The power of control of communication technologies: the marconi case in historical perspective

Technical infrastructure has never been a neutral reality. On the contrary, it reflects power relations, intersecting technological control with political authority and economic interests. The literature has long highlighted how the ownership and governance of infrastructure – from nineteenth-century railways to submarine cables and, today, digital platforms – have been key elements in the exercise of private influence over the public sphere (Goldin, 1947; Du Boff, 1980; Chandler, 1990; Richardson, 2015). This power is not only expressed in the material management of networks, but is also exercised through the use of legal, accounting and institutional instruments capable of codifying private authority as legitimate, necessary and technically indispensable. From this perspective, the history of technological innovation intersects with the history of accounting. Patents, often considered legal guarantees protecting intellectual property, take on a more significant role when placed in the context of institutional governance: they operate as instruments for measuring, evaluating and negotiating power. As an act of accounting, the patent represents a way of translating a technical insight into an exclusive right that has economic value, legal relevance and political force. It allows its owner to transform an invention into a strategic resource capable of influencing public choices and redefining the relationship between the private sector and state authorities (Hopwood, 1983; Lazzini and Nicoliello, 2021). This study seeks to investigate how, at particular moments of technological transition, the possession of communication technologies and the associated intellectual property rights has enabled private actors to exert a form of systemic influence on the public sphere.

Through the lens of Foucault’s concept of governmentality (Foucault, 1991), the work investigates how the ownership of communication infrastructure and the strategic use of patents have enabled private innovators to negotiate, influence and sometimes condition public institutions. Foucault’s approach is particularly productive for management history because it directs attention not to the formal structures of authority, but to the practices – contractual, technical, administrative - through which power is actually exercised and normalised (McKinlay and Starkey, 1998; Bigoni et al., 2024).This perspective reveals how the firm as an organisation can become an actor in governance, not only subject to regulation but constitutive of it.

To address this question, the work focuses on the case study of Guglielmo Marconi and the role that his company, the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company – later the Marconi Company – played in the global establishment of wireless telegraphy in the early twentieth century.

The case of Guglielmo Marconi has generally been examined in relation to scientific invention, entrepreneurial initiative and the international development of wireless telegraphy (Baker, 2013; Guagnini, 2006; Raboy, 2016). These studies have shown how Marconi transformed experiments with electromagnetic waves into a commercially viable system and created a company capable of operating across several national contexts. However, less attention has been paid to the mechanisms through which the control of patents and licensing agreements enabled the Marconi Company to shape the conduct of governments and international regulatory institutions. This aspect is particularly relevant because the development of wireless communication did not depend only on the technical superiority of a specific system. It also depended on the legal and contractual conditions that regulated access to the technology, its use by public authorities and its interoperability with competing systems.

For this reason, the study investigates how a private actor used control over communication technology to influence public institutions during the emergence of wireless telegraphy. More specifically, it addresses the following research question:

The study is developed through an empirical historical case study based on primary and secondary sources. The primary sources include materials from the digital archives of the Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi, Marconi’s writings and correspondence, Italian parliamentary documents, records concerning the Italian Navy and government, and documents produced by the British Government, the British General Post Office and the international radiotelegraph conferences. These sources allow the reconstruction of the relationships between the Marconi Company and public institutions and provide evidence of how patents, licences and technical conditions were used in institutional negotiations.

The article argues that Marconi’s influence developed through three interconnected mechanisms. The first was the creation of legal and technological exclusivity through patent ownership. By controlling the principal rights associated with wireless telegraphy, the company strengthened its position as a necessary interlocutor for institutions interested in adopting the technology. The second mechanism was institutional lock-in. Licensing, leasing and exclusive-use clauses increased the dependence of public authorities on Marconi equipment, technical standards and operators, making the transition to competing systems more difficult. The third mechanism was the extension of this dependency to international regulation. The contractual relationships established at national level influenced the positions adopted by governments during international negotiations on interoperability and non-intercommunication.

The study contributes to the understanding of how private firms can influence the governance of public infrastructure through control over proprietary technologies. Chandler (1990) showed how technological innovation, organisational capabilities and managerial coordination supported the rise of large-scale enterprise. The Marconi case extends this interpretation by showing that the expansion of a technological company could also reshape the institutional environment in which governments and international bodies operated. The growth of the firm was therefore connected not only to production, market expansion and internal organisation, but also to its capacity to establish contractual and technological dependencies. Through this case, it is possible to osserve how patents and licensing arrangements may function as devices of governance. Their power did not derive only from the formal protection of intellectual property, but from their ability to define the conditions of technological access and to influence the choices of public actors. The Marconi case therefore provides a historical example of how control over communication infrastructure can allow a private enterprise to participate in the regulation of public and international activities without possessing formal governmental authority.

The remainder of the article is structured as follows. Following this introduction, Section 2 develops the theoretical framework; Section 3 sets out the methodology and the source base; Section 4 examines the three mechanisms in turn; Section 5 discusses the findings; and Section 6 concludes by stating the study’s contribution, its limits and the directions it opens for future research.

