History of Technology Volume 28

Description

Technical standards have received increasing attention in recent years from historians of science and technology, management theorists and economists. Often, inquiry focuses on the emergence of stability, technical closure and culturally uniform modernity. Yet current literature also emphasizes the durability of localism, heterogeneity and user choice. This collection investigates the apparent tension between these trends using case studies from across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The History of Technology addresses tensions between material standards and process standards, explores the distinction between specifying standards and achieving convergence towards them, and examines some of the discontents generated by the reach of standards into 'everyday life'. Includes the Special Issue "By whose standards? Standardization, stability and uniformity in the history of information and electrical technologies"

Ian Inkster is Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK.

Editors Graeme Gooday and James Sumner have selected a diverse set of articles ...[the book] adds value by challenging how we understand standardization in the realm of technology and industry. It should be read by all those interested in processes of standardization. -- British Journal for the History of Science