Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on August 12, 2009
Enterprise and Society 2009 10(4):661-674; doi:10.1093/es/khp038
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"Industrial Legislatures": Consensus Standardization in the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions
ANDREW L. RUSSELL is an assistant professor in the College of Arts & Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology. This dissertation was completed in the Department of the History of Science and Technology at The Johns Hopkins University in 2007
Contact information: College of Arts & Letters, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ 07030, U.S.A. E-mail: arussell{at}stevens.edu
My dissertation is a study of standardization in four communications networks: AT&T's monopoly telephone network, the Internet, digital cellular telephone networks, and the World Wide Web. A history of these networks that highlights standardization shows how engineers in industry committees replaced managers in monopoly hierarchies as the stewards of standards for communication networks. By the end of the twentieth century, the new networks—and the new institutions devised to sustain the standardization process—formed the technological and ideological infrastructure of the Third Industrial Revolution.
I am grateful for the guidance and good humor of my advisor Bill Leslie and for words of wisdom from Louis Galambos, my committee members Robert Kargon, Harry Marks, and Andreas Terzis, and my friends in the Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at Johns Hopkins. The Department of the History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins, the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, and the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder provided financial support for my dissertation research and writing. I am pleased to acknowledge postdoctoral fellowships from John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University and the IEEE Life Members Committee that have supported my efforts to revise my dissertation for publication.