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68 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
previous models of state intervention, embracing the post-Fordist discourse
of markets, flexibility, consumption and choice (Pinches 1997:
24–6). 7 Many in these new middle classes saw telecommunications reforms
as crucial to the infrastructure overhaul necessary for participation
in the new global economy. In contrast to the constituency for jobs in
the public-sector telecommunications unions, the promise of jobs in a
new information economy appealed to younger workers, including young
women, who were targeted by transnational firms in the new gendered
division of labour associated with the post-Fordist economy (Mitter and
Rowbotham 1997). Ultimately the jobs that would open up in the ‘new’
economy would also be segmented by class, gender and other sociocultural
divisions (Baldoz, Koelbler and Kraft 2001). But the initial appeal of
the reforms lay in the prospect of overcoming the failures of the previous
development model which had offered rapid economic opportunities, for
a more technologically savvy generation (Freeman 2000). By the 1990s,
access to commercial media – especially television – was expanding rapidly
in the developing world as was the influence of diasporic communities
who were returning ‘home’ with more frequency to influence local tastes
and practices (Appadurai 1996; Ong 2001).
The fact that the new middle classes who backed these reforms have
made up a minority, and in many cases a small minority, of the overall
population of most nations in the South did not undermine the resonance
of the new discourse about failed state capacity, especially as reformers
turned to issues of state inefficiency and corruption. Experts in the World
Bank and the ITU routinely compared the inefficient performance of
state-based operators in the South with their successful counterparts in
the developed North and the rapidly ‘emerging’ economies represented
by the Four Tigers of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.
The overwhelmingly poor performance of state-operated telecommunications
services in the South coupled with inefficiency – measured by
such indicators as the relatively high numbers of employees per telephone
line – demonstrated the problem with government ‘interference’
(Wellenius and Stern 1994; Wellenius 1997). The implicit anti-union sentiment
dovetailed perfectly with the promise that state-of-the art liberalized
telecommunications infrastructure would provide modern flexible
jobs beneficial to both employees and employers.
For consumers, the state’s monopoly in this increasingly important
economic sector was seen by reformers as fertile grounds to raise the
issue of corruption – a concern that would drive policy-making from the
mid-1990s until the present. 8 Inefficiency and corruption were real concerns
for citizens of many postcolonial nations where, as we discussed in
Chapter 2, governments in power for decades deployed empty populist