Business of Computing
What do we mean by the business of computing? Not trivial. Since we are not in the business of delineating whether a business is in the computing industry or not and that category in itself is becoming very blury, here are some references that can start a lead at thinking through the concept of the business of computing.
First, we are not interested in defining the business of computing, but empirically studying actors and their practices to understand how they came to be and where they are going. We do so with an emphasis on production: what do they produce, how is the production organized and for who do they produce.
If we are going to talk about businesses, than it is also necessary to think about the corporation or the firm and how we conceptualize it. This will take longer work that could benefit from looking at Martha's thesis. I also appreciated the chapter in this thesis on the corporation which gives an overview of literature starting from Weber and Coase and all the way to feminist theory:
Jayme Walenta, PhD Thesis https://scholar.archive.org/work/r3namx2rr5e47apoti7iogtlsq/access/wayback/https://open.library.ubc.ca/media/download/pdf/24/1.0066891/1
More directly relevant are the following pieces:
- Kelly-Campbell, Development and Structure of the International Software Industry, 1950-1990, 1995
- Luanne Johnson, A View From the 1960s: How the Software Industry Began, 1998
- Campbell-Kelly and Garcia Swartz, From Mainframes to Smarphones: A history of the International Computer Industry, 2015 (albeit, it seems the emphasis is on the industry and not the "business" or the "firm")
References that may also be interesting but not yet vetted:
- Steinmueller, he US Software Industry: an analysis and interpretative history, 1995. https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/1350625/guid-b1d2735f-8c10-4967-8cc2-51336daa7955-ASSET1.0.pdf
- Shanling Li et al., Why Do Software Firms Fail? Capabilities, Competitive Actions, and Firm Survival in the Software Industry from 1995 to 2007, 2010. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1287/isre.1100.0281