Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880

Hagley Library Studies in Business, Technology, and Politics

by JoAnne Yates, Craig N. Murphy

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

440 pages, Hardcover

Published June 11, 2019

Reviews

[David]

this is a book about engineering standard-setting organizations since 1880. It is about as exciting as you might expect from a book about engineering standard-setting organizations since 1880. That said, I found absolutely fascinating the sort of social theories held by the members of these organizations. Internationalism, for them, meant that engineers from post ww1/ww2 germany, or post-1917 ussr, were brought back into the fold more or less without hesitation. can you imagine the conversations they had at their conferences? "hey franz, pretty wild what you guys were doing, no?" For these engineers, a standard railway gauge, a modular container, they were paths to world peace. really remarkable.

[Dan Lussier · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an engineer this was an interesting history of the standards that underpin our modern technological world. This is how the sausage got made and the story of the people who created the institutions that made the creation of international (or global) standards possible.