Pretty pictures and ugly scenes: Political and technological maneuvers in high definition television

Abstract

Conference on Qualitative Research for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. 2Introduction The development of High Definition Television in the United States has been a nearly twenty year odyssey, one that has been characterized by political maneuvering, alliance formation and disbanding, and technological change that has frustrated actors ’ attempts to shape HDTV development in their own favor. In this paper, we treat technological standards as institutions, and we use the HDTV story to describe how social movements affect technological change, and how the effectiveness of social movements is in turn influenced by technological change. We find that actors involved in HDTV used collective action framing processes with varying degrees of success, and that the success of their framing attempts can be explained partly by standard explanations of what affects the efficacy of frames (Ben o d and Snow 2000), and partly by the nature of technological change, which can render previously effective frames null and void.1 The issues of how institutions change, and how private actors such as organizations and individuals bring about change in institutions, remain of key interest to new institutional theorists

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