The modern understanding of the large industrial enterprise owes its principal formulation to Chandler (1990), for whom competitive advantage arose from a coordinated investment in production, distribution and management, generating the organisational capabilities and first-mover position that later entrants struggled to overcome in capital-intensive sectors. Much of the Marconi enterprise is legible in these terms. Wireless telegraphy was capital-intensive, the firm moved first, and it built an international organisation of subsidiaries to hold the ground it had taken. Yet the source of its advantage sits uneasily within Chandler’s account. For Chandler, advantage flows from the managerial coordination of high-throughput production and distribution within a market whose boundaries the firm does not itself set; the state figures chiefly as a condition of the environment, and legal instruments as protections of an advantage secured elsewhere. Marconi’s advantage was of another order. It rested upon exclusive legal control of the technology and upon the terms on which access to it was granted to governments, navies and postal administrations (Baker, 2013; Raboy, 2016). The visible hand that mattered in this case reached beyond the firm and beyond the market, into the conduct of the institutions that were meant to regulate it - a possibility that Chandler’s predominantly domestic framework, centred upon the internal hierarchy of the enterprise, does not contemplate.

The history of communication industries makes this displacement legible. Under conditions of high fixed cost, competition in telegraphy gave way rapidly to concentration and to a recurrent dependence on the state, so that the sector took shape as a public-private hybrid rather than as a competitive market (Goldin, 1947; Du Boff, 1980). Networks of this kind, moreover, function only where equipment and procedure are mutually compatible, and interoperability is therefore never a merely technical matter: whoever governs the conditions of interconnection governs access to the network itself. The international telegraph regime managed this problem through shared calculative and administrative conventions that bound national administrations together (Richardson, 2015). What this literature establishes is that control over communication infrastructure has been exercised through proprietary systems, conditions of interconnection and relations of state dependency, rather than through scale alone. What it does not establish is how such control operated as a mechanism.

The business history of Marconi confirms both the record and the omission. It has reconstructed the inventor and the technical achievement (Baker, 2013); the contested patents through which priority was secured in the British courts, where Marconi’s claims were challenged as an appropriation of public knowledge (Arapostathis and Gooday, 2013; Arapostathis, 2015); the entrepreneur who assembled an enterprise of global reach (Raboy, 2016); and the national politics of wireless, including the firm’s influence over Italian policy, documented most fully through the Marconi Archives (Balbi, 2012). This scholarship is indispensable, and the present study rests upon it. Its emphasis, however, falls upon invention, entrepreneurship and infrastructural expansion, and it reads the firm’s hold over public institutions as corporate strategy rather than as an exercise of government. The record is rich precisely where the theoretical account remains thin. To move from description to mechanism, an analytics of power is required.

Such an analytics is furnished by Foucault’s notion of governmentality, understood as the conduct of conduct (Foucault, 1991). Government, in this sense, is neither sovereign command nor coercion, but the effort to structure the field of possible action of others who remain formally free to act. It displaces the state from the centre of the analysis and directs attention instead to the contractual, technical and administrative practices through which conduct is shaped, and to the many authorities, public and private, that take part in shaping it.

The conception of power that follows is relational rather than proprietary. Power is not a substance that one holds but a relation that one exercises; it does not descend from a single sovereign point but circulates through documents, standards, procedures and institutions, and it is productive as much as prohibitive (Foucault, 2006). Organisation scholars working in this vein have insisted upon the same point, rejecting the reduction of power to a property of persons, of a dominant class, of a sovereign or of the state, and describing it instead as dispersed through the social relations of a population in a diversity of mechanisms and directions (Knights and Willmott, 1989). On this basis three registers may be distinguished, as Knights (2002) sets out in his reconstruction of the Foucauldian edifice: sovereign power, which commands and forbids through law; disciplinary power, which trains bodies within the enclosed spaces of the prison, the school and the factory through hierarchy, normalisation and examination (Foucault, 1979); and governmental power, which operates at a distance and through the responsibility of those it governs. The Marconi case belongs to this third register. The firm neither commanded governments nor disciplined them in any narrow sense; it arranged the field within which they chose, so that certain options became costly and others came to appear necessary.

The means of such government are calculative and technical. Governing at a distance rests upon political rationalities and upon technologies of government, among which numbers, records and calculative devices occupy a central place (Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller, 2010). It is a mode of rule that is economical in its very form, since the resources required for its exercise are dispersed among those governed and cost the governing authority little (Knights, 2002). Its characteristic instrument is the contract. As Burchell (1993) argued, and as du Gay et al. (1996) demonstrate in their study of managerial conduct, contractualisation assigns a function to a distinct unit which is thereby rendered accountable both for performing it and for its outcomes, and it recasts relations between institutions, and between institutions and individuals, in a contractual form. Government of this kind does not abolish the freedom of those it governs; it presupposes it. Freedom and power define one another, and where determining factors saturate the field there is no relation of power at all, since it is precisely because action is free that power is exercised as a means of persuading others to use their freedom in a particular way (Knights and Willmott, 1989, drawing on Foucault, 1982). Power does not deny freedom; it channels it. The proposition bears directly upon the case at hand, for the governments that dealt with Marconi retained the capacity to choose, and it is for that reason, rather than in spite of it, that their conduct may be analysed as governed.

