Bargaining norms (EN)

Technical standard are a typical phenomenon of complex societes. They are a means to achieve control and to regulate or coordinate the production and uses of technology. In this publication, reseachers and practitioners argue that standardisation should be understood as technological as well as social and political activity.

Datum 17 augustus 2008
Toekomstonderzoeker

Preface

This monograph unravels the process of negotiating standards. It offers perspectives on negotiations in transportation and telecommunication infrastructure from different disciplinary perspectives and from the different viewpoints of practitioners. For the STT foresight project, it is crucial to gain insight into these processes. This enables STT to advise Dutch parties involved, on which questions, strategies and policies they should focus on to position the Netherlands within international infrastructure networks. The articles give us unexpected glimpses behind the scenes, illustrating the pre-conditions required for attaining standards.

This multiform book results from a close cooperation between the STT Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends and researchers from the Universities of Maastricht and Utrecht. The productive collaboration originated from the shared interest in standardisation processes for trans-border infrastructure development. Standards play a crucial role in facilitating the international exchange of goods, people and information. This makes them both a fascinating topic of study for researchers and a key-element in future infrastructure development. These combined interests led to the organisation and financing of an international workshop in Utrecht to map crucial aspects of standardisation processes that often remain unnoticed: the processes of negotiating standards. The workshop received additional financial support from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Graduate School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC).

Based on the outstanding quality of the contributions, STT took the initiative to publish the papers and comments from the workshop. Usually we present STT studies as end products. However, in this bundle of essays we show you the results of the first step in the foresight process, which focused on identifying key-issues, preceding the next step of offering outlooks into the future. The conclusions offer a first impulse for a research agenda, strategy and policy, which at a later stage will be tested on their robustness for the future.

This book is part of the STT foresight project entitled: ‘HubHolland.eu’ which explores the future of infrastructure networks in Europe and the position

of the Netherlands here in. Other workshops in this project, focused on the themes: safe-guarding public values; the attractiveness of the Netherlands as a hub; and on issues concerning governance for border-crossing infrastructure projects. All these preliminary workshops accumulated in a scenario-workshop and round-table discussions, in which the role of standards recurs. The topic of standardisation processes surpasses the national boundaries; we therefore encouraged the idea of broadening the topic beyond the Dutch frontier and developing an international scope. This allowed for an alliance with the European Research Area ForSociety.

We hope you enjoy reading and using this book.

Who would have thought home-baked cookies played such a central role in obtaining international standards?

Karla Peijs
Chair Steering Committee HubHolland.eu

Wiebe Draijer
Chair STT

Introduction: The Complexity of Negotiating Technical Standards

Forty years ago, in July 1966, the international efforts to agree on a common standard for colour television in Europe failed. After years of intense discussion between various actors on the technical, industrial and political scene, the study commission XI (television) of the CCIR (Comité Consultatif Internationale des Radiocommunications) — an advisory body on radio communication technologies of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) — was unable to present a consistent recommendation for one European colour television standard to the Plenary Conference meeting in Oslo. While many television engineers and broadcasting officials all over Europe had hoped that the introduction of colour television would bring an end to the fragmented European landscape of black and white television standards, the advent of colour finally, added a new technical hurdle to the already complicated process of transnational programme exchange in Europe. As a result of competing industrial and technopolitical strategies and interests, the European television landscape became divided. The press caricatured the new division of Europe in Cold War rhetoric as ‘colour television curtain’, segregating the mainly Eastern European Secam camp from the Western European (with some prominent exceptions as France, Greece and Luxbourg) Pal camp.

The colour television story is — at least to a certain degree — exemplary for the complexity of standardisation processes and for the ambivalent effects that standardisation can evoke [Fickers, 2007]. It demonstrates the interlacement of technical, economic and political interests when it comes to defining the technical standard both at the national and international level. In addition, it points to the crucial importance of the social and the symbolic capital involved in an apparently ‘neutral thing’ such as a technical standard.

