Digital Displacement: How Digitalization Affects Industry Standards
The development and deployment of digital initiatives is generating significant change within industries. Yet, we know little about what ongoing digitalization means for the materialization of industry standards regulating core products. This motivates our field study which examines a well-established and much-used standard in the book publishing industry. We find that regular maintenance and systematic revisions to the standard do not suffice when the product that a standard regulates is digitized, generating challenges and tensions that significantly threaten its continued global robustness. This produces what we theorize as digital displacement, a process undermining the material capacity of a standard to effectively coordinate and regulate industry operations in the digital era.