Accounting scholarship has given this analytics its empirical content, demonstrating that calculative practices do not merely record an organisational reality but help to constitute it, and in so doing render persons and activities governable (Hopwood, 1983; Miller and O’Leary, 2001). By translating contested political choices into technical necessities, such practices may also confer legitimacy upon the authority that deploys them (Lazzini and Nicoliello, 2021). The reception of Foucault in organisation studies has been extensive, yet it has looked almost entirely inward, concerning itself with discipline, surveillance and subjectivity at work (Clegg, 1989; Knights and Willmott, 1989; McKinlay and Starkey, 1998), and with the ways in which an enterprising rationality remakes the conduct of the public office and constitutes the manager as an agent of his or her own government (du Gay, 2000; du Gay et al., 1996). Knights (2002) has himself diagnosed the tendency, observing that organisation theorists have privileged Foucault’s middle period, and often the single book Discipline and Punish, because the theme of surveillance runs parallel to the control of employees at work, and that this selective appropriation reinforces a commonsense conception of the organisation as an entity with clear-cut boundaries. Within accounting history the corresponding reception, mapped by Bigoni et al. (2024) as genealogy, disciplinary technique and power-knowledge, has remained with instruments already recognised as accounting. Two movements have consequently drawn little notice: the firm that governs, from outside, the institutions charged with regulating it; and the device that carries such government where no ledger is kept.

The patent is the device in which the strategy of the enterprise and the government of conduct meet, and it has remained outside both receptions even though it performs the very functions they treat as constitutive: it values, it records and it disciplines. A patent is, in the first place, a legal instrument, since it grants an exclusive right to an invention for a fixed term. It is at the same time an economic valuation, since it quantifies the worth of that invention and orders the property rights and incentives of an entire technological field. And in strategic industries it is a political instrument, since the grant, transfer and licensing of patents settle who may reach technologies held to be essential to security, development or public service (Mercelis et al., 2017). In this triple capacity the patent operates as a technology of government in the sense set out above: it translates a technical insight into a structure of social relations, assigns and records value, legitimates the authority of its holder, and disciplines those who must negotiate access to what it protects. The licence and the operator-leasing model prolong the device into recurring obligations, converting a single right into a lasting relationship in which the licensee assumes responsibility for terms it did not set - contractualisation in the sense described above, transposed from the management of persons to the government of administrations.

It is on this basis that the three traditions reviewed here are brought together, each for a distinct purpose. Business history reconstructs the development of the Marconi enterprise and its patent strategy, and furnishes the empirical record upon which the analysis rests. Accounting history supplies the means of conceptualising patents and licences as calculative devices of value and control, and thus provides the interpretive vocabulary rather than the documentary base. Governmentality supplies the analytics of power that connects those devices to the conduct of states and regulatory bodies. The contribution sought through their combination belongs to management history, and concerns the mechanisms by which a private firm came to govern public institutions through control of a proprietary technology.

Through the lens of governmentality, and drawing upon the accounting-history reading of calculative devices, the study therefore treats patents and licences as the calculative-legal means through which the Marconi enterprise governed public institutions at a distance. Three mechanisms follow from this reading, and they organise the empirical analysis. The first is institutional lock-in: by granting access to the technology on terms that made withdrawal costly, and by tying that access to clauses of exclusivity, the firm bound public institutions to itself while leaving them formally free to choose. The second is public legitimation: drawing upon the authority of the patent system and, after 1912, upon the moral prestige attaching to the rescue of the Titanic survivors, the firm converted a private interest into a position that was difficult to contest, in the manner in which calculative practices too may legitimate authority (Lazzini and Nicoliello, 2021). The third is geopolitical extension: dependencies contracted at national level raised the cost, for the governments concerned, of adopting international rules that ran against the firm’s interest. These three are advanced as analytical constructs rather than as established findings, and are weighed against the documentary evidence in the sections that follow.

The study is developed as an empirical historical case study, conducted on primary and secondary sources and organised around theoretically defined constructs. It follows the strategy that Rowlinson et al. (2014) term analytically structured history, in which the narrative is built around conceptualised structures and events rather than presented as an unstructured chronicle. The constructs are the three mechanisms set out in the preceding section - institutional lock-in, public legitimation and geopolitical extension - and they govern both the selection of the evidence and the organisation of the analysis. The Marconi Company was selected as a single, exemplary case for three reasons. It represents an early and unusually legible instance of a private firm governing a public utility through control of a proprietary technology, at a moment when neither the technology nor its regulation had yet been settled. It operates simultaneously on three levels - the entrepreneurial, the institutional and the geopolitical - and thus renders visible the passage from managerial decisions to state authority and international regulation. And it is documented through surviving primary sources of sufficient density to support a historically grounded reconstruction rather than a synthesis of secondary accounts. The choice of a single case carries a known limitation, which is stated here rather than left implicit: such a design cannot establish how frequently the dynamic recurred, nor can it support claims of statistical generalisation. What it can do is trace the mechanisms in detail and in sequence, and this is what is sought.

