Emergence, adherence and proliferation of industry level standards: A case study of Aligarh padlock industry, India

Shekhar Jain

African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, 2021, vol. 13, issue 7, 853-864

Abstract: Industry in developing nations has not attracted much attention from standard theorists. One of the reasons is that developing countries are considered ‘standard takers.’ As a result, the limited scholarship on standards in the context of developing countries largely remains occupied with global value chains and standards. Besides, industries in these countries are often marked with various degrees of informality. Due to this, the innate structure and governance of these industries depend a lot on socio-economic relations, over and above the formal legal and regulatory structures. This makes operationalization of standards much more complex than simple adoption of standards in codified and documented form, dominantly considered in mainstream discourse on standards. This paper attempts to answer a few of the limitations highlighted and adds to the scholarship on standards in the context of developing countries by considering the case of Aligarh padlock industry. The paper explores the socio-economic dynamics which govern the emergence, adherence and proliferation of these standards. To this end, the paper considers standards as a form of knowledge that brings order to an industry. Further, adapting upon the literature on global value chain and its role in standard proliferation and informality, the paper explores the role of local value chain in the proliferation of industry-level standards.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20421338.2020.1771670 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rajsxx:v:13:y:2021:i:7:p:853-864

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rajs20

DOI: 10.1080/20421338.2020.1771670

Access Statistics for this article

African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development is currently edited by None

More articles in African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().