Technical standards in telecommunications – the central focus of this paper - were traditionally developed by official government accredited or intergovernmental organizations. In the last two decades, however, private forums and consortia of standardization have evolved which initiated a...

Modern societies regard knowledge as a production factor in its own right. The market is the prevailing governance mode of their economies, and it is supposed to be the most appropriate mode of trading and allocating knowledge assets, too. But socio-economic research has revealed that knowledge...

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...

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...

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...

Mit der Ausbreitung des Internet haben die Erwartungen, dass die elektronischen Kommunikationsmedien tiefgreifende gesellschaftliche Veränderungsprozesse auslösen werden, neue Nahrung erhalten. Gelegentlich wird sogar behauptet, dass sich außerhalb der Realgesellschaft eine Cybersociety...

The purpose of this paper, which was written for a forthcoming book on the state-of-the-art in the social sciences, is to survey the influence which natural science concepts and models have recently had on theoretical developments in the social sciences, especially sociology. Such influences can...

Evolutionstheoretische Erklärungen technischer Entwicklung haben in der letzten Zeit an Stellenwert gewonnen. Die vorliegende Arbeit sieht zwei Schwachstellen dieser Ansätze. Zum einen fehlt eine über stochastische Prozesse hinausgehende Erklärung der Entstehung von Varianz. Zum anderen wird...