Standards, and Consortia, as discussed in Veblen's "Theory of Business Enterprise"

Thorstein Veblen was a thinker very early to the subject of business management and industrial systems. He is better known for his thesis on the inner workings of conspicuous consumption, "Theory of the Leisure Class". This work, "Theory of Business Enterprise" goes more into management theory, but in the first few pages contains some ideas about why "standardisation" of the description and measurement of interfaces is necessary or profitable for business purposes.

As a matter of course, tools and the various structural materials used are made of standard sizes, shapes, and gauges. When the dimensions, in fractions of an inch or in millimetres, and the weight, in fractions of a pound or in grammes, are given, the expert foreman or workman, confidently and without reflection, infers the rest of what need be known of the uses to which any given item that passes under his hand may be turned.

What is not competently standardized calls for too much of craftsmanlike skill, reflection, and individual elaboration, and is therefore not available for economical use in the processes.

Connect this to Adam Smith's thinking in "The Wealth of Nations" and his promotion of "division of labour". Craftslike skill in a simple, repetitive work seems like wasted time, time that could be spent enjoying oneself, educating oneself. Profit from your increased output relative to labour time enters the economy as a whole, providing surplus for use in bleak times or bleak places.

Irregularity in products intended for industrial use carries a penalty to the nonconforming producer which urges him to fall into line and submit to the required standardization.

Materials, to answer the needs of standardized industry, must be drawn from certain standard sources at a definite rate of supply. Hence any given detail industry depends closely on receiving its supplies from certain, relatively few, industrial establishments whose work belongs earlier in the process of elaboration. And it may similarly depend on certain other, closely defined, industrial establishments for a vent of its own specialization and standardization product. It may likewise depend in a strict manner on special means of transportation

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When a product directly influences or defines a special means of transportation, it has both a direct and indirect means of "leverage" on "other, closely defined, industrial establishments". In a "loopback" fashion the prevalence and performance of the transportation network helps spread the product and provide it more "acceptance".

This mechanical concatenation of industrial processes makes for solidarity in the administration of any group of related industries, and more remotely it makes for solidarity in the management of the entire industrial traffic of the community.

However, the process of standards development as legislated-into-place rather than as made-concrete-through-practise, may have blocked off the benefit of the solidarity reached through collaboration on shared interfaces and processes. This hinders the development of solidarity at a meta-level, in the interests of the "entire industrial traffic".

... the point of chief attention for the business man has shifted from the old-fashioned surveillance... to a strategic control of the conjunctures of business through shrewd investments and coalitions with other business men.

Standards of some kind are necessary to do business. The process by which they are created varies among industries. The control of business is in the interfaces, thus systems of coalitions, or consortia, that have grown up.

It is notorious, beyond the need of specific citation, that the great business coalitions and industrial combinations which have characterized the situation of the last few years have commonly been the outcome of a long-drawn struggle, in which the industrial ends, as contrasted with business ends, have not been seriously considered.

Bad news for technocrats. However, to see a distortion of the process to the concerns of business, suggests that the focal points for critique of abuse are not the technical contents and their merits, but the organisation of the process as a whole but the implications for business and PR.

In the normal course of business touching this matter of industrial consolidation, therefore, the captain of industry works against, as well as for, a new and more efficient organization. He inhibits as well as furthers the higher organization of industry.

Higher standards? Different standards?
Links to standards commentary made over the DIS 29500/OOXML issue.
Proposed statements about standards, consortia, companies within them, resulting dynamic.