Technical standards ensure compatibility among the components of complex systems. Economists and others have studied standards selection, their effects on competition, and how sub-optimal standardization outcomes vary by the mechanisms used to create them. Actual standards creation has received less attention and their wider effects on industry structures are less understood. This research addresses three questions: (i) how standards making and adoption plays out in the design and implementation of large systems, (ii) how organizational and other actors coordinate with one another, with technology, and with standards, and (iii) how the creation and adoption of standards relates to these patterns of coordination.
These questions are explored using in-depth case studies of the US and UK mobile wireless and television industries. Two cases examine the development of early cellular radio standards and the data capabilities that helped transform the mobile phone into a computing and multimedia platform. Two other cases look at the TV industry, its convergence with telecom, and the emergence of mobile TV services. The cases draw upon archival sources and interviews with 42 executive level interviewees.
The cases show that standards, along with the characteristics of natural phenomena, shape the coordination of technologies and organizations in these industries. Economic and some social theoretical perspectives exhibit too much technological or social determinism to satisfactorily explain the relationships between standards and industry structures observed. The actor-network based process model presented conceptualizes industry changes as the dynamic interactions among actors pursuing their standardization and other strategies. This is extended to incorporate the analytical domains proposed by Lyytinen and King (2002): the innovation space, the marketplace, and the regulatory regime. The resulting model provides a high-level view of the actor-network, and of actor-network building, in both the mobile wireless and television industries.
Analog technologies sustained stable industry structures in the telecom, TV, and other industries by limiting the potential interconnections among them. The digital transition brought many industries closer together as well as providing platforms for service innovation and increased competition. The effects of digitization and the use of digital computing in these industries are conceptualized as a radical increase in the flexibility that key interfaces offer for actor-network building. This vastly increased flexibility is used to explain convergence, the explosion in the number of interfaces requiring standardization, and other industry and standardization changes observed in the cases.