Theoretical perspective to analyze organizational strategy for information and communications technology standards

Standardization of innovative technology can create great competitive advantage for organizations. In addition, the consequences of interactions between organizations as they implement their standards strategies can have tremendous socio-economic impact, especially with the current convergence in information and communications technology. The existing research on standards uses economic theories to explain how economic factors stimulate technology standardization and game theory to analyze how organizations collaborate on standardization, but these theories both overlook the issue of how organizations make decisions about their standards strategies and the results of their interactions with other actors. Thus, the research question presented in this paper is: how do organizations reach their strategies for standards during and after the standardization process? To answer this question, we need a holistic perspective to analyze the context of organizational standards strategy, including the situation of any given organization and how the organization interprets its situation to choose or develop a certain strategy. This research presents a framework based on combining two theories, ANT (actor network theory) and self-organized complexity.