

JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy
The first global history of voluntary consensus standard setting.
Finalist for the Hagley Prize in Business History by the Hagley Museum and Library and 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...
The first global history of voluntary consensus standard setting.
Finalist for the Hagley Prize in Business History by the Hagley Museum and Library and 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.
Every standards professional should own this book. Bottom line—an A+.
By recounting the story of standardization, Yates and Murphy demonstrate how human and organizational actions slowly sediment into institutions that melt into the background of our lives.
Yates and Murphy provide an engaging narrative about the people and processes responsible for making the technologies we have today work with one another
The book is an extraordinarily detailed history of the movement from national to international standards creation and use. It introduces as its heroes... a series of men of rectitude and accomplishment who selflessly built the practice.
A comprehensive, readable account of private standard setting that should interest legal scholars, lawyers, and law students. Yates and Murphy have provided a great service with their illuminating history of the private world of standard setting.
This book is history at its finest. It is not only a technical and business history of engineering standards but also a deeply researched social history of communities of standardizers. It is also elegantly written—a testament to Yates's and Murphy's research and writing skills. Historians of capitalism and technology will find it required reading, but this book also stands a fair chance of engaging a mass readership.
A deeply researched and well-crafted examination of one of the key invisible infrastructures of the modern world: private consensus-based industrial standards. Aptly combining their respective expertise, the authors have written an impressive and highly detailed treatment of the emergence of standards-setting bodies, their networks, and their legion of activities. Standards geeks, of which there are thousands, will want to read this book—the first volume of its kind.
Too many of us who labor in the vineyards of global governance spend our time on visible, formal international organizations. Yates and Murphy do not. Drawing on a century and a half of archives and anecdotes, they demonstrate the crucial impact of private and informal standard-setting on our daily lives. This fascinating tale is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the major changes in the global economy.
From trains to planes to household electric plugs, unseen committees of engineers have been making our technologies work together for decades. This fascinating book explains how they've done it and offers compelling lessons to historians, technologists, and policy makers alike. Highly recommended.
Drawing on interviews, personal correspondence, and other unconventional sources, Yates and Murphy make a compelling case that voluntary private standardizers were motivated by non-economic forces. A critical contribution to our deliberation about whether this vital activity of consensual decision-making that elevated the profession in the twentieth century will survive in the next.
This thought-provoking book describes significant cultural and institutional changes in Western standardization since 1880. It is the fascinating story of differences—but also similarities—in initiatives, (self)organization, and social movements over time, from precursors of IEC and ISO to industry consortia and newcomers like ISEAL. It talks about flesh and blood standardization entrepreneurs and the hopes, frustrations, and wondrous feats of standardizers in technical committees. Not least, this historical account invites us to critically self-examine where we are now.
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
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
with Hopkins Press Books