Traditional Institutional Structures and Practices

In order to understand how traditional processes and discursive spaces may be undergoing enclosure, it is useful to examine the baseline from which recent changes have taken place. In other words, it is important to ask, How open were these standards-setting institutions and their practices in the past? This is not an easy question to answer. The diversity among various institutions is considerable. Even the question, What institutions should we be talking about? is not easy to answer. A detailed historical account, analysis, and comparison of standardization bodies is beyond the scope of this study, but the three oldest and most established international standards-setting organizations , the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), and International Organization for Standardization (ISO), have been selected here because they are stable, they are respected, and their authority and legitimacy are well established. These organizations were mentioned briefly in an earlier chapter, as part of an historical overview of the global standardization system. They will now be examined in more detail.