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The purpose of this paper is to identify the potential barriers of telecom services and develop relationships among them using interpretive structural modeling (ISM) in the Indian telecom sector. Further, this paper intends to find the driving and dependence powers of telecom barriers, using MICMAC (Matriced' Impacts Croise′s Multiplication Applique′ea′un Classement) analysis.

A group of experts from telecom sector and academia was consulted and the ISM was used to develop the contextual relationship among identified barriers of telecom services. The results of ISM are used as an input to MICMAC analysis, to further classify identified barriers based on their driving and dependence powers.

This paper has identified 11 barriers of telecom services from the literature review and opinion of experts, and a contextual relationship model was developed using the ISM technique. The paper further studied barriers based on their driving and dependence powers using MICMAC analysis that classifies them into four clusters. The results identified the barriers such as “lack of adequate investment in infrastructure expansion”, “interference of private operators”, “legal and regulatory issues”, “lack of maintenance culture” and “lack of financial resources and high cost” as strategic-level barriers that, if dealt with carefully, can help overcome the effect of other barriers preventing the effective performance of the Indian telecom sector.

Although, there are a number of barriers that affect the performance of telecom services, existing theories, models and frameworks have focused on identification of factors, their implementation and benefits, and thus, these theories lack a holistic view in understanding those barriers which hinder the performance of the telecom sector. Top-managers and policymakers need to be more concerned about these barriers so that the performance of the Indian telecom sector could be improved.

A thorough literature review has revealed that no such study has been undertaken that provides any clear understanding of the barriers of telecom services, linkages between them and hierarchical relationships among the barriers.

During the recent past there have been two successive and successful takeovers of Telecom Italia, in both cases by other Italian companies and employing the device of “Chinese boxes” to secure control without the need either to hold a majority stake in the acquired company or to pay much regard to the interests of minority shareholders. This raises into question the extent to which “Anglo‐Saxon” attitudes in financial markets are making inroads in continental Europe; the willingness of continental European governments to permit foreigners to acquire control of the “commanding heights” of their economies; and the manner in which the European telecommunications sector is being restructured.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to the telecommunication reform process in Europe, its status, and upcoming policy issues. Furthermore, it also aims to provide an overview of the papers in this special issue.

The paper provides an introduction to the telecom reform process based on previous research and the papers in this issue of info.

The introduction argues that the European telecommunication reform process with the telecommunications green paper of 1987 as an important point of departure has been a success in many ways. It has, for example, facilitated the development of mobile, of the internet and its many applications, and considerably lowered prices. However, there are important areas where a single European market has not developed. Moreover, new challenges are rising in terms of upcoming reconfigurations of the whole information communications technology (ICT) area requiring new policy and regulatory answers.

The paper provides a brief introduction to the European telecommunication reform process, its achievements, present challenges, and the policy responses of the European Union. In addition, an overview of the papers of this issue of info is provided.

This paper aims to understand and identify the various barriers in adopting new telecom services in rural areas for improving the penetration and revenue of the telecom companies. These barriers are modeled to study their inter-relationships and prioritize them for strategizing appropriate management action plans.

Delphi technique has been used to form a consensus with the telecom managers working in rural areas to finalize the barriers. An integrated Interpretive Structural Modeling–Analytic Network Process (ISM–ANP) approach has been adopted to establish the complex relationships, cluster the relationships, to understand and prioritize the telecom service adoption barriers.

The major contribution of this research is imposing directions and dominance of various barriers to promote better adoption of new telecom-based mobile services in rural areas. The proposed integrated method can aid in decision making by providing more informative, accurate and a better choice than using either ISM or ANP in isolation.

The generalizabilty of these research findings is limited, as it was generated specific to rural telecom service adoption barriers in Indian context. Because decision-making problems are usually complex and ill-structured, every decision is based on the decision-maker’s expertise, preferences and biasness of the experts who showed their interest to participate in the research.

This paper forms the basis of identifying the reasons for poor adoption of telecom-based mobile services in rural India. This study would help the telecom companies and the managers to understand and develop strategies to target the rural audience by introducing action plans and innovative mobile services to overcome the identified barriers. By applying the proposed methodology, telecom companies can classify and prioritize their action plans as short-, medium- and long-term plans to systematically overcome the identified barriers.

This paper provides a base for understanding various factors that affect the adoption of telecom-based mobile services. It demonstrates the use of an innovative approach to develop an integrated model to understand the barriers.

Examines the restructuring of Hong Kong Telecom Ltd with respect to its two subsidiaries: Hong Kong Telecommunication International Ltd and Hong Kong Telephone Company Ltd. The process and impact of this restructuring is discussed. Investigates particularly the impact of internal and external factors such as functional structure, government regulations, customers, potential competitors and labour unions.

This study aims to demonstrate the interaction of the regulatory environment and market forces with rapid technological change in the transformation of SOEs, as exemplified by Telecom NZ.

