| dc.description.abstract | In the article on “Standardization” in the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica,
Paul Gough Agnew, the long-time Secretary of the American Standards Association (ASA),
argued:
In the flow of products from farm, forest, mine, and sea through processing and
fabricating plants, and through wholesale and retail markets to the ultimate consumer,
most difficulties are met at the transition points––points at which the product passes
from department to department within a company, or is sold by one company to
another or to an individual. The main function of standards is to facilitate the flow of
products through these transition points. Standards are thus both facilitators and
integrators. In smoothing out points of difficulty, or “bottlenecks,” they provide the
evolutionary adjustments which are necessary for industry to keep pace with technical
advances. They do this in the individual plant, in particular industries, and in industry
at large. They are all the more effective as integrators in that they proceed by simple
evolutionary steps, albeit inconspicuously.2
Albeit inconspicuous, standard setting has been among the nuts and bolts of globalizing
industrial capitalism since its beginning, assuring that things needing to work together fit
from product to product, industry to industry, and country to country. The foci of the first
two of the now 229 “technical committees” of the non-specialized international standards
organizations that emerged after the two world wars—the interwar International Standards
Association [ISA] and the post-World War II International Organization for Standardization
[ISO]—are iconic: “Screw Threads” and “Bolts, Nuts and Accessories.” Over the past two
decades, voluntary standardization processes, invented by turn-of-the-twentieth-century
engineers working in national and international technical committees, have increasingly been
1 We would like to thank Madame Beatrice Frey at ISO for her help in providing us access to original
documents from UNSCC and ISO, and Stacy Leistner at ANSI for his help in providing access to the minutes
from AESC and ASA meetings.
2 Quoted as epigraph of Dickson Reck, ed., National Standards in a Modern Economy, (New York, 1956), v.
3
applied to issues that have little in common with those of fitting one mechanical part to
another, such as work processes (ISO 9000), environmental pollution (ISO 14,000), and
human rights (SA 8000 and the planned ISO 26000). | en |
