"To Antipolis, my sisters!": ETSI as a forum of contestation, collaboration and orchestration.

Abstract

Over the years, ETSI, the prime European standard-setter for ICT standards, has experienced significant critique about its legitimacy, including more recently by the European Commission in the 2022 Standardization Strategy, which focused on the alleged deficiencies of its global participation model. Despite potential missteps in certain instances, ETSI has overall addressed such critique with remarkable success. In this article, we argue that this occurred thanks to various strategies that ETSI used to sustain its organizational resilience over the years. In regard to its interaction with its de facto controller, the European Commission, we argue that ETSI had recourse to three key resilience strategies: one where ETSI took a hard stance resisting to the Commission's desires (contestation), one where ETSI intentionally succumbed to the Commission's desires or preferences (orchestration), and one where ETSI opted for a reconciliatory approach to achieve commonly set objectives serving the mutual interest (collaboration). Interestingly, such strategies were not only resilience-enhancing, but also legitimacy-conducive. This article contributes to two different strings of academic literature relating to organizational resilience, on the one hand, and institutional legitimacy, on the other, by combining them in a manner that, to the best of our knowledge, had not been done before in the relevant literature. In the discussion section, we draw observations that are pertinent to discussions and developments since the 2022 European Union's Standardization Strategy.