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Engineering rules : global standard setting since 1880 / JoAnne Yates, Craig N. Murphy.

by Yates, JoAnne, 1951- author.

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Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

Standards, Engineering -- History.

9781421428895 (hardcover ; alkaline paper)

142142889X (hardcover ; alkaline paper)

Hagley library studies in business, technology, and politics.

xiv, 421 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

The first wave -- Engineering professionalization and private standard setting for industry before 1900 -- Organizing private standard setting within and across borders, 1900 to World War I -- A community and a movement, World War I to the Great Depression -- The second wave -- Decline and revival of the movement, the 1930s to the 1950s -- Standards for a global market, the 1960s to the 1980s -- US participation in international RFI/EMC standardization, World War II through the 1980s -- The third wave -- Computer networking ushers in a new era in standard setting, 1980s to 2000s -- The development of a W3C standard: WebCrypto API, 2012-2017 -- Voluntary standards for quality management and social responsibility since the 1980s.

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 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. 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, including newly uncovered documents contributed by key standard setters, interviews, and direct observation of recent Web-related standard setting, 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. An in-depth history of the engineers and organizations that developed and operate the vast yet inconspicuous global infrastructure of private, consensus-based standard setting, 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.

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