Standards 2

In my recent post on Standards, I said that "while there is a lot of debate about individual standards, or the choice between apparent alternatives, there is little rigorous debate about standardization as a whole".

So I was happy to see the announcement (via John Gøtze) of the latest issue of MIS Quarterly, a Special Issue on Standards-Making, guest-edited by Kalle Lyttinen and John Leslie King.

"The introductory article by the editors Kalle Lyytinen and John Leslie King, Standard Making: A Critical Research Frontier For Information Systems Research, is freely available, as are abstracts for all articles, but you need access to a research database to get online access to full-text articles."

I have known (and been impressed by) Kalle for many years, and I am delighted to see the latest product of his researches. But I infer from his article that rigorous debate is going to be limited to those who can master a range of interacting intellectual disciplines, including some difficult areas of economics and sociology, as well as the technological aspects.

So we are still a long way from having decent answers to the questions I posed earlier.

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