اقتصاد سیاسی جهانی استاندارد سازی فن آوری: مورد بازار ارتباطات راه دور تلفن همراه کره ای

This paper examines empirical cases of standardization in the Korean mobile market as vehicles for approaching the broader political and institutional context of standardization in telecommunications. A consideration of Korean standardization in the mobile telecommunications market is particularly interesting because it reveals how the state's political interests influence standards decisions, which are primarily driven by market and technological changes in telecommunications. Judged from the social construction of technology perspective which sheds light not only on technology itself but also on political, social and economic interests that surround transformations in technology, this paper highlights power relations among the major actors that have made technology standards decisions in Korea regarding second (2G) and third-generation (3G) mobile telephony. The paper also attempts to show how the Korean government has dealt with the diverse interests of various market actors while pursuing its own policy agenda.

Over the past two decades a growing body of economic literature has made large strides into studying the role of technical standards in shaping telecommunications markets (Antonelli, 1998; David & Steinmueller, 1994). Such research has focused on the emergence of technical standards driven by the technical and economic interests of firms in telecommunications markets while paying less heed to the political dimensions and the context surrounding standardization in the telecommunications industry. A standard does not develop solely according to technical logic or any other single economic phenomenon. The political and social interests and pressures behind technical standardization play a crucial role in defining the path of technical and industrial development (Dosi, 1982; MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1985). Thus, a broad range of political and social factors as well as economic and technical considerations can, and more often than not, influence the selection of a technology standard.

The technology standards issue has been a controversial topic in the field of mobile telecommunications in recent years in Korea as in other countries. One of the important implications of the arguments outlined in this paper is that standardization increasingly involves non-technical dynamics in the process of setting standards domestically and internationally. Economic and technical explanations of technology standardization fail to provide a full analysis of the characteristics of domestic institutions and policies and the interests and strategies of major actors in technology standardization. For example, economic analysis of the IMT-2000 standardization does not provide the rationale for the existence of several incompatible standards, despite global efforts to obtain a common standard for economic efficiency. This paper shows that technology standardization was a highly path-dependent and conflicting process of technical specification among a given set of technical alternatives, as an alternative to the technologically deterministic position, which argues for the inherent evolution of technology itself. The government's involvement in standardization in Korea clearly shows that technological choice reflects the complexity of the environment and the behavior of various agents. It shows that political and institutional initiatives and different interests are important factors in understanding the selection of technology standard, while economic and technological developments bring about a new choice of standards. Diverse regulatory bodies have differing perspectives on the development of the telecom market and struggle to gain supremacy over the regulation of the telecom sector. In addition, the different interests of the stakeholders such as telecom carriers and manufacturers also attempt to influence the standardization process.