve the environment for the future as well.

AT&T's $7.5 billion acquisition of NCR decreased the wealth of AT&T shareholders by between $3.9 billion and $6.5 billion and resulted in negative synergies of $1.3 to $3.0 billion. We find that AT&T paid a documented $50 million and possibly as much as $500 million to satisfy pooling accounting, thus boosting EPS by roughly 17% but leaving cash flows unchanged. We conclude that AT&T's decision to acquire NCR in what the market perceived as a value-destroying transaction was related at least in part to the 1984 consent decree with the Department of Justice that led to the break-up of AT&T.

Learning a new foreign language using the data highway can be a rewarding experience for children and teachers. The article looks at three major projects linking schools worldwide, and its considerable effect on English teaching.

In 1917 Frank Aydelotte, an English professor at MIT, became AT&T's first outside writing consultant. Because many of its older, better-educated male employees had been mobilized to fight World War I, the company found itself with numerous young, poorly-educated employees. Drawing on the humanistic approach to writing instruction that he had developed at MIT in his book English and Engineering, Aydelotte created a year-long program at AT&T that taught employees to think and write about issues important to their work. The course is important for two reasons: first, it offers insight into the kinds of early consulting work that English professors did, and, second, it shows that Aydelotte's humanistic approach to technical communication worked as well in business as it did in academic settings.

In March 1990, AT&T entered the credit card business under a unique set of circumstances; from its first day in existence, the company’s credit card subsidiary built itself up, based on total quality management principles. While most firms embracing total quality management have had to fit their principles into an already dynamic business environment, AT&T Universal Card Services (UCS) has never existed without them. Thus, UCS’s story may provide a fresh perspective for those interested in quality implementation. Coming into an industry not noted for high levels of customer service, UCS saw that it could distinguish itself by focusing in this area. A formalized programme for collecting a broad array of information from customers helps UCS keep apprised of what customers value in their credit card companies. Processes are in place for applying this information and measuring the company’s performance in key customer‐impacting areas. UCS, which won the Malcolm Baldrige national quality award in 1992, is currently the second‐largest issuer of bank credit cards in the USA with 15 million accounts. The company credits its use of total quality management for its business success – and is confident the same methods will continue to serve it well in its increasingly competitive future.

Since the mid-1970s, the 4ESS™ switch has been the principal switching system — first in the AT&T Long Lines network, and today in the AT&T network as a whole. Until now, its main call-processing engine has been the 1A processor. The 1A is an ultra-reliable central controller designed to support high-volume electronic switching of simple phone calls having few if any special service features, like those in AT&T 800 service. In recent years, however, rising call volumes and sophisticated new long-distance service features have created the need for much more processing capacity and “intelligence” in the 4ESS switch. To meet this need, the AT&T Network Services Division — which manages the AT&T network-chose AT&T Network Systems Group's 1B processor to replace the 1A processor in 135 4ESS switches. The 1B processor more than doubles the call-handling capacity of the 4ESS switch while performing at least as reliably as the 1A processor. Not only that — the 1B processor can connect to a community of other processors, databases, and switch fabrics.

The 1B processor represents one of the largest single investments in new network technology ever made by AT&T. The effort to make the 1B processor a reality encompassed organizations throughout AT&T, requiring, from all involved, the highest levels of commitment and teamwork to meet an aggressive schedule. This paper provides an overview of the scope and complexity of the entire project, from requirements through field deployment. It focuses on the significant role that the 1B processor plays in the long distance network, the stringent reliability requirements imposed on it, and the technical and organizational challenges that were successfully met. Also included are a high-level summary of the 1B processor's capabilities, and a discussion of the business directions that helped to define them. Finally, this paper sets the stage for the detailed papers that follow, providing perspective on how each effort fits into the overall scheme.

This paper presents a fuzzy systems model of the effects of U.S. and USSR arms transfers on the political and strategic relationships between India and Pakistan during the period 1951–1976. The relationships between the importers are represented in the model by two system transformation equations. These equations stipulate that changes from t to t+1 (where t = one year) in the political and strategic relationships between India and Pakistan will be functions of those actors' relationships at t and U.S. and USSR arms transfers during the same time period. The political and strategic relationships between India and Pakistan are represented in the model by fuzzy variables: one variable identifies the degree to which there is political cooperation between the importers; another measures the degree of military balance. The model is tested by using COPDAB and SIPRI data on political relations, the military balance, and arms transfer inputs at t to predict the fuzzy levels of cooperation and military balance between India and Pakistan at t+1 (for every year of the 1951–1976 time frame). Pearson product-moment correlations between, on the one hand, the predicted levels of cooperation and military balance and, on the other hand, observations on those variables at t+I are r = .77 (for cooperation) and r = .75 (for military balance).

The quality revolution is sweeping its way through most companies globally. It has focused on improving the quality of products and services delivered to the customers and on companies' internal processes. The success of these programs has led to the realization that the same principles need to be applied to the area of environmental management. AT&T has fully embraced TQM as witnessed by the many products and services that have received the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9000 certification and awards such as the Malcolm Baldrige Award and the Deming Prize for Quality. We have been utilizing the TQM methodologies for the past few years to turn our environmental focus from end-of-pipe waste management to proactive and preventive TQEM and have made significant progress in reducing our wastes, emissions, and impact on the environment. This article shows how TQEM is now driving Design For Environment (DFE) programs and procedures, recognizing that addressing environmental issues in the initial design process is the most cost-effective means for minimizing environmental impact.

Thirty years ago, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave birth to the mobile wireless industry by granting two licenses in each cellular geographic market across the United States. In the next three decades the FCC continually provided more access to the electromagnetic spectrum which is a critical input for the provision of mobile wireless communications services to, in part, promote a more competitive market structure in the mobile wireless industry. One objective of this chapter is to describe and analyze the trends in the overall competitiveness of the mobile wireless market during this time by utilizing a modified Porter competitive forces framework. This analysis will be supplemented with an analysis of the most recent proposed merger in the mobile wireless industry – between AT&T and T-Mobile. The proposed merger is an example of a continuing trend in the industry, consolidation of national mobile wireless carriers. This chapter will analyze the impact of proposed merger on the ability of the remaining mobile wireless carriers to constrain the market power of the national wireless carriers in the industry. Specifically, the arguments for and against the merger by major stakeholders are reviewed. There are signs that the mobile wireless industry may return to a duopoly structure. Recommendations regarding the horizontal merger will be offered.

The growing number of voluntary standards for governing transnational arenas is presenting standards organizations with a problem. While claiming that they are pursuing shared, overarching objectives, at the same time they are promoting their own respective standards that are increasingly similar. By developing the notion of ‘standards markets’, this paper examines this tension and studies how different social movement and industry-driven standards organizations compete as well as collaborate over governance in transnational arenas. Based on an in-depth case study of sustainability standards in the global coffee industry, we find that the ongoing co-existence of multiple standards is being promoted by the interplay between two countervailing mechanisms: convergence and differentiation. In conjunction, these mechanisms are enabling the emergence and persistence of a market for standards through what we describe as meta-standardization of sustainable practices. Meta-standardization leads to convergence at the ‘rules of the game’ level, but allows also differentiation at the attributes level, which is enabling parties to create and maintain their own standards. Our study helps to advance the understanding of transnational governance by explaining the dynamics of competing and collaborating non-state actors in constituting a standards market.