Technical standards are a typical phenomenon of complex societies. They are a means to achieve control and to regulate or coordinate the production and uses of technology. Proportional to the increase of complexity, standards are a prerequisite for enabling the (international) interlinking of technical components and systems. As Timmermans and Berg [Timmermans et al., 2003a; 2003b: 8] argue: “…standards emerged as one of the hallmarks of rationalization.” Technical standards act as control procedures and enable the interoperability of socio-technical systems: “Standards specify how we work, how our societies interact; they hold our sociotechnical societies together.” (p. 8) When technical standards gained crucial importance during the industrial revolution, they were primarily aimed at improving the trade and production process (e.g. Taylorism as an early example of standardising the production process). Standardisation became one of the central pillars in the functional ideology of scientific and technological progress.

Over the past decades, the EU has made standardisation a top priority in order to support the stabilisation of a common market and the unification of Europe. The aims expressed repeatedly by the EU, in reports on infrastructure development focus on interlinking national infrastructures, cross-border exchange of people, freight, data or information, interoperability and safety. All these aims require standards. The European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) sees standards as an essential way to “help building the ‘soft infrastructure’ of modern, innovative economies.” Hence, the development of infrastructure networks cannot be understood without taking standards into account. Thinking about the future of transnational infrastructure development implies a better understanding of the process of standardisation.

In this book, researchers and practitioners argue that standardisation should be understood as technological as well as social and political. Although standardisation is sometimes seen as a boring, highly technical and apolitical process, the contrary is true. Standards are socially constructed in complex and lengthy interaction and negotiation processes. They are inherently political. The high stakes involved in standardisation processes (political, economic, but also in terms of reputation and prestige) and their contested The colour television story is — at least to a certain degree — exemplary for the complexity of standardisation processes and for the ambivalent effects that standardisation can evoke [Fickers, 2007]. It demonstrates the interlacement of technical, economic and political interests when it comes to defining the technical standard both at the national and international level. In addition, it points to the crucial importance of the social and the symbolic capital involved in an apparently ‘neutral thing’ such as a technical standard.

Technical standards are a typical phenomenon of complex societies. They are a means to achieve control and to regulate or coordinate the production and uses of technology. Proportional to the increase of complexity, standards are a prerequisite for enabling the (international) interlinking of technical components and systems. As Timmermans and Berg [Timmermans et al., 2003a; 2003b: 8] argue: “…standards emerged as one of the hallmarks of rationalization.” Technical standards act as control procedures and enable the interoperability of socio-technical systems: “Standards specify how we work, how our societies interact; they hold our sociotechnical societies together.” (p. 8) When technical standards gained crucial importance during the industrial revolution, they were primarily aimed at improving the trade and production process (e.g. Taylorism as an early example of standardising the production process). Standardisation became one of the central pillars in the functional ideology of scientific and technological progress.

Over the past decades, the EU has made standardisation a top priority in order to support the stabilisation of a common market and the unification of Europe. The aims expressed repeatedly by the EU, in reports on infrastructure development focus on interlinking national infrastructures, crossborder exchange of people, freight, data or information, interoperability and safety. All these aims require standards. The European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) sees standards as an essential way to “help building the ‘soft infrastructure’ of modern, innovative economies.” Hence, the development of infrastructure networks cannot be understood without taking standards into account. Thinking about the future of transnational infrastructure development implies a better understanding of the process of standardisation.

In this book, researchers and practitioners argue that standardisation should be understood as technological as well as social and political. Although standardisation is sometimes seen as a boring, highly technical and a-political process, the contrary is true. Standards are socially constructed in complex and lengthy interaction and negotiation processes. They are inherently political. The high stakes involved in standardisation processes (political, economic, but also in terms of reputation and prestige) and their contested nature, make standards and the processes interesting strategic research sites. Standardisation processes are complex and difficult to achieve. Paradoxically, standards developed to coordinate or control people or processes, turn out to be particularly difficult to control themselves [Ciborra, 2000; Hanseth et al., 1994; Timmermans, 2003a]. To negotiate norms and standards proves to be a technological as well as political tour de force. In formal standardisation processes, a variety of actors are involved: engineers, politicians, industrialists, international standardisation bodies etc. These negotiation processes often remain hidden to the general public and for scholars interested in studying these processes; it is often hard to find out what happened and why. This also defines the extent to which governmental and entrepreneurial policies can influence the processes of standardisation.

