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****Call for Abstracts - Apologies for Cross Postings****
The Social Dynamics of Standardization
25th EGOS Colloquium, July 2–4, 2009, Barcelona
Conveners: Nils Brunsson (Stockholm Schools of Economics); Andreas Rasche (Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg); David Seidl (University of Zurich)
Deadline for submission of abstracts (up to 3000 words): January 11, 2009
(online submission via www.egosnet.org)
In modern organizations and societies, standards are proliferating. They occur in most fields (e.g., corporate governance, financial and social auditing, product development, technical design), take many forms (e.g., membership standards, multi-stakeholder standards), and are particularly relevant when we are thinking about regulating organizations beyond national boundaries (Brunsson &Jacobsson 2000; Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson 2006). In a broad sense, we can define standards as a particular type of rules: voluntary rules that are explicitly formulated to pertain to a wide set of actors (individuals or organizations). Many organizations are involved in developing, sustaining, and implementing standards. Such organizations include, but are not limited to, standard makers, adopters, monitoring and certification agencies, and the wider public.
Standards and standardization are often addressed as part of the wider discussion of organizational regulation. Regulation involves creating and propagating more or less explicit rules and thus fosters the formation of social order. Hence, studying standards allows us to consider both the “demand side” of order, i.e., how organizations and individuals are affected by organizing efforts, and the “supply side,” i.e., how organizing elements are produced.
Despite their pervasiveness and significance in modern life, social scientists have given comparatively little serious attention to standards. It is only within the last few years that researchers have started to systematically explore standards and the process of standardization. Apart from research on individual standards such as ISO 9000 (e.g., Beck & Walgenbach 2005), CSR standards (e.g., Déjan et al. 2004) or accounting standards (e.g., Perry & Noelke 2005), there are now also attempts to explore the logic of standards per se (e.g., Mörth 2004).