Standards as Hybrids: An Essay on Tensions and Juxtapositions in Contemporary Standardization

Abstract

Today the political rhetoric of the European Union is focused on the transformation from service/industrial to Information Society – the concept emphasizing the role of national and global information infrastructures in the economic development of the state (Castells, 1996). Guided by the vision as laid out in European Commission’s programme “eEurope,” European societies and economies are accelerating the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in a hope to be able to fully exploit the potential of the new informational economy, which is expected to bring not less than a “tremendous potential for growth, employment and inclusion”1 (Council of the European Union, 1999, p.4). Similar to the processes of interconnecting roads and railways, bolts and nuts in the formation of the industrial economies, building informational economy requires networking of myriad of disparate information systems and resources on different levels of social organizing. Inter-operating informational resources and systems, making a “workable whole” out of disparate local implementations, brings about new requirements and dynamics unknown in the construction of industrial age infrastructure – the instantaneity of production and delivery of services, the inter-modality of different infrastructures (such as e.g., cellular mobile, the Internet, TV, radio, GPS) (Edwards, 2000), consistency of informational resources (Gill & Miller, 2002), a host of security-, safetyand privacy-related issues – just few to mention. With new unthinkable levels of complexity in assuring interoperability of informational tools and resources, scholars of standardization and infrastructure development are operating with theories on standards competition and interoperability based on the knowledge of pre-informational age, and the validity of the extant theories is tried and often refuted as new cases of informational age are studied. To take few examples, competition of Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) file formats is not like typical standards contests as we know from the Standards as Hybrids: An Essay on Tensions and Juxtapositions in Contemporary Standardization