Developing uses, qualifying goods: on the construction of market exchange for Internet access services

Abstract

What role does the use of goods play in the shaping of commercial exchange? This question is investigated through a case study of the commercialization of Internet access services in France at the end of the 1990s. Specifically, the study traces how the uses of the Internet were made part of the process of qualifying Internet access as a commercial good in the NetStations launched and operated by France Telecom. Drawing on an analysis of the interactions between staff and customers in these NetStations, the article shows the diverse configurations through which use development and qualification of goods are intertwined in the course of commercial exchange. These observations are used as a basis for discussing the strategic incidence of the management of uses for commercial organizations operating in a competitive environment.

Keywords:

• market exchange
• use
• Internet
• economy of qualities
• commercial work

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the editors of this Special Issue and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful commentary upon earlier version of this article. I hope they will see the benefit I have taken from their efforts in this version of the text. Inadequacies that remain are, of course, all my own work.

Notes

The original name of the concept was “Station Internet.” For practical purposes, I will use the shorter denomination “NetStation.”

Note that analogous results would be obtained using closely related frames of analysis like the perspective of user configuration (Woolgar 1991) or the more recent perspective of Social Learning in Technological Innovation (Williams, Stewart, and Slack 2005).

Greenstein (2001) has studied the development of this market in the USA in the same period. His account, focusing on the logic of “technological mediation,” offers a very interesting parallel to the story recounted here.

“Le marché des services de telecommunications en France – Année 2002.” Observatoire des marchés de l'Autorité de Régulation des Télécommunications, mars 2004.

One can usually find two major modes of distribution in the telecommunications market: on the one hand, there are stores belonging to a distribution network owned by an operator, on the other, there are independent distributors (for instance, supermarkets). The first mode naturally gives priority to the operators’ products and services, whereas the second mode puts the different operators in competition with each other.

I use the term “customer” to denote the various categories of people who visited the NetStations, without necessarily implying that their visit had a commercial purpose. Furthermore, only some of these visitors could be labeled “consumers,” since the NetStations attracted a lot of entrepreneurs running small-scale businesses.

Wanadoo was the brand name of the France Telecom services in the consumer market for Internet services.

In his reflection on the notion of reasonable use, Thévenot (1993) mentions analogous conflicts between consumers and commercial operators concerning the legitimacy of certain practices and expectations. For instance, a consumer brings a camcorder back to the after-sales department, explaining that the image dribbles with certain colors, like fluorescent yellow. The employee answers that all camcorders have this characteristic, that it is visible only under extreme conditions and that the customer cannot not expect a better result with any other product.

Although incremental innovation can also be use in innovation. Finch and Geiger (2011) illustrate two examples where changes in product qualification implied first and foremost change in the user groups and/or uses that existing customer groups made of re-qualified products.