Engineering rules : global standard setting since 1880
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Engineering rules : global standard setting since 1880
(Hagley Library studies in business, technology, and politics / Richard R. John, series editor)
Johns Hopkins University Press, c2019
- : hardcover
Available at 1 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [343]-408) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Acronyms
Introduction
Part I. The First Wave
1. Engineering Professionalization and Private Standard Setting for Industry before 1900
2. Organizing Private Standard Setting within and across Borders, 1900 to World War I
3. A Community and a Movement, World War I to the Great Depression
Part II. The Second Wave
4. Decline and Revival of the Movement, the 1930s to the 1950s
5. Standards for a Global Market, the 1960s to the 1980s
6. US Participation in International RFI/EMC Standardization, World War II to the 1980s
Part III. The Third Wave
7. Computer Networking Ushers in a New Era in Standard Setting, 1980s to 2000s
8. Development of the W3C WebCrypto API Standard, 2012 to 2017
9. Voluntary Standards for Quality Management and Social Responsibility since the 1980s
Conclusion
Essay on Primary Sources
Notes
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"