One way to get a better grasp of what is going on in standardisation processes is to focus on these micro-level processes of arguing and bargaining. Researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds have been studying standardisation and the negotiation processes involved. Our aim here is to bring together perspectives from the history and sociology of technology, economics, business studies and political science. Their views on standardisation processes will be confronted with the views of experts who were actively involved in such processes. Key questions that will be addressed are:

  • How do technical standards emerge?
  • What is the role of negotiations in these processes?
  • Who are the negotiators?
  • Which problems do they face?
  • What is the role of national and international (political) styles, informal networks, reputation and prestige?
  • Finally, what does this mean for research and policy on standardisation?

This work combines two ambitions. In the first place, it feeds into a growing academic interest in standardisation processes. It offers the reader a mosaic of different research perspectives on bargaining and negotiating technical standards. In the second place, it helps to prepare the way for outlooks into transnational infrastructure development, as part of a foresight exercise performed by STT Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends. It wants to signal the importance of standardisation for infrastructure development and to analyse, where policies could potentially focus on to stimulate effective standardisation processes. We challenge the readers to translate the insights of the different case studies to implications for policy on both a national and European level.

The aims can be summarised as follows:

  • Multidisciplinarity: We want to broaden the intellectual horizon by asking scholars from a diversity of scientific fields to reflect upon negotiating standards.
  • Interdisciplinarity: We hope to integrate these view in a coherent perspective on negotiating standards.
  • Transdisciplinarity: We want to learn from the interactions between expert practitioners and scholars.

Contents

In the first part, Tineke Egyedi and Henk de Vries make an attempt to map the diverse field of standardisation research from their own disciplinary perspective. They critically reflect upon the current trends in standardisation and standardisation research. Egyedi represents a social scientific perspective on standardisation, including research in the field of Science, Technology and Society studies. De Vries takes a business studies perspective on standardisation research.

In Part two, the focus moves to negotiation processes. As an expert on political negotiation theories Frank Pfetsch presents a number of negotiation models from the field of conflict studies. Furthermore, he discusses the role of political styles and national cultures in negotiation processes.

In Part three, the historical investigations on the QWERTY-case (by Andreas Reinstaller) and the ITU frequency allocation (by Christian Henrich-Franke) emphasize the importance of social networks and ‘soft factors’ in standardisation processes and — in a more general sense — in innovation as such. Both reinforce the necessity to historicise the analysis of past standardisation processes, in order to gain useful insights into the complex practices of negotiating standards. Thereby, contributing to a empirical enrichment of sometimes, too abstract standardisation theories, especially in the field of economics.

In Part four, two historians of technology, Nina Wormbs and Marine Moguen-Toursel, present empirical studies on the development of telecommunication and transport standards. Wormbs discusses standardisation as a form of regulation. She analyses the case of early radio broadcasting in Europe (1920s) and the negotiations on, for instance, the formula for allocating wavelengths. Moguen-Toursel reveals the tough negotiations on the European Commission level for standard weights and dimensions of commercial vehicles (like trucks) (1949-the mid 1970s).

In Part five, two interviews with ‘practitioners’ discuss the experience of the negotiation processes that they were involved in. Hans Borgonjen, head of the R&D department of the ICT organisation for the Dutch Police, was involved in the negotiations around the Tetra standard: a formal technical communication standard for services in the ‘command and control’ sector (like emergency services). Willem Wakker is director of ACE Consulting. He has been active in the world of standardisation since 1988 and was involved in various international standardisation committees.

Finally, a brief conclusion sums up the outcomes of the different articles and sketches the implications for future research and policy.

References

  • Ciborra, C.U., ed. (2000). From Control to Drift. The Dynamics of Corporate Information Infrastructures. Oxford University Press, Oxford
  • Fickers, A. (2007). „Politique De La Grandeur“ Versus „Made in Germany“. Politische Kulturgeschichte Der Technik Am Beispiel Der Pal-Secam-Kontroverse. Oldenbourg, München
  •  Hanseth, O. et al. (1994). The Politics of Networking Technology in Health Care. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 2, 1-2, pp. 109-130
  • Timmermans, S., M. Berg (2003a). The Gold Standard : The Challenge of Evidence-Based Medicine and Standardisation in Health Care. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA
  • Timmermans, S., M. Berg (2003b). The Gold Standard. The Challenge of Evidence-Based Medicine and Standardisation in Health Care. Temple University Press, Philadelphia
Bargaining Norms, Arguing Standards