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“Industrial Legislatures”: Consensus Standardization in the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Andrew L. Russell
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Abstract

My dissertation is a study of standardization in four communications networks: AT&T's monopoly telephone network, the Internet, digital cellular telephone networks, and the World Wide Web. A history of these networks that highlights standardization shows how engineers in industry committees replaced managers in monopoly hierarchies as the stewards of standards for communication networks. By the end of the twentieth century, the new networks—and the new institutions devised to sustain the standardization process—formed the technological and ideological infrastructure of the Third Industrial Revolution.

Information

Type
Dissertation Summaries
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 661 - 674
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2009. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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