The power of control of communication technologies: the marconi case in historical perspective

Purpose The study investigates how a private firm came to shape the conduct of public institutions through the ownership of a proprietary communication technology. It asks through what mechanisms a private firm used its intellectual property rights to influence the conduct of governments and international regulatory bodies, taking as its setting the rise of the Marconi enterprise between 1896 and 1912. Design/methodology/approach Through the lens of Foucault’s concept of governmentality, this study is developed as an empirical historical case study, drawing on primary sources from the digital archives of the Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi, Marconi’s own writings and correspondence, and official records from the Italian Parliament, the Italian Navy, the British Government, and the British General Post Office. The theoretical framework combines Foucault’s concept of governmentality with accounting history perspectives on patents as instruments of power. Findings Marconi’s patents and licences functioned not merely as legal protections for an invention but as devices of governance, operating through three mechanisms. Institutional lock-in bound public administrations to the firm by granting access on terms, including exclusivity and non-intercommunication clauses, that raised the cost of turning to a competing system. Public legitimation drew on the authority of the patent system and, after the Titanic disaster of 1912, on public recognition, to render a private interest difficult to contest. Geopolitical extension carried national dependencies into multilateral negotiation, where they narrowed the room for manoeuvre available to the governments concerned. Throughout, those governments retained the capacity to choose; what the firm had arranged was the price of choosing otherwise. Research limitations/implications The study focuses on a single, albeit paradigmatic, case. Future research could extend the comparative analysis to contemporaneous competitors such as Telefunken, or trace the long-term institutional evolution of the non-intercommunication regime through the 1912 London Convention. Originality/value The paper brings intellectual property rights forward as an object of management history in their own right, rather than as a background condition of innovation. It turns the Foucauldian analysis of power outward, from conduct within the firm to the firm that governs the institutions charged with regulating it, and it extends the study of the large-scale enterprise to the proprietary legal instrument and the relation with the state as sources of advantage.