The analytical window runs from the filing of British patent no. 12039 in 1896 to the London International Radiotelegraph Convention of 1912, at which point the legitimacy of the Marconi system found international recognition. The subsequent evolution of the regime, and the emergence of broadcasting in the following decade, lie outside this window and are identified in the conclusion as directions for further research.

The primary sources comprise materials from the digital archives of the Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi at Villa Griffone, Pontecchio Marconi, together with Marconi’s writings and correspondence, among which the letters to his father of March and April 1896 document the decision to move to Britain; the patent documentation, beginning with British patent no. 12039 of 1896 and extending to the foreign filings through which the firm built its legal position; Italian parliamentary documents and records concerning the Italian Navy and government; and documents produced by the British Government and the British General Post Office, together with the printed proceedings of the international radiotelegraph conferences, namely the Preliminary Conference on Wireless Telegraphy held in Berlin in 1903 and the International Radiotelegraph Convention of Berlin of 1906, both issued by the Reichsdruckerei. Taken together, these sources allow the reconstruction of the relations between the Marconi Company and public institutions, and provide evidence of the ways in which patents, licences and technical conditions were deployed in institutional negotiations. The secondary sources comprise the established historiography of the case (Guagnini, 2006; Balbi, 2012; Baker, 2013; Raboy, 2016) and the scholarship on patent disputes in Britain (Arapostathis and Gooday, 2013; Arapostathis, 2015). They serve both to corroborate and to contextualise the primary record, and, in the case of the Italian negotiating position, to supply detail drawn from archival material not consulted directly. Table 1 sets out the source base, its provenance and the role assigned to each body of material.

Sources were selected for their bearing upon the three mechanisms and for their proximity to the events they record. The reading proceeded iteratively. Each document was interrogated for evidence of the terms on which access to the technology was granted and priced, of the means by which exclusivity was secured, of the ways in which the firm’s authority was justified before public opinion and public institutions, and of the bearing of national dependencies upon international negotiation. The material was then organised under the three mechanisms and assembled into a structured narrative, in which each section addresses one component of the research question.

The corpus combines the voice of the firm with external record, and the two are weighed differently. Marconi’s writings, memoirs and correspondence present the enterprise as its founder wished it to be seen, and are read as evidence of self-presentation rather than as neutral report; their value lies in what they disclose of the strategy pursued, not in their testimony as to its effects. The printed proceedings of the Berlin conferences, the patent documentation and the official records provide the independent check, and triangulation across these registers guards against reliance upon any single account. Two limitations qualify the reconstruction. The archive is uneven, as historical archives are, and the analysis is necessarily confined to what has survived (McWatters, 2020); silences in the record are therefore not read as evidence of absence. Part of the detail concerning the Italian negotiating position, and in particular the correspondence between the firm’s management and the Italian delegation, derives from Balbi’s (2012) study of the Marconi Archives rather than from direct consultation, and is attributed accordingly throughout.

The exclusivity upon which the three mechanisms rest was neither given by the invention nor conferred automatically by law: it was constructed, at considerable cost and with professional assistance, and its construction was itself a managerial undertaking.

Marconi’s early approach to the Italian Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, seeking the commercial development of his apparatus, met with refusal; the administration was satisfied with cable and wire for fixed-line communication and showed no interest in wireless (Baker, 2013). On the advice of his mother’s Irish relatives, and of his cousin Henry Jameson Davis, Marconi moved to England in February 1896. The choice was not fortuitous. Britain possessed the largest merchant fleet and navy of the period, a maritime sector in which Marconi anticipated the principal application of his system, and the Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, William H. Preece, had already begun studies on maritime communication, so that the invention arrived in a receptive environment (Raboy, 2016). The resources Marconi mobilised at this juncture were social and cultural as much as technical: a bilingual formation that allowed him to move between the Italian and British institutional worlds, family connections that supplied both capital and access, and his training under Augusto Righi in Bologna, which lent him the scientific credibility required to present himself to public institutions as a serious interlocutor (Martin, 1904; Corazza, 1998; Guagnini, 2006; Raboy, 2016).

Marconi’s intention on arriving in London was to secure a patent and return to Italy with the proceeds, in the conviction that the commercial value of the invention lay principally in the patent itself (Guagnini, 2006). The conviction was well founded, but the instrument had to be built. Marconi had not invented anything wholly new; the novelty lay in the techniques by which he rendered existing concepts practical and functional, and the 1883 British Patent Act required both a specification reviewed by examiners and a novelty subject to determination by the courts. The construction of the right was therefore a skilled, costly and strategically consequential activity rather than an administrative formality, and it was entrusted to the patent agent Edward Carpmael of Carpmael & Co. A provisional specification was filed on 5 March 1896 under the title “Improvements in telegraphy and in apparatus therefor” (No. 5028); it was withdrawn and replaced by a further provisional application of 2 June 1896, “Improvements in transmitting electrical impulses and signals, and in apparatus therefor” (No. 12,039). The final application was submitted to the Patent Office on 2 March 1897. Through the combined work of Carpmael, the engineer Graham and the lawyer Moulton, the text was drafted so as to resist attack on either legal or technical grounds, securing a commercial value that would be difficult to contest (Guagnini, 2006). Protection was extended to the USA with patent No. 586,193 of 13 July 1897, so that the system was covered simultaneously in the two principal maritime nations.

