The first global history of voluntary consensus standard setting.
Finalist, Hagley Prize in Business History, The Hagley Museum and
Library / The Business History Conference
Private, voluntary standards shape almost everything we use, from screw
threads to shipping containers to e-readers. They have been critical to
every major change in the world economy for more than a century,
including the rise of global manufacturing and the ubiquity of the
internet. In Engineering Rules, JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy trace
the standard-setting system's evolution through time, revealing a
process with an astonishingly pervasive, if rarely noticed, impact on
all of our lives.
This type of standard setting was established in the 1880s, when
engineers aimed to prove their status as professionals by creating
useful standards that would be widely adopted by manufacturers while
satisfying corporate customers. Yates and Murphy explain how these
engineers' processes provided a timely way to set desirable standards
that would have taken much longer to emerge from the market and that
governments were rarely willing to set. By the 1920s, the standardizers
began to think of themselves as critical to global prosperity and world
peace. After World War II, standardizers transcended Cold War divisions
to create standards that made the global economy possible. Finally,
Yates and Murphy reveal how, since 1990, a new generation of
standardizers has focused on supporting the internet and web while
applying the same standard-setting process to regulate the potential
social and environmental harms of the increasingly global economy.
Drawing on archival materials from three continents, Yates and Murphy
describe the positive ideals that sparked the standardization movement,
the ways its leaders tried to realize those ideals, and the challenges
the movement faces today. Engineering Rules is a riveting global
history of the people, processes, and organizations that created and
maintain this nearly invisible infrastructure of today's economy, which
is just as important as the state or the global market.
