4. Values, Media, and Genres for Standardization

This chapter applies genre theory to the history of voluntary standardization. Drawing from research on electrical, Internet, and Web standardization reported in Yates and Murphy (Engineering rules: global standard setting since 1880. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2019), I show how genres shape and reflect the values and processes for arriving at product and performance standards across firms in voluntary standard setting, and how they change when new values and media are adopted. The traditional genres of standardization used through most of the twentieth century (demonstrated in genres used in radio frequency interference standardization in the 1960s through 1980s) reflected values of technical orientation, consensus, balance of stakeholders, respect for all stakeholder views, willingness to spend time on due process through repeated balloting, and (at the international level) internationalism. In the late 1980s, new standards organizations emerged to set standards for the Internet and the World Wide Web. In them, new or altered genres arose, reflecting and revealing shifts in values toward transparency, timeliness, and free availability of standards, and less emphasis on balance, respect, due process, and international representation. The move to electronic communication occurred from the beginning in the new standards organizations, also shaping the new genres. In contrast, the old organizations simply reproduced existing genres in new media, reinforcing my earlier work identifying values more than media as the key driver in genre change. More broadly, this study argues that genres are useful tools for historical and contemporary social analysis in many realms.