That the value so constructed was afterwards contested does not diminish the point; it confirms it. Marconi’s claims were challenged in the British courts as an appropriation of public knowledge, and the identification of the solitary inventor was itself in part an outcome of litigation (Arapostathis and Gooday, 2013; Arapostathis, 2015). Exclusivity was an achievement rather than a fact, and it was achieved by the means the patent system made available.

Demonstrations followed the grant, conducted with the General Post Office through Preece, with the War Office, and with the Italian Embassy in London in the person of Ambassador Ferrero, as well as before Italian and British naval officers. Preece recognised the significance of the invention and offered the use of the GPO’s premises for further trials, while the principal costs, those of the apparatus and of the patents, remained with Marconi (Marconi to Giuseppe Marconi, 8 April 1896). The pattern established at this early stage would recur: the public institution supplied the setting and the recognition, while the firm retained the instrument.

The decisive strategic choice was not to sell. Private offers were received and were financially attractive, among them those of Urquihart & Smell and of British Syndicate Ltd., but on the advice of Jameson Davis, Marconi chose instead to found a company. The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Co. was established on 20 July 1897 with a share capital of £100,000, of which 60,000 shares were assigned to Marconi against the transfer of the patent and 40,000 were offered for sale (Guagnini, 2006). The patent was thereby converted from an asset that might have been alienated once into the permanent foundation of an enterprise: the choice to exploit the right by offering the system on the market through a dedicated company was the condition of everything that followed.

The firm’s first action was to extend patent protection to further jurisdictions. By 1900 the expenditure incurred in obtaining patents in a range of countries, among them France, Denmark and Canada, has been estimated at some £75,000, and is reported to have constituted the company’s single largest item of expenditure (van der Kooij, 2017, p. 327). Whatever its precise magnitude, the direction of the commitment is what matters here: the outlay was not made to protect an invention already commercialised, but to construct the legal infrastructure within which commercialisation would subsequently occur. The commercial model gave this infrastructure its grip. Rather than selling equipment, the company leased it and supplied a Marconi operator on board; the shipowner bore the cost of the rental, while the apparatus, its operation and the technical knowledge required to work it remained with the firm. Immediate revenues were modest, but the arrangement retained control of the system, since the full network of services was available only to vessels equipped with Marconi technology (Balbi, 2017). The device was thereby prolonged into a continuing obligation: what the licensee acquired was not a thing but a relationship, renewed at intervals and on terms it had not set. Organisation followed: the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Co. was renamed the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company and retained the patent rights, while the Marconi International Marine Communication Company was created to conduct commercial and productive activity, and further subsidiaries were established in the USA on 22 November 1899, in Canada in 1903, and in Belgium in the same year, covering the French, Portuguese and Spanish markets.

Where an existing public monopoly barred the way, the firm did not confront it. Under the Telegraph Act the Post Office controlled British communications, which prevented the company from establishing a competing internal service; the GPO offered £10,000 for the outright purchase of the patent rights, a sum insufficient to the company’s ambitions. Marconi turned instead to the maritime market, where no comparable public monopoly obtained. The redirection was consequential for the firm’s commercial fortunes and for the form its institutional power would take: it built its position in the interstices of state control rather than against it.

Two further instruments deepened the hold. The patent of 26 April 1900 (No. 7,777), for tuned or syntonic telegraphy on a single aerial, allowed reception only where transmitter and receiver were tuned alike, which limited the dispersal of signals and rendered the system at once more secure and more controllable. And in 1901 the company concluded its first contract with the British Admiralty for the rental of thirty-two sets against a patent royalty of £100 per device. The formula repays attention, for it is where the character of the device is most visible. A royalty per apparatus per period is a calculative arrangement: it prices access, it records it, and it converts a right into a recurring flow of revenue that binds a state institution to a private supplier for as long as the equipment remains in service.

The pattern is most fully documented in the Italian case, where free access was the very instrument of dependency. Invited to La Spezia by Ferrero in 1897, Marconi demonstrated his system to the Italian Navy, which proved receptive to experimentation and adoption, and he granted the Ministries of the Navy and of War the free use of his patents for military purposes. The relationship was consolidated in 1903 by the law authorising the construction of a high-power station at Coltano, near Livorno, intended to connect Italy with South America and its emigrant communities (Law 127 of 5 April 1903). The accompanying agreement guaranteed the Italian government free use of the patents for commercial purposes and obliged it, for fourteen years, to employ only equipment produced by the Marconi Company and to communicate only with Marconi systems, save in emergencies. A further agreement of May 1904 with the Ministries of Post and of the Navy confirmed the free use and the right of reproduction for military purposes, and established that for fourteen years Italian and colonial stations engaged in commercial services might communicate only with stations equipped with the same technology. None of these agreements was formally exclusive. Their combined effect was nonetheless to place the Italian telecommunications system within a field that the firm had defined.

