Standardization: an interdisciplinary scientific field: Connecting economics, management, and other disciplines

About a century ago, scientists began to investigate standardization, a phenomenon that has characterized civilizations since ancient times. Throughout history, individuals and organizations needed to develop common technical specifications and use them repeatedly to achieve coordination across a wide range of contexts. Early examples of standards include common units of measurement and the specification of exchange currencies. Their reach grew dramatically with the standardization of assembly lines in factories during the first industrial revolution, and today standards permeate our lives, from standardized paper sizes to freight containers, from test methods for product safety to physical and digital standardized interfaces for our computers.
The development of standardization research underwent three main stages. First, standardization research formed a standalone academic discipline, mostly connected to management and engineering. Later, it evolved into a multidisciplinary scientific field, especially with the surge of environmental, sociological, and legal investigations on standards. Nowadays, standardization can be considered in all effects an interdisciplinary scientific field. The progressive use of interdisciplinary approaches (i.e., combining elements of two or more disciplines in the same studies) is uncovering a set of common theories (which science philosopher Imre Lakatos called “protective belts”) about the process of standardization, from the development of standards to their adoption and impact.
However, the development of standardization research is not linear, since the divergence of approaches and terminologies employed by the different research communities is undermining the consistency of the field. This dissertation aims to bring order to this “interdisciplinary” stage of this development. It does so through a twofold research objective: first, it aims to explore the extent to which research on standardization is interdisciplinary; second, it aims to illustrate possible avenues for interdisciplinary research. For this purpose, the dissertation adopts a multi-method approach that spans from literature-based research (both bibliometric and conceptual) to quantitative and qualitative research...