This case study analysis explicates resource dependency and institutional forces in the process of SOE privatisation, in the first ten years of transformation, through textual analysis of data collected from company annual reports and interviews.

It is demonstrated that resource dependencies on technology and capital, market forces, and the institutionalization of new structures and relationships, are as important as regulatory changes in the analysis of SOE restructuring. It is also documented that the regulatory transitions are not as clear‐cut as the legislative dates and economic analyses suggest.

The research focuses on a single exemplar to explicate key interactions. While generalizable to theory, the use of in‐depth case studies is context‐specific.

Both technology and market forces must be incorporated in models of public sector transformations to fully capture resource dependence and institutional effects.

The value of the paper to academics is its integration and application of institutional theory and resource dependence theory to issues that have previously been explored primarily through economic lens. Methodologically, this paper provides an original insight into organisational change. The content analysis of annual reports, supported by interview records, reflects the importance of certain themes in organisational documents for organisational actors. To practitioners, this presents an in‐depth “portrait” of one of the largest and most successful public sector transformations of its era.

Post 1991, given the advent of liberalization and economic reforms, the Indian telecom sector witnessed a remarkable growth in terms of subscriber base and reduced competitive tariff among the service providers. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of regulatory announcements on systemic risk among the Indian telecom firms.

This study employed a two-step methodology to measure the impact of regulatory announcements on systemic risk. In the first step, CAPM along with the Kalman filter was used to estimate the daily β (systemic risk). In the second step, event study methodology was used to assess the impact of regulatory announcements on daily β derived from the first step.

The results of this study indicate that regulatory announcements did impact systemic risk among telecom firms. The study also found that regulatory announcements either increased or decreased systemic risk, depending upon the type of regulatory announcements. Further, this study estimated the market-perceived regulatory risk premiums for individual telecom firms.

The regulatory risk premium was either positive or negative, depending upon the different types of regulatory announcements for the telecom sector firms. Thus, this study contributes to the theory of literature by testing the buffering hypothesis in the context of Indian telecom firms.

The study findings will be useful for investors and policy-makers to estimate the regulatory risk premium as and when there is an anticipated regulatory announcement in the Indian telecom sector.

This is one of the first research studies in exploring regulatory risk among the Indian telecom firms. The research findings indicate that regulatory risk does exist in the telecom firms of India.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a possible business model for telecom operators for entering the IPTV (digital television) market.

The approach takes the form of a case study, literature search and interviews.

The IPTV business model always has to adjust to the change of external factors and uncertainties in the exploration and the exploitation phase. The four scenarios presented in this paper explicitly address the demand, regulatory and competition‐related uncertainties. The scenarios represent the different future possibilities in terms of regulatory environment, industry structure and consumer attitudes towards (IP)TV service. By choosing the right business model, telecom operators can sustain the market competition and deliver customer value and economic benefits. In the light of limited resources, when balancing the requirement of IPTV business model design, telecom operators have to focus on the critical design issues in each of the scenarios.

This is a one‐case study, so no cross‐analysis with other cases was possible.

The research does not stop when the critical design issues have been analysed, but takes them a step further to shed light on the viability of the business model in an exploration phase. This is done by integrating the business model framework analysis with scenario analysis. Scenario analysis indicates various future possibilities and provides a platform for analyzing the decisions regarding critical design issues that have to be made in an uncertain future environment. The competing views on future developments are helpful in reducing the future uncertainties with regard to viability and feasibility of business models for IPTV.

This is one of the first studies that looks into the relationships between business models and scenarios. Also, the application on IPTV is quite novel.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how authentic leadership and transactional leadership styles in Ghanaian telecom firms influence employees’ creativity, and the effect that climate for innovation and work-related flow have on such influencing relationship.

Guided by the implicit theory of leadership, and using questionnaires, data were collected from 335 employees in five mining firms and analyzed descriptively and inferentially.

It was found that managers in the telecom firms use transactional leadership styles and authentic leadership styles to enhance employees’ creativity. The work climate fostered employees’ creativity and encouraged their innovation. The prevalence of work-related flow enhanced employees’ job performances. The innovative climate mediated the effect of authentic leadership on employees’ creativity, but moderated the effect of transactional leadership on the employees’ creativity. Work-related flow also moderated the effects of both authentic and transactional leadership styles on employee creativity. It is concluded that managers in telecom firms influence their followers’ creativity by altering their leadership styles in accordance with the given situation to achieve organizational goals.

The study sample was drawn from a single sub-sector of the Ghanaian economy. This represents a limitation, for which the findings cannot be generalized. Replications and extensions of the study in different industrial sectors will help test the robustness and generalizability of the findings.

This study has shown that managers of telecom firms in Ghana can cultivate and nurture the creativities of their employees toward increased performances by creating conducive psychosocial work climate that supports innovativeness, and use the requisite authentic and transactional leadership skills in the conduct of their managerial functions.