For more than a decade the Internet was confronted with ignorance and resistance in many European countries. National and European technology policies were unfavorable to not invented here technologies and committed to open networks of a different kind. The incumbent network operators in...

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...

In verschiedenen sozialwissenschaftlichen Teildisziplinen finden sich institutionalistische Ansätze, die die Entstehung, Entwicklung und Ausbreitung von Technik analysieren, ohne dass diese unbedingt den zentralen Fokus der Studien bildet. Die wichtigsten stammen aus dem Bereich der Forschung...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Different sub-disciplines of the social sciences analyse the evolution and diffusion of technical innovations from an institutional perspective. Important contributions are provided by socio-economic studies of national systems of innovation, by politico-economic research on the varieties of...

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...