The evidence for lock-in is the accumulation of costs that reversal would have entailed rather than any single clause: investment in Marconi-compatible installations, operators trained on Marconi apparatus, and, in due course, political capital committed to the defence of the arrangement. The Italian state retained the formal capacity to choose otherwise. What the agreements altered was the price of doing so, which is what governing at a distance consists in (Foucault, 1991; Rose and Miller, 2010).

The dependencies contracted at national level did not remain there. The company had developed and enforced a policy of non-intercommunication, under which its stations refused to communicate, outside genuine emergencies, with any station not equipped with Marconi apparatus. The policy was the commercial expression of the logic already at work in the licensing agreements: by making interconnection conditional upon exclusive adoption, it converted a technical incompatibility into a barrier to entry. Interoperability, as observed above, is never a merely technical question, and here the firm governed its conditions.

The international consequences became apparent at the Berlin conferences of 1903 and 1906, convened by Germany with the object of breaking the monopoly and promoting competition among wireless companies (Balbi, 2012). Germany, France and the USA opposed the arrangement; Britain and Italy defended it, for reasons of their own. The German concern was not solely commercial: the monopoly was seen as a further extension of British ascendancy in international communications, of a kind already established in submarine cables (Preliminary Conference on Wireless Telegraphy, 1903). The Marconi Company objected to the intercommunication requirement proposed at both conferences on the grounds that competing systems infringed its patents and that a mandatory obligation would permit free-riding upon its extensive and costly network of coast stations (International Radiotelegraph Convention, 1906).

The Italian position is the most instructive, and also the point at which the evidence must be handled with care. Italy acted at the conferences to protect the monopoly, contending with other delegations to that end, and Balbi (2012), working from the Marconi Archives, shows that the company’s managing director, Cuthbert Hall, was in continual contact with the Italian delegate to the 1906 conference, proposing positions and orienting the Italian stance, in the knowledge that the government could not readily extricate itself from its contractual dependence upon Marconi equipment. This is evidence of influence exercised upon a negotiating position, and it is documented; it is not evidence that the position was determined by that influence alone. Italy had reasons of its own for defending an arrangement that gave it privileged access to an advanced technology and a stake in the prestige of an Italian inventor, and Britain had interests in international communications that long antedated Marconi. What the record supports is narrower and sufficient: the contractual dependencies raised the cost, for the governments concerned, of endorsing an international rule that ran against the firm’s interest, and they narrowed the range of positions those governments could adopt without loss. Private governance did not replace international regulatory politics; it entered into them as one of the conditions under which states calculated.

Legitimation operated from the outset through the patent system itself. As an instrument of public law, the patent conferred upon a private interest a legal standing that was difficult to contest in political terms, and it supplied the vocabulary in which contestation could be answered. The Italian parliamentary discussion illustrates the process. The non-intercommunication clause raised concern in the Chamber of Deputies, where it was feared that it might compromise future interoperability with other European systems, and it was defended as fair compensation for the free grant of the patents (Chamber of Deputies, 20 February 1903). The debate reveals the tension between immediate access to an advanced technology and the longer-term cession of regulatory autonomy to a private enterprise. It also shows the calculative logic of the patent doing political work: the proposition that an inventor is owed recompense proportionate to the value of his contribution was mobilised to justify a restriction upon a public service, translating a contested choice into something resembling a technical necessity (Lazzini and Nicoliello, 2021).

The sinking of the RMS Titanic on the night of 14–15 April 1912 altered the terms of this legitimacy. The Marconi installation transmitted the distress calls, and the coordination of the rescue by the Carpathia was conducted through it. The consequence, for the purposes of this analysis, was a shift in the standing of wireless telegraphy in public and institutional perception, from an experimental facility to an instrument of public safety.

The reversal that followed is the clearest indication of what had changed. The second International Radiotelegraph Convention met in London later in 1912; it had been scheduled before the disaster, and the sinking bore upon its deliberations (International Radiotelegraph Convention, 1912). It was at this convention that the Marconi Company announced the abandonment of its policy of non-intercommunication outside emergencies. The concession had been resisted for almost a decade at Berlin, and it was now offered without compulsion. The interpretation advanced here is that the firm could afford it: its technology had become difficult to dispute in the public mind, and its position in the market did not depend upon the clause it surrendered. Legitimation, on this reading, did not merely accompany the firm’s power; it substituted for one of its instruments.

The claim should be stated at the level the evidence supports. That Marconi’s standing with governments was enhanced after 1912 is not in doubt, and the abandonment of non-intercommunication at the London convention is a matter of record. The inference that the concession was made from a position of strength rather than under constraint is an interpretation, offered as the reading most consistent with the sequence of events and with the firm’s conduct at the two preceding conferences.

