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Review Author(s): Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Review by: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Source: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 153-156Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/365972Accessed: 09-06-2015 00:46 UTC

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BOOK REVIEWS 153

illustrations, and here we could have used some vigorous pruning and arranging by the author or book designer. Amid scores of black-and- white illustrations, the most effective are historical photographs from 1870 on, for they reveal patterns of growth and the structural forms of species. An equally handsome addition are many fine color plates, all botanical drawings by early naturalists. But it seems wasteful to include works by such well-known (and widely reprinted) American artists as Durant, Homer, Johnson, or Wyeth in muddy, streaked monochrome instead of their native colors. Fortunately, such lapses do not dominate this absorbing, informative work, one that awakens an Arnold Arbore- tum visitor to the wealth of natural history written along its roads and winding paths.

William Howarth, Professor of English at Princeton University, has written widely on American literature and environmental history.

Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. By AnnaLee Saxenian. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1994. Pp. xi, 226. $24.95.) AnnaLee Saxenian's book is a tale of two regions transformed by the

discovery of the integrated chip, one of the most revolutionary technological innovations of the twentieth century. Invented almost simultaneously in 1959 at Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor, it fundamentally altered the electronics industry during the 1960s. In California's Santa Clara Valley, the integrated chip led to the production of the new silicon-based semiconductors and components for computers and other information-processing devices. Along greater Boston's Route 128 it led to the production of a new type of computer. Smaller, less expensive than existing large mainframe computers, these new minicomputers used the increased power of the chip for complex scientific, engineering, and then commercial applications.

In the 1970s the output of both industries and both regions boomed as new and restructured firms strove to meet the expanding worldwide demand. Then both regions and their industries suffered severe set- backs. In the 1970s, the Santa Clara Valley, by then known as Silicon Valley, faced competition from the improved integrated production processes of Japanese companies, which drove U.S. makers of components, particularly memory chips, out of global and even domestic markets. Then the invention and development of a new chip, the micropro-


154 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

cessor, revived the valley's fortune. The microprocessor, "the computer on a chip," led in the late 1970s to the development of a small, low- priced microcomputer that did much the same volume of work as did the mini- and, in time, the mainframe. The soaring output of microcomputers during the 1980s revived the demand for Silicon Valley's semiconductors and other components at the very same time that it was making the minicomputer obsolete. Thus the technological change that was responsible for the recovery of the valley's activities is precisely what hastened Route 128's decline.

For AnnaLee Saxenian this story is one of regional rather than industry differences and technological transformation. As her title indicates, she sees the changing fortunes of the two regions in terms of the dis- similarities in their cultures, that is, in distinctive work patterns, business organization, and ways of cooperating and competing. She pro- vides a most valuable description of the regional differences and a wealth of new information on the development of the minicomputer and semiconductor industries. For this reason alone her book should be required reading for anyone concerned with the history of elec- tronic data-processing in the United States.

In Saxenian's view, Route 128's "Puritan industry" was dominated by large, hierarchical, centralized enterprises whose workforce of manag- ers and employees remained stable. They rarely communicated with one another; new knowledge was hoarded within the firm. As a result, "The industrial structure of Route 128 was defined by the search for corporate self-sufficiency or autarky" (p. 69).

On the other hand, Silicon Valley's enterprises were small and entrepreneurial. Existing firms were seedbeds for new ones. Indeed, by the late 1960s, the majority of the valley's semiconductor producers had worked for a single pioneering company, Fairchild Semiconductor. The turnover of companies was high. Job-hopping was the norm. Nour- ished by venture capital, the new and growing entrepreneurial enterprises cooperated, as well as competed, with each other. "Shared lan- guages," "shared meanings," and personal relationships provided the glue that created a network. "In Silicon Valley, the region and its networks, rather than the individual firms, became the locus of economic activity" (p. 37).

While these descriptions of regional differences are certainly valid, they cannot explain the changing fortunes of Route 128 and Silicon Valley since the 1960s. For Saxenian, minicomputers and semiconductors were part and parcel of one industry whose products competed against one another. She fails to make clear that their processes of pro-


BOOK REVIEWS 155

duction, markets, sources of supplies, and requirements for R&D were very different. The greatest weakness of the book is its failure to place descriptions of the two regions in a framework of industrial and technological history.

