“INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATURES”: CONSENSUS STANDARDIZATION IN THE SECOND AND THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS
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Date
2008-02-21T18:31:45Z
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
Consensus standardization is a social process in which technical experts from
public, private, and non-profit sectors negotiate the direction and shape of technological
change. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have recognized the importance of consensus
standards as alternatives to standards that arise through market mechanisms or standards
mandated by regulators. Rather than treating the consensus method as some sort of
timeless organizational form or ever-present alternative to markets or laws, I argue that
consensus standardization is itself a product of history.
In the first two chapters, I explain the origins and growth of consensus standards
bodies between 1880 and 1930 as a reaction to and critique of the existing political
economy of engineering. By considering the standardization process—instead of the
internal dynamics of a particular firm or technology—as the primary category of analysis,
I am able to emphasize the cooperative relations that sustained the American style of
competitive managerial capitalism during the Second Industrial Revolution. In the
remaining four chapters, I examine the processes of network architecture and
standardization in the creation of four communications networks during the twentieth
century: AT&T’s monopoly telephone network, the Internet, digital cellular telephone
networks, and the World Wide Web.
Each of these four networks embodied critiques—always implicit and frequently
explicit—of preceding and competing networks. These critiques, visible both in the
technological design of networks as well as in the institutional design of standard-setting
bodies, reflected the political convictions of successive generations of engineers and network architects. The networks described in this dissertation were thus turning points
in the century-long development of an organizational form. Seen as part of a common
history, they tell the story of how consensus-based institutions became the dominant
mode for setting standards in the Third Industrial Revolution, and created the
foundational standards of the information infrastructures upon which a newly globalized
economy and society—the Network Society—could grow.