The foregoing analysis allows for a systematic interpretation of the Marconi case through the theoretical framework of governmentality and accounting as power. The central argument is that Marconi’s patents functioned not merely as legal protections for a technical invention, but as devices of governance in the Foucauldian sense: they shaped the conduct of states, military institutions and regulatory bodies by creating a structured field of dependencies and constraints that those actors could not easily escape (Foucault, 1991; Bigoni et al., 2024).

The research question asked through what mechanisms a private firm used its intellectual property rights to influence the conduct of governments and international regulatory bodies. The preceding analysis permits an answer in three parts, which correspond to the mechanisms that organised it, and it also permits a statement of the limits within which that answer holds.

The mechanisms are analytically distinct but were practically entangled, and their sequence matters. Exclusivity came first and was constructed rather than found: the patent was built by professional labour, at deliberate expense, and in a form designed to resist challenge, and it was extended to the jurisdictions where the maritime market lay (Guagnini, 2006). That construction did not by itself govern anyone. It became a mechanism of government only when the terms of access to what it protected were set, and this is where lock-in operated. The refusal to sell the rights, the decision to lease rather than to vend the apparatus, the retention of the operator on board, the royalty per device payable to the firm by the Admiralty, and the 14-year clauses in the Italian agreements of 1903 and 1904 all converge upon a single form: access was granted, and it was granted on terms that made subsequent withdrawal costly. Lock-in in turn supplied the condition for geopolitical extension, since the dependencies contracted at national level bore upon the positions that governments could comfortably adopt at Berlin. Legitimation, by contrast, did not follow the other two in sequence but accompanied them throughout, first through the authority of the patent system, which supplied both a legal standing and a vocabulary of just recompense with which restriction could be defended in Parliament (Chamber of Deputies, 20 February 1903), and then, after April 1912, through a public recognition that altered the terms on which the firm could afford to act.

Table 2 sets out the three mechanisms, the devices through which each operated, the principal evidence adduced, and the boundary of what that evidence supports.

The last column is not a concession but a condition of the argument. Government in the sense employed here presupposes the freedom of those governed, since freedom and power define one another and there is no relation of power where determining factors saturate the field (Knights and Willmott, 1989, drawing on Foucault, 1982). Were it to be shown that Italy had no alternative, the case would cease to be one of government and would become one of constraint, which is a different phenomenon and a less interesting one. The interest of the case lies precisely in the fact that the Italian state chose, and chose repeatedly, within a field whose costs had been arranged by another party. The same holds at Berlin. Italy had reasons of its own to defend an arrangement that gave it privileged access to an advanced technology and a share in the standing of an Italian inventor, and Britain had interests in international communications that long preceded Marconi. To say that private dependencies entered into those calculations is a claim the evidence sustains; to say that they settled them is not.

Three implications follow for the literatures on which the study has drawn.

The first concerns the large-scale enterprise. Chandler (1990) located competitive advantage in the coordinated investment in production, distribution and management, and in the organisational capabilities that follow from it. The Marconi enterprise made such investments, but they were not the source of its position. Its advantage lay in a legal instrument and in the terms of access it permitted the firm to set, and it was consolidated not in the market but in the offices of ministries, admiralties and postal administrations. The case therefore extends the study of the large enterprise in two directions that Chandler’s predominantly domestic and firm-centred framework leaves in shadow: the proprietary legal instrument as a source of advantage in its own right, and the relation with the state as a site where advantage is secured rather than merely encountered. The extension is offered as a qualification of scope, not as a refutation.

The second concerns the analysis of power in organisation studies. The Foucauldian tradition in the field has been productive, but its attention has been directed inward, to discipline, surveillance and the constitution of the subject at work, and to the enterprising remaking of managerial conduct (Clegg, 1989; Knights and Willmott, 1989; McKinlay and Starkey, 1998; du Gay, 2000; du Gay et al., 1996) - a concentration that Knights (2002) has himself diagnosed and attributed to the appeal of the disciplinary phase of Foucault’s work. The Marconi case exhibits the converse movement. Here the firm is not the site in which conduct is governed but the agent that governs, and its objects are the institutions charged with regulating it. The devices are recognisable: contractualisation assigns a function to a unit thereafter accountable for terms it did not set (Burchell, 1993; du Gay et al., 1996), and government proceeds at a distance and by calculative means (Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller, 2010). What the case adds is the demonstration that these devices operate outward as well as inward, and that the enterprise may be constitutive of the regulation to which it is subject.

The third concerns accounting history and the patent. The tradition has established that calculative practices constitute rather than record, and thereby render persons and activities governable (Hopwood, 1983; Miller and O’Leary, 2001), and that they may legitimate authority by translating contested choices into technical necessities (Lazzini and Nicoliello, 2021). The Marconi case suggests that the patent belongs within this analysis, and the royalty of £100 per device payable by the Admiralty shows why with unusual economy. That formula prices access, records it, and converts a right into a recurring obligation; it is calculative in form and governmental in effect, and it does its work without a ledger being opened. The proposal advanced here is accordingly bounded: not that patents are accounting, but that they perform functions the accounting-history tradition has taught us to recognise, and that they warrant analysis on those terms. Intellectual property rights - patents, licences, proprietary standards - deserve a place in management history as objects of analysis in their own right rather than as background conditions of innovation, a claim consistent with the observation that the commercialisation of science engaged its protagonists simultaneously as patentees and as institutional actors (Mercelis et al., 2017).

