Richard Coopey, ed. Information and Technology Policy: An International History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xvi + 346 pp. ISBN 0-19-924105-8, $99.50 (cloth).

Richard Coopey’s Information and Technology Policy isan edited volume featuring an impressive array of scholars whoprovide nuanced accounts of national governmental policies relatedto the computer and (to a lesser extent) software industries.As Coopey writes in his introduction, the post–World WarII period is remembered as a time of American political, economic,and technological ascendancy. In the design, manufacture, anddistribution of computers, the United     

Pamela Walker Laird. Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. xiv + 439 pp. ISBN 0-674-01907-5, $29.95 (paper).

Success is as much about whom you know as it is about what youknow and how you perform. Networks, mentors, and role modelsplay pivotal roles in corporate climbing and entrepreneurship.Although the business lexicon only recently incorporated theseterms into its vocabulary, Pamela Laird convincingly arguesthat these forms of social capital, which she calls pull, havealways helped determine success. Moreover, because they existprimarily among individuals who see each other as belongingto the same cohort, success