JoAnne Yates and Craig Murphy, Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019; £48, $64.95 hbk, £29.50, $39.95 pbk.
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RATING: 90
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This is a fine book, and a significant one, as it provides an essential perspective on the building of the world market. Yates and Murphy are primarily concerned with processes of standardization through the voluntary activity of private actors - agreeing, publishing and disseminating standard specifications for industrial parts, products and processes, with a view to ensuring the interoperability of products from different firms and states. A typical example, depicted on the cover, is that for nuts and bolts - a story that begins in 1841 with Joseph Whitworth, engineer, arms manufacturer and philanthropist (for whom The Firs was built in Fallowfield, Manchester, in 1850), and incidentally one that has yet to result in a fully unified global standard (29-30). They approach the topic from what might be described as a 'critical IPE' perspective focused on firms, states and markets: 'How did the actual committee system of private standard setting arise and develop in our real world of interested and unequally powerful companies and governments?' (6). They answer it by tracing three chronological 'waves' - from the 1880s to the Great Depression, from the 1930s to the 1980s, and from the 1980s to the present, deploying in the process a wealth of empirical detail based on primary and secondary historical sources, archival records, and for the later period, interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. The first wave is predominantly national, the second international (national bodies aggregated to international level), the third global in approach from the start. Key case studies include containerization (a success), colour television (a failure), radio frequency interference and electromagnetic compatibility (a success, in the end), and the development of an encryption standard under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C (a success for the browser companies, less so for applications developers). Yates and Murphy tell the story through the 'standardisers' themselves and the sector-level and broader organizations they created, with a focus on civil and electrical engineering in the first two parts of the book, and computer engineering in the third; and a major strength is that they identify the process of standardization as a genuinely deliberative procedure, albeit a case of 'deliberative technocracy' rather than 'deliberative democracy', and set it at the same time in a context of unequal power relationships in the global economy. The final chapter, on the development of voluntary standards for quality management and social responsibility is informative, but a departure from the main theme, and for reasons of length I consider it only briefly. A key theme throughout the book is that standardization has been a progressive social movement, with its leading figures displaying altruism in their unstinting voluntary work and their commitment to rationalization on a global scale, and the common good. On its own terms, this is entirely convincing: leading figures in the 'movement' exerted themselves mightily over decades, built inclusive institutions, and insisted on the need to put personal interests aside in order to promote the common good. But there is more to it. What is most striking is the triple contribution the standardization movement has made to building the world market - first because it has focused principally on the industries central to building the material and communicative infrastructure of global trade, second because it has striven to be inclusive, bringing the Soviet Union and China into the movement before the Second World War, and actively recruiting 'Third World' states as they became independent thereafter, and third because in so doing it laid the basis for the global production chains that have become the major drivers of interoperability. In short, Engineering Rules shows how the world market develops in front of the noses rather than behind the backs of protagonists whose motives varied, but did not in any case specifically include the furthering of the logic of global capital.
Standardization was pursued, as early as the 1880s, through 'consensus-seeking committees of technical experts representing a range of stakeholders. Through iterative research, discussion, deliberation, and often voting, members of these committees attempted to reach a consensus that had the buy-in necessary for voluntary adoption by all parties' (3): committees at the national level 'were typically designed to balance membership of engineers from producer companies, user or consumer companies, and those unaffiliated with either category. No category of participant was allowed to dominate' (9). 'From the inside,' Yates and Murphy summarise, 'the decision-making process in standard-setting committees has looked a lot like deliberative democracy - a careful process that allows all voices to be heard and all positions to be considered before working toward a consensus' (9). From the outside, however, it more resembled a technocracy: 'Moreover, most of the technical experts represented profit-making companies, the producers and main consumers of most of what has been standardized' (10). Yates and Murphy note here the salience of 'ideas about transcending interests and acting to support technical excellence and the public good' (12), and insist that accounts based 'purely on economic interest also leave unexplained, for example, Charles Le Maistre's and Olle Sturén's efforts to bring more and more countries into the international standardization network, lessening the influence of the developed countries that pioneered it' (13, Le Maistre and Sturén being the founder (in 1946) and longest-serving head (1968-86) respectively of the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO for short). In summary: 'We believe that a better way to approach private standardization is to see it as an entirely different realm with a very different logic from either commerce or politics, something that developed in response to the greater social complexity that accompanied the pressure toward the greater economic integration of industrial capitalism' (13). I give this formulation a slight twist, suggesting that the 'very different logic' of private standardization is that of the emergent world market through competition.
