Browsing by Author "Brito Salas, Kelly Natalia"

This Master’s Thesis discusses the Publicness of public telecommunications services through the case study of the Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Bogotá – ETB. Dimensional Publicness is a degree to which an organization is endowed or constrained by political authority. The main objective of this research was to identify an alternative point of view to the public versus private discourse, taking a closer look to what influences organizational behavior and how these influences affect the public character of an organization. It is a qualitative case study that contributes to the discussion on the governance of infrastructure and service delivery, critical urban research, and organization theory. This work also serves as a case study of the current dynamics of planning politics in the global south. The data consists of primary and secondary sources, which consisted of digital newspaper articles, interviews, official reports, legal documents, information requests, academic literature, and raw data. The findings highlight a strong regulated political authority and affinity to public values, that has had both a positive and negative impact on ETB’s behavior, and affirm that a debate on ownership is minimal if we think on the greater picture of the role of companies for development. The focus should not only be on questioning which sector is best to deliver, rather answer what do we want out of companies and public services, or any service in general. There is a need to place organization behavior in a context of affinity to public sector values, enriched with political inputs from both society and the State, without discarding the imperative of financial and organizational sustainability. This research hopes to be a source of unified information on the privatization debate of ETB, a unique approach to Dimensional Publicness, and input for alternative arguments outside the outdated public-private ownership divide. Answering these inquiries also provide inputs on discovering empirically the current telecommunications framework in Colombia, spaces for improvement for ways to strengthen community and promote citizenship in the city’s telecommunication service delivery framework.