Technical Controversy in International Standardization

The development of larger technical systems relies on the coordination of autonomous action of a multitude of individuals and organizations. Institutional settings, often neglected in the analysis of technical development, help to achieve such coordination. Our analysis of international technical standardization in telecommunications highlights an institutionalized process aiming at the creation of compatibility standards as the means for coordination. Formal procedural, membership, and decision rules combined with informal sets of expectations constitute the normative basis of the CCITT, the most prominent international standardization organization in telecommunications. Although scientific, political and economic aspects can be equally important for standards, the CCITT selectively legitimizes a technical perspective. Political and scientific reasoning is restricted, an open economic perspective even completely banned, unless they can be "translated" into a technical perspective. This increases the capacity to proceed on a consensusal basis and often facilitates reaching a consensus in a controversy. Standardization of Videotex and Telefax empirically examplifies this, and at the same time demonstrates the limits of pure technical reasoning to resolve genuine political or economic conflicts.