Institutionalized Dialogue and Conceptual Convergence. The GBT agreement also institutionalizes dialogue among parties and collective examinations of problems, thereby promoting conceptual progress and convergence. All social actors---individuals, business, governments, etc.---behave on the basis cognitive constructs, interpretations, and understandings of their interests and the larger environments in which they operate, and these "mental images" help to define what is (in)appropriate and (in)advisable in any given decision situation. As many social scientists now recognize, the development of cognition generally is not something that happens in an atomistic, entirely individualized manner, since most of us do not live in a cave. Instead, it is to a significant degree a collective experience, one that plays out through complex processes of ongoing interaction and communication. The collective development and internalization of shared information and beliefs in an essential underpinning of all international institutions and patterns of world order. Indeed, the very institutionalization of trade in services discourse in the 1980s signaled a major shift in how international telecommunications relationships were collectively understood, and in how policy problems were defined, bargained over, and resolved. The GBT deal expands and extends this process of conceptual development and convergence. Even if GBT members did not decide to agree on a singular and limiting definition of basic services, their inductive definition via examples went a long way toward promoting convergence and clarifying what sorts of services should be scheduled, and that dialogue will now continue in a structured form over time. Questions of statistical measurement and national accounting of basic services will be continuously addressed in a manner that promotes shared understandings and negotiations. Further, national regulatory schemes and institutional arrangements will be reexamined on an ongoing basis in light of newly shared criteria. This is especially important for developing and newly emerging countries, many of whom will need a great deal of assistance in the years ahead in redefining their internal arrangements to achieve conformity with international standards and notions of best practice.