Of course, efforts to create an institutional and infrastructural basis for the world market long predated the late nineteenth century emergence of the private associations discussed here. So, for example, the 1855 creation of the Association for Obtaining a Uniform Decimal System of Measures, Weights, and Coins, with international banker Baron Jacques Rothschild as its first president (20), stemming from the French Republican promotion of the metric system, was a step in a series of initiatives dating back to antiquity as much as a precursor of subsequent developments. But the key issue in this period was the challenge of telegraphic communication across borders and the development of long-distance and undersea cables, prompting a concern for standardized units for electrical resistance and related measures: 'Indeed, before the establishment of the ITU [International Telegraph Union, 1865], at each border crossing, transnational telegraphs were written out on paper, physically carried across the frontier, and then retransmitted on the other side' (24). As summarised, 'During the nineteenth century, treaty-based public international unions set primarily administrative rules, rather than technical standards, that extended communication and transportation networks across national boundaries' (25). And despite the rise of private standard setting, there would remain areas where differing national standards and the sunk costs they reflected would preclude universal harmonisation - railway gauges and electrical sockets being notable examples.
Against this background, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the creation of professional institutes of engineers at national level in the UK, US, and Japan, and widely across continental Europe (26-8), while international meetings brought engineers together to discuss shared concerns, notably around metrics, testing and quality standards (41-5). The French government used the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition to promote the metric system, while the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition shocked German engineers into recognition of their backwardness in relation to US production techniques and quality, prompting a turn towards the pursuit of excellence. Yates and Murphy (36) quote from a secondary source Engels' description of the Exposition as 'the industrial Jena' [the battle at which Napoleon defeated the Prussians in 1806]. The original source, the preface to the second German edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England (1892) is actually directly concerned with the transformation of the world market since the book was first published in 1845, and notes, along with other changes, that 'the new means of communication introduced at the close of the preceding period - railways and ocean steamers - were now worked out on an international scale; they realised actually what had hitherto existed only potentially, a world-market' (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf, pp. 19-20). French, German, and especially American industrial production now rivalled that of Great Britain, transforming a situation in which the latter had briefly been the only major exporter of industrial goods. This was the broader context in which the events narrated by Yates and Murphy would unfold.
At the very end of the nineteenth century the American Institute of Electrical Engineers constituted a Committee on Standardization composed of two professors, two engineers from companies who were consumers of power equipment, and two representatives of the leading manufacturer, General Electric, after some discussion on the merits of including the latter and its resolution on the grounds that representation of 'the manufacturer, the purchaser and the consulting engineer' was essential (39). But it was only after the turn of the century that the first wave of private standardization organizations gained momentum. Yates and Murphy describe the resulting process as follows: 'Engineers sought to serve the public by broadening and coordinating standard setting across multiple engineering fields and industry communities as a way to improve the efficiency, interoperability, safety, and output quality of manufacturing industries at home (and, in some cases, within sprawling empires), and to improve their economic competitiveness internationally (52). The focus on competitiveness was perfectly represented by Sir Douglas Fox, president of the British Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), who lamented, in his 1899 Presidential Address, that Great Britain had fallen behind Germany and the United States in particular, pointing to successes in standardization in both cases, and 'wondering "whether competition in the world's race could be facilitated by the establishment, upon sufficient authority, of standard specifications for such materials as steel and cement, and the introduction of standard types for bridgework, roofing, and other structures, ... and for locomotives and rolling stock"' (55). That is to say, the initiative arose out of emerging relative backwardness. In 1901, the ICE created a Committee on Standard Sections (of iron and steel), and by the end of the year, with support from the Board of Trade and the India Office, it became the Engineering Standards Committee, adding ship-building, locomotives, rolling stock and rails and electrical plants to its remit by 1902, and further types of production thereafter (58). Its first British Standards were published in 1903. Another prominent figure in the ICE and the second President of the Engineering Standards Committee, Sir John Wolfe-Barry, expected in 1908 that these developments 'should very materially assist in keeping the trade of our Colonial Empire in the hands of British manufacturers' (60), and in 1917 set out eight principles of standardization that had guided him, the first being that participants should represent all interested parties, and both producers and purchasers, and the second and third that it should take the form of private self-regulation of a voluntary nature (61). The eighth 'emphasized the need for regular revision of standards to avoid having them become an impediment to progress' (62).
This arrangement reflected a concerted private effort to address national concerns regarding failing competitiveness. Five years after the founding of the ESC, discussions that began at the St Louis International Electrical Congress led to the founding in 1906 of the International Electrotechnical Commission, initially with 13 countries represented (ten in Western Europe, along with Canada, Hungary and the United States). The leading figure here was Colonel Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton, who had come to electrical engineering from a background in military service and transportation. The organising committee included Alexander Siemens (head of the British branch of the German company) and William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, who would become the first president of the IEC, to be followed in 1908 by Elihu Thomson, the Manchester-born and Philadelphia-raised scientist and entrepreneur whose company eventually became General Electric. Its Acting and then General Secretary, Charles Le Maistre, a bilingual native of Jersey, in the Channel Isles, would retain the position until his death in 1953, and become the dominant figure in international standard setting over his lifetime. Importantly, the new Commission established a rule of 'one country, one vote', intended both to secure equality between technical societies, and to boost the stimulus to internationalization, with representation not from governments, but from nationally recognised technical societies, though in the interest of inclusiveness, governments could nominate representation where such societies did not yet exist (67-8). It was to be, as far as possible, 'a nongovernmental association of national electrical engineering societies' (69).
