Editorial Comments

A couple of days ago, I had a look at my to-do list. To my dismay, I realized that was supposed to write a paper on the future of standardization research (I really should look at my list more often). Luckily (in a way), I had to attend a rather boring seminar, which gave me some time to think: What does the future hold for standards research? The only correct answer, of course, would have to be that I'm not a prophet, and I don't know. But there are some indicators , at least in Europe. I have written earlier about the increasing awareness in Europe of the importance not only of standards but also of research about standards and standardization. Obviously, this is good news. A potential downside was exemplified by the argument that it is too academic as a reason for the rejection of proposals for two projects to analyze aspects of standards in the context of European policy. Does this hint at a tendency away from rigorous academic research (well, not even that terribly rigorous in the case of our proposals) to a more practical approach, which may yield quicker and better digestible, albeit not necessarily correct and fully explored, outcomes and also may well lead to a complete disaster (we've seen it before)? I certainly hope not. A look at the earlier issues of JITSR (which cover a period of 3.5 years) immediately confirms that standards research is highly multidisciplinary. Disciplines represented include, among others, economics, business studies, technology studies, telecom engineering, management and organizational studies, information systems, and computer science. Yet, one cannot help but notice a lack of truly interdisciplinary studies (as opposed to multidisciplinary; with the latter, each discipline works in a self-contained manner, and there is no integration across disciplines, whereas with interdisciplinary research, the contributions of the various disciplines are integrated formally). Given the complexity of the topic, I am convinced that we will have to move to more interdis-ciplinary research where the individual disciplines can inform each other, and where, I'm sure, research will give an outcome where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Also, despite the considerable variety of disciplines involved in standards research, some are suspiciously absent (at least from the backgrounds of JITSR authors). Most notably, this holds for lawyers but also for communication studies and psychology, for example. As policymakers (research and …