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Footnote

Rez. in: JASIST 55(2004) no.2, S.181-182 (J. Scholl): "The book is based an a doctoral thesis titled "Global opportunity and national political economy: The development of internet ventures in Germany," which was supervised by Razeen Sally and accepted at the International Relations Department of the London School of Economics & Political Science, UK, in 2002. Its primary audience, although it is certainly of interest to policy makers, trade press journalists, and industry practitioners, is the academic community, and, in particular, (international) policy, business, business history, information technology, and information science scholars. The book's self-stated purpose is to explain "why Europe, despite initiating a tremendous amount of change ... failed to produce independent internet ventures of note" (p. 1) in contrast to the United States, where Internet start-ups such as Amazon.com, eBay, E*trade, and Yahoo managed to survive the notorious dot.com shakeout of 200I-2002. A few pages down, the objective is restated as "to explore the hypothesis of a global opportunity for technology innovation delivered via the internet and to explain Europe's entrepreneurial response" (p. 4). As a proxy case for Europe, the study provides a broad account of the changing legal and socioeconomic setting during the phase of early Internet adoption and development in Germany throughout the 1990s. The author highlights and details various facets of the entrepreneurial opportunity and compares the German case in some detail to corresponding developments in Sweden. Waesche concludes that starting an Internet business in Germany during that particular period of time was a "wrong country, wrong time" (p. I86) proposition.
Waesche sparsely Sketches out a theoretical framework for his study combining "network thinking," which he Claims to stand in the Schumpeterian research tradition, with classical institutional theory a la Max Weber. It is not clear, though, how this theory has guided his empirical research. No detailed hypotheses are presented, which would further clarify what was studied. Beyond the rudimentary framework, the author presents a concept of "refraction" denoting the "distorting effect national institutions have an a global innovation opportunity" (p. 17). Again, no hypotheses or measures for this concept are developed. No indication is given about which specific academic contribution was intended to be made and which particular gap of knowledge was attempted to be filled. Waesche's book would have greatly benefited from a more sharply posed and more detailed set of research questions. Instead we leam many details about the German situation in general and about the perceptions of individual players, particularly managerial personnel, in entrepreneurial Internet businesses in a specific Situation within a relatively short period of time. While many of those details are interesting in their own right, the reader is left wondering what the study's novelty is, what it specifically uncovered, what the frame of reference was, and what was finally learned. Contrary to its Claim and unlike a Chandlerian treatment of business history, the study does not explain, it rather just deseribes a particular historical situation. Consequently, the author refrains from presenting any new theory or prescriptive framework in his concluding remarks, but rather briefly revisits and summarizes the presening chapters. The study's empirical basis consists of two surveys with Sample sizes of 123 and 30 as well as a total of 68 interviews. The surveys and interviews were mostly completed between July of 1997 and November of 1999. Although descriptive statistics and detailed demographic information is provided in the appendix, the questionnaires and interview protocols are not included, making it difficult to follow the research undertaking. In summary, while undeniably a number of interesting and illustrative details regarding early Internet entrepreneurship in Germany are accounted for in Waesche's book, it would have provided a much stronger academic contribution had it developed a sound theory upfront and then empirically tested that theory. Alternatively the author could have singled out certain gaps in existing theory, and then attempted to fill those gaps by providing empirical evidence. In either case, he would have almost inevitably arrived at new insights directing to further study."