Standards and standardization on the eve of a new century

· This paper surveys some problems of standard sett ing and adoption in a highly f lex ib le economic society which demands new and di f ferent iated products (postfordist organization). In part icular , i t shows how adopting a nonhierarchical standard could cause problems w h e n making laroe s c a l e co-ordination la ter on. Unpredictabil i ty and path dependency are c lear ly the common features of technolooical adoption patterns. When the technolooy adopted is supported by the majority, i t i s difficult to change, which makes it crucial for f i rms and other decision makers to make the right choices in the ear ly phase of technolooical development. ost-fordism and standards Managers always need new buzzwords. They fill the market with them. Postfordism is one of the new words that may help us understand our changing environment. It tries to capture what is new in industrial societies as a consequence of the diffusion of information and communication technologies. It defines the new (post-) contrasts it with the old (fordism): Flexibility versus rigidity; adaptive and evolutionary versus planned and fixed relations with the environment; variety and differentiation versus standardization and homogeneity. Two main forces are at work in creating a post-fordist organization. The first, driven by demand, is a new attitude toward variety and differentiation. A higher disposable income and new cultural attitudes that stress individual behavior increase the value consumers place on variety. The second comes from the corporate side in the form of new technologies, especially applications of information and communication technologies to production processes, which have dramatically lowered the cost of producing varieties of products. Multipurpose workstations, industrial robots, and numerically controlled machines reduced setup costs; automated materials-handling systems and local area networks reduced the cost of co-ordinating complex materials flows, and so on. While previously, operations needed simpler production flows and required working with nonchangeable systems, it is now possible to cope with more complex and variable flows. Is it possible to separate post-fordism from standardization? Stated differently, is a post-fordist society a place in which there is no room for homogeneity, fixed norms, variety, and variability reduction? The author feels that post-fordism needs standardization, but one different than in the past. Standardization in a post-fordist society can be seen by contrasting it with that in a fordist society: