Standardization organizations in the area of information and telecommunications technology have mushroomed in the last two decades. In addition to new official organizations at the regional level, many private consortiums and forums have been set up that complement and compete with the incumbent national and international organizations. The organizational landscape and the relations between the standardization organizations are examined, and institutional reasons that could explain why the frequency and intensity of jurisdictional conflicts has remained low are considered. Institutional features do not only frame a standardization organization's behavior toward other organizations, they also account for speed, exclusiveness, costs and market acceptance of standardization and thus influence firms' decisions as to which organization to turn to with a standards issue. ZusammenfassungIn den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten ist die Zahl der Standardisierungsorganisationen im Bereich der Informations-und Telekommunikationstechnik rasch gewachsen. Neben neuen offiziellen Organisationen auf der regionalen Ebene sind viele private Konsortien und Foren entstanden, die sich mit den bestehenden nationalen und internationalen Organisationen ergänzen oder auch mit ihnen konkurrieren. Die Landschaft der Standardisierungsorganisationen und die Beziehungen zwischen ihnen werden untersucht und zudem die institutionellen Faktoren aufgezeigt, die dazu beitragen, dass Kompetenzkonflikte relativ selten auftreten und nicht sehr intensiv sind. Die institutionellen Merkmale kanalisieren nicht nur das Verhalten der Standardisierungsorganisationen untereinander, sie beeinflussen auch Geschwindigkeit, Exklusivität, Kosten und Marktakzeptanz der Standardisierung und leiten damit die Entscheidung der Unternehmen, an welche Organisation sie sich mit einem Standardisierungsproblem wenden.

The European Community as a social configuration, with its complex division of competencies and action capacities between EC institutions and national governments, is still difficult to conceptualize. In this context the authors propose the concept of corporate actor networks in order to understand more thoroughly the interaction processes of policy integration by which the European community has accumulated increasing supranational action capacities. A case study on the emergence and development EC telecommunications policy provides the background for a discussion of the scope, structure and operation of such EC policy actor networks.

The way information and communication technology (ICT) develops can promote or hinder the democratic potential of this critical societal infrastructure. Concerns about the role standards development organizations (SDOs) play in this context predate the 'digital age' but are reemerging amid substantial changes in the institutional landscape of standardization. This article explores the increasingly critical link between the institutional design of SDOs and the democratic design of ICT. We review some principles of democracy in terms of the design of technology, apply these to standardization, and discuss the role public policy may play here, while distinguishing between input and output legitimacy.

The emergence of large technical systems like railroads, telecommunication networks or power grids was closely associated with hierarchical governance. Despite the success of hierarchical structures in promoting the development of these systems they have recently come under strain. They are suspected of being too slow, too cumbersome, and too unimaginative to deal with the complexity and turbulence of modern technology. Practical people as well as academics look for functional alternatives. One of the alternatives is the decentralisation of technical control via standards. The paper investigates this alternative by analysing the role that standards have achieved in telecommunications after the hierarchical order was eroded by globalisation and deregulation. It discusses how the demise of hierarchy has boosted the ‘demand’ for standards and how the institutional infrastructure for standardisation was adapted to meet this demand