Coordinating International Standards: The Formation of the ISO

In the article on “Standardization” in the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Paul Gough Agnew, the long-time Secretary of the American Standards Association (ASA), argued: In the flow of products from farm, forest, mine, and sea through processing and fabricating plants, and through wholesale and retail markets to the ultimate consumer, most difficulties are met at the transition points––points at which the product passes from department to department within a company, or is sold by one company to another or to an individual. The main function of standards is to facilitate the flow of products through these transition points. Standards are thus both facilitators and integrators. In smoothing out points of difficulty, or “bottlenecks,” they provide the evolutionary adjustments which are necessary for industry to keep pace with technical advances. They do this in the individual plant, in particular industries, and in industry at large. They are all the more effective as integrators in that they proceed by simple evolutionary steps, albeit inconspicuously.2 Albeit inconspicuous, standard setting has been among the nuts and bolts of globalizing industrial capitalism since its beginning, assuring that things needing to work together fit from product to product, industry to industry, and country to country. The foci of the first two of the now 229 “technical committees” of the non-specialized international standards organizations that emerged after the two world wars—the interwar International Standards Association [ISA] and the post-World War II International Organization for Standardization [ISO]—are iconic: “Screw Threads” and “Bolts, Nuts and Accessories.” Over the past two decades, voluntary standardization processes, invented by turn-of-the-twentieth-century engineers working in national and international technical committees, have increasingly been 1 We would like to thank Madame Beatrice Frey at ISO for her help in providing us access to original documents from UNSCC and ISO, and Stacy Leistner at ANSI for his help in providing access to the minutes from AESC and ASA meetings. 2 Quoted as epigraph of Dickson Reck, ed., National Standards in a Modern Economy, (New York, 1956), v. 3 applied to issues that have little in common with those of fitting one mechanical part to another, such as work processes (ISO 9000), environmental pollution (ISO 14,000), and human rights (SA 8000 and the planned ISO 26000)

Virtual Organizing: Using Threads to Coordinate Distributed Work

This paper explores the critical role of conversational threads in facilitating the ongoing, distributed work of one virtual organization. In studying the electronic mail exchanges of organizational members during one year, we found that they engaged in a range of threading activity to establish and maintain continuity, coherence, and coordination in their collaborative work over time. In particular, we found that organizational members relied on simple threads to focus their attention and action on a particular topic over a short period of time, concurrent threads to enable their participation in multiple topics at the same time, and compound threads to allow provisional settlement of key issues that were subsequently revisited over extended periods of time. We conclude by discussing the implications of conversational threads for research and practice of virtual organizin

A cégeken belüli információáramlás alakulása 1850 és 1920 között – Ideológia, információtechnikák és információtechnológiák

Korunk információs forradalmát sokan előzmények nélkülinek tartják, annak ellenére, hogy alig egy évszázada amerikai cégek egy másik hasonló eseménysor részesei voltak. Sem a műszaki fejlesztések kínálata, sem pedig a vállalatok nagyságában és szerkezetében végbemenő változások nem adnak elégségest választ az akkori forradalom különböző szakaszaira. Ezért nem szabad elfeledkeznünk a rendszerszerű vállalatvezetés-ideológiáról, ami ösztönzőleg hatott az új berendezések és technikák alkalmazására; a növekvő hatékonyság hozzájárult a költségek csökkentéséhez, ami előmozdította az új ideológia elterjedését

Conversational Coherence in Instant Messaging and Getting Work Done

This paper explores the critical role conversational coherence plays in facilitating the ongoing, distributed work of one virtual team as they engage in instant messaging (IM) conversations to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate. In studying the IM conversations of team members over the course of a month, a number of challenges to coherence emerged as they communicated with each other and worked together. These challenges include two previously identified challenges—lack of simultaneous feedback, and disrupted turn adjacency—and two additional challenges: multi-tasking, and authority. We describe the team’s responses to these challenges and conclude by discussing implications for research

ELECTRONIC MARKETS AND ELECTRONIC HIERARCHIES: EFFECTS OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ON MARKET STRUCTUR CORPORATE STRATEGIES

This paper analyzes the fundamental changes in market structures that may result from the increasing use of information teChnology. First, an analytic framework is presented and its usefulness is demonstrated in explaining several major historical changes in American business structures. Then, the framework is used to help explain how electronic markets and electronic hierarchies will allow closer integration of adjacent steps in the value-added chains of our economy. The most surprising prediction is that information technology will lead to an overall shift toward proportionately more coordination by markets rather than by internal decisions within firms. Finally, several examples of companies where these changes are already occurring are used to illustrate the likely paths by which new market structures will evolve and the ways in which individual companies can take advantage of these changes

The Shift from Centralized to Peer-to-Peer Communication in an Online Community: Participants as a Useful Aspect of Genre Analysis

In this paper we analyzed an online community based on a mailing list that was created as an internal marketing tool for launching a new network service. We focused on the change in communication over time among dispersed Sales representatives and the employees in a centralized Service Department. We conducted a genre analysis based on content (what), purpose (why), timing (when), form (how) and participants (who communicates to whom) (Yates and Orlikowski, 2002). Analyzing the participants in a genre and how those participants changed over time highlighted a shift from centralized to dispersed, peer-to-peer communication in this community. We highlight implications both for genre analysis and for organizational practice

The Role of an Online Community in Relation to Other Communication Channels in a Business Development Case

We investigated how sales representatives (Salespeople) and members of a service business development department (the Service Dept.) communicated within an informal online community, particularly in relation to their use of other informal and formal communication channels. We found that while the Service Dept. developed formal communication channels in order to fulfill the information needs of Sales, some types of information were apparently more effectively provided by the online community. The result suggests that an online community may play an important role both in making visible information needs, and in providing information that can’t be better provided by the formal organization