A brief chronology of basic technological developments makes this point. In the late 1970s, the two most significant events in the U.S. information processing industry were the Japanese onslaught, particularly in memory chips, and the initial commercializing of the microcomputer. By 1980 the Japanese had taken a lead in the production of memory chips which they have never lost. In 1977 three firms--Apple in California, Radio Shack in Texas, and Commodore in Pennsylva- nia-almost simultaneously announced their new volume-produced, microprocessor-based computers. In 1980 IBM responded to the microprocessor challenge by setting up "an independent business unit" in Florida to design and mass produce its personal computer. That unit's chief selected Intel to make its semiconductors and Microsoft its software. The IBM Florida plant began mass production of its PCs in late 1981 and quickly became the market leader. Soon dozens of companies were mass producing IBM look-a-likes. These clones all used Intel's chip and Microsoft's software. In this same critical period in the development of the new industry, IBM invested $400 million in Intel to fi- nance the shutting down of its DRAM memory operations and the si- multaneous expansion of its microprocessor production to meet the booming demand.

The fortuitous timing of the huge expansion of IBM microcomputers and its clones may well have saved the U.S. semiconductor industry. The Japanese remained dominant in the production of memories, but they failed to get a strong foothold in the new microprocessor industry. Silicon Valley prospered from the PC revolution, but much of the pros- perity came from the activities of large individual firms rather than from networks of small entrepreneurial firms. Intel came to have an overwhelming marketshare in microprocessors. Except for Apple and Packard-Bell, the leading producers of PCs are located outside of Sili- con Valley. In workstations, where the microcomputer was used for complex scientific, engineering, and commercial purposes, the two leading Silicon Valley firms, Sun and Hewlett-Packard, like Apple, became integrated global enterprises.

By the 1990s, as Saxenian points out (pp. 118-19), the typical Silicon Valley firm concentrated on designing chips and software by develop- ing prototypes and semiworks and by producing customized devices and other specialized products for a wide variety of niche markets. As


156 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

the computer industry matures, with its growth coming largely in ser- vices and software rather than from hardware, Silicon Valley continues to have a significant role, though a more limited one than in the 1970s. Nevertheless, the history of Silicon Valley and Route 128 cannot be explained in terms of regional differences alone. The impact of technological change and the characteristics of the products that the regions produced must also be examined.

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Straus Professor of Business History at the Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, is the author of the Pulitzer-prize-winning THE VISIBLE HAND: THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN BUSINESS. He is also an ed- itor of the NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY.

The Frost Family's Adventure in Poetry: "Sheer Morning Gladness at the Brim.'" By Lesley Lee Francis. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 1994. Pp. ix, 236. Illustrated. $29.95.)

Frost and the Book of Nature. By George F. Bagby. (Knoxville: Univer- sity of Tennessee Press. 1993. Pp. xiii, 217. $28.95.)

Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite. By Katherine Kearns. Cam- bridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Pp. xi, 228. $59.95.)

Early and late-from the unchanged altered self of "Into My Own," to the guide of "Directive," who "only has at heart your getting lost," to the strategic retreat of his "final" poem-Robert Frost evades. Slip- page, in everything from epistemology and language to the maternal body and the law of the father, drives the endless deferrals of his play among contraries for mortal stakes. Frost's contraries are a dialectic without synthesis; his antitheses are the ground of nature, human nature, and art: nurture and decay, passion and control, inspiration and restraint. Since he assumes the terms are given and not to be resolved, Frost affirms opposites, slipping definition in incisive, elusive poems. The critical response to the circumstance is revision, and each book considered here revises received views of Frost in a different way, ap- plying critical approaches from biography through close reading to the- ory.

In The Frost Family's Adventure in Poetry, Lesley Lee Francis, Frost's granddaughter, revises Lawrance Thompson's portrait of Frost


Article Contentsp. 153p. 154p. 155p. 156

Issue Table of ContentsNew England Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Mar., 1995) pp. 1-171Front Matter [pp. 1-2]Religious Radicalism in the Puritan Officer Corps: Heterodoxy, the Artillery Company, and Cultural Integration in Seventeenth-Century Boston [pp. 3-43]Surviving the Marketplace: Robert Lowell and the Sixties [pp. 44-57]New England Witch-Hunting and the Politics of Reason in the Early Republic [pp. 58-82]Well-Tempered Temperance: Hawthorne's Dionysian Aspect [pp. 83-105]Memoranda and DocumentsCaptain John Deane and the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley: A Study of History and Bibliography [pp. 106-117]

Essay ReviewsEssaying Early American Literature [pp. 118-138]Re-Viewing Cole [pp. 138-146]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 147-150]Review: untitled [pp. 150-153]Review: untitled [pp. 153-156]Review: untitled [pp. 156-159]Review: untitled [pp. 159-161]Review: untitled [pp. 162-164]Review: untitled [pp. 164-166]Review: untitled [pp. 166-168]Review: untitled [pp. 169-171]

Back Matter

Download - 365972 Regional Advantage Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by AnnaLee Saxenian.pdf

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