How Balanced is Balanced Enough? Case studies of Stakeholders’ (Under-) Representation in Standardization Process

Existing research emphasizes the far-reaching effects of formal international standardization and recognizes the importance of involving the key stakeholders in the process of developing standards. However, to date no systematic assessment has been made on how well competing interests of different stakeholders are balanced in standards development. In this work we fill the gap in the literature by reporting on actual causes and effects of stakeholders’ under-representation in standardization process. We derive the findings from four case studies of standards development. Our findings confirm the earlier literature in that there is a clear causal effect between stakeholders under-representation and problems in terms of quality of standardization outputs. New contributions to extant literature are made, and managerial implications for remedying unbalanced stakeholder representation are drawn.