This study asked through what mechanisms a private firm used its intellectual property rights to influence the conduct of governments and international regulatory bodies. The Marconi enterprise between 1896 and 1912 furnishes an answer in three parts. The firm first constructed exclusivity, building a patent that would resist legal and technical challenge and extending it to the jurisdictions in which the maritime market lay. It then set the terms on which access to that exclusivity might be had, leasing rather than selling, retaining the operator, pricing the right as a recurring royalty, and binding public administrations by clauses of exclusivity and non-intercommunication: access was granted, and it was granted so as to make withdrawal costly. Those dependencies were finally carried into the arena of multilateral negotiation, where they bore upon the positions that the governments concerned could adopt without loss. Throughout, the authority of the patent system supplied a legal standing and a vocabulary of just recompense with which restriction could be defended before Parliament, and after April 1912 a public recognition of a different order altered the terms on which the firm could afford to act. Patents and licences, on this reading, were not merely legal protections for an invention. They were the calculative-legal means by which a private enterprise governed public institutions at a distance, in Foucault’s (1991) sense: not by command, but by arranging the field within which others chose.

The contribution of the study belongs to management history, and is threefold. It brings intellectual property rights forward as an object of analysis in their own right, rather than as a background condition of innovation or competition. It shows that the Foucauldian analytics of power, which organisation scholars have applied chiefly to conduct within the firm, illuminates the converse movement, in which the enterprise governs from outside the institutions charged with regulating it, and may become constitutive of the regulation to which it is subject. And it extends the study of the large-scale enterprise to a source of advantage and a site of its consolidation that Chandler’s (1990) predominantly domestic and firm-centred framework leaves in shadow, namely the proprietary legal instrument and the relation with the state.

The claims advanced here are bounded, and it is worth stating the boundaries plainly. The study does not contend that the Italian state was deprived of the capacity to choose; it contends that the price of choosing otherwise had been arranged by another party, which is what government at a distance consists in and what distinguishes it from coercion. It does not contend that the positions of Italy and Britain at Berlin were determined by their contractual dependencies; both had interests of their own, and what the evidence sustains is that those dependencies entered into the calculation. Nor does it contend that the concession of 1912 is documented as having been made from a position of strength; that reading is an interpretation, offered as the one most consistent with the sequence of events.

A further boundary concerns the accounting dimension, and it should not be blurred. The empirical contribution of this study rests upon contractual, legal and institutional evidence. What the accounting-history tradition has supplied is the conceptual vocabulary with which that evidence has been interpreted: the recognition that calculative practices constitute rather than record, and that they may render conduct governable and legitimate the authority that deploys them (Hopwood, 1983; Miller and O’Leary, 2001; Lazzini and Nicoliello, 2021). The study therefore claims that patents and licences perform functions which that tradition has taught us to identify, and that they warrant analysis on those terms. It does not claim to have demonstrated the proposition through accounting records, which it has not consulted.

Other limitations qualify the reconstruction. The design is that of a single, exemplary case, and while it permits the mechanisms to be traced in detail and in sequence, it cannot establish how frequently they recurred, nor whether firms differently placed governed by comparable means. The archive is uneven, as historical archives are, and the analysis is confined to what has survived (McWatters, 2020). Part of the detail concerning the Italian negotiating position derives from Balbi’s (2012) study of the Marconi Archives rather than from direct consultation. And the analytical window closes in 1912, at the point where the legitimacy of the system found international recognition.

Each limitation indicates a direction for further work. The most consequential concerns the accounting dimension itself: balance sheets, patent valuations, internal cost records and the licensing contracts in their entirety would allow the calculative reading proposed here to be tested against the documents in which valuation and recording actually took place, and would establish on documentary grounds what the present study advances as a conceptual proposition. A second direction is comparative. Telefunken pursued a rival technological and diplomatic strategy in the same years and against the same regulatory background, and a comparison would show whether the mechanisms identified here are proper to the Marconi case or characteristic of a wider pattern - the question that a single case, by its nature, cannot settle. A third direction is temporal, and would follow the regime beyond 1912, through the subsequent conventions and into the emergence of broadcasting in the 1920s, when the terms of access to the spectrum were negotiated once more.

The case has a contemporary resonance, which is noted here rather than argued. Private control of critical communication infrastructure remains a matter of public dispute, and the current debate over satellite networks and their bearing upon the conduct of states echoes the questions raised at Berlin more than a century ago. The echo is suggestive; it is not a demonstrated parallel, and nothing in the evidence assembled here establishes that the mechanisms traced in the Marconi case operate in the same manner today. Whether they do is a question for research on contemporary materials. What the Marconi case does establish is that the question is not new: the government of public institutions through the private ownership of a technology was fully formed, and fully visible, at the moment when wireless communication began.