Actor Networks and Broadband Standards: An Annotated Bibliography

Okay, so here are a few pieces that will end up in the final draft of the literature review:

Tilson, D., Lyytinen, K. (2005). "Making Broadband Wireless Services: An Actor-Network Study of the US Wireless Industry Standard Adoption," Case Western Reserve University, USA . Sprouts: Working Papers on Information Systems, 5(21). http://sprouts.aisnet.org/5-21

NOTE: This is a classic ANT paper: "We adopt actor-network theory to examine how technical and human actors interact to reach agreement on the creation and adoption of wireless services and standards. We present a model in which actors formulate standardization strategies based on their perceptions of existing and future actor-network configurations in light of their interests..." The authors use the evolution of the 3G standard as the case to launch their theoretical claims. They find that the 3G standard was an occasion in which operators (users, I gather) were highly influential".

And here's another:

Yooa, Youngjin , Lyytinena, Kalle and Yang, Heedong (2005). "The role of standards in innovation and diffusion of broadband mobile services: The case of South Korea," The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 14 (3) Pages 323-353

Similar to the above:

"We explore the evolution of the mobile infrastructure in South Korea through the lens of actor network theory. In particular, we analyze the roles of standards in promoting, enabling and constraining innovation in broadband mobile services over a 10-year period....Our study suggests that successful innovation and diffusion of broadband mobile services are collective achievements and firms need to deploy strategies that enable them to mobilize broad socio-technical networks that include technological, institutional, political and financial resources. At the heart of such strategies, standards play critical roles as they mediate different interests and motivations among participating actors."

This one might be helpful, it's an early effort at understanding rural actor-networks:

Murdoch, Jonathan (2000). "Networks — a new paradigm of rural development?," Journal of Rural Studies, 16(4), October 2000, Pages 407-419.

Abstract: The network concept has become widely utilised in socioeconomic studies of economic life. Following the debates around exogenous and endogenous development, networks may also have particular utility in understanding diverse forms of rural development. This paper assesses whether networks provide a new paradigm of rural development. It seeks to capture a series of differing perspectives on economic networks — including political economy, actor-network theory and theories of innovation and learning — and attempts to show how these perspectives might be applied to different types of rural areas. The paper demarcates two main “bundles” of networks: “vertical” networks — that is, networks that link rural spaces into the agro-food sector — and “horizontal” networks — that is, distributed network forms that link rural spaces into more general and non-agricultural processes of economic change. It is argued that rural development strategies must take heed of network forms in both domains and that rural policy should be recast in network terms.