In due course, national standards committees were established in Germany in 1917 (eventually becoming the Deutsche Institut für Normung, DIN), and in the United States in 1918 (the American Engineering Standards Committee). Both opted for membership, as the AESC expressed it, 'made up of representatives of producers, consumers and general interests, no one of these interests to form a majority' (76). In a practice that encapsulated the drive for the use of standards to promote scientific and technological advance, the German Committee (in the summary offered by Brady, 1933: 25-6) embedded five principles into its work: '(1) initiating standardization only when rapid technical change and improvement of a product, part or process had ended; (2) allowing change and revision; (3); creating standards with the needs of industry in mind; (4) making sure that all standards were consistent with one another; all of which requires that (5) "the process of standardization be made as scientific as possible"' (79). As Yates and Murphy demonstrate, the German standardizers were committed in principle to the projection of standards to the international level. In short, there were three key principles inherent in the logic of national competitiveness. First, care had to be taken to avoid a premature fixing of standards that would 'throttle development' (77); so second, the setting of standards ought to be consistent with and supportive of technical and scientific advance; and third, the conquest of overseas markets which was the objective of the agenda of competitiveness could only be fully realized if standards were established through consensus-building on an international scale. This agenda opened the way to a progressive self-image that came to typify the organizations that emerged and the individuals prominent in them.
So, the account of developments from the First World War to the great depression foregrounds the extent to which 'the early industrial standard setters formed an international community and understood themselves as a progressive movement that created a network of standard-setting organizations worldwide. Many standardizers even considered themselves to be the leading edge of a global movement of engineers that was making a more prosperous, peaceful and humane world' (81). No doubt they did. Even in the context of preoccupation with readiness for war one could see the movement, as did British Secretary of State for War Richard Haldane in 1906, in a view that was widely shared, as 'an omen of the peaceful management of the world in the future', and a promise of 'universal peace' (70). Prominent figures in the movement were fully committed to 'cooperative action, mutual concession and ultimate agreement between all the interests concerned', as le Maistre expressed it in 1916 (84), and Yates and Murphy trace the emergence of a transnational community of practice, 'disrupted but not destroyed' by the First World War. It is notable that in this period the focus appears to have shifted from national competitiveness towards economic progress as a means of alleviating class conflict, and to rationalization as a means to greater productivity. A report in Electrical World of a meeting of local sections of eighteen engineering societies in New York on 29 March 1919 on the theme of the duties of the engineer in government affairs, particularly addressed to means and methods of increasing productivity of labour, recorded that 'Comfort A. Adams, president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, in his paper on the “Relations of the Engineer to Distribution and Production” pointed out that if engineers could so improve methods and machinery that the productivity of labour would be increased until it is possible to pay labour a real living wage and still have a fair return for capital, then they will have the remedy for the present undercurrent of industrial unrest' (Vol. 78, No. 13, p. 648, referenced here p. 90 and ft. 35, p. 360). In August of the same year, he would tell members of the AESC: 'We must either face the possibility of a Bolshevik movement in this country or devise some means for increasing the average productivity of labour. This can be done by cooperation and standardization, which go hand in hand' (93). Yates and Murphy recall Veblen's critique of a business world committed to restricting competition rather than to promoting more efficient production through the application of science, and briefly reference his set of essays from 1919, published in 1921 as The Engineers and the Price System (text accessible online, but you didn't learn this from me). It merits closer inspection than they give it. It contrasted Veblen's customary attack on 'absentee' ownership and vested interests with a vision of production and consulting engineers as 'the general staff' of modern industry, capable of bringing about a revolution in productivity and production if freed from dependence on the 'captains of finance'. Veblen strikingly highlights the negative consequences of 'financialization' in the late nineteenth century, as the wave of entrepreneurs who had transformed industry through invention and the application of science were displaced by financiers, and private enterprise lost its ability to deliver 'the progressive increase of productive capacity': the captains of finance were 'unremittingly engaged in a routine of acquisition, in which they habitually reach their ends by a shrewd restriction of output; and yet they continue to be entrusted with the community's industrial welfare, which calls for maximum production'. Channelling the Communist Manifesto, Veblen noted that: 'In point of material welfare, all the civilized peoples have been drawn together by the state of the industrial arts into a single going concern'; but he went on to argue that the rational development of this 'single going concern' was blocked by the subordination of' industrial experts' to states and captains of finance motivated by narrow interests:
'And for the due working of this inclusive going concern it is essential that that corps of technological specialists who by training, insight, and interest make up the general staff of industry must have a free hand in the disposal of its available resources, in materials, equipment, and man power, regardless of any national pretensions or any vested interests. Any degree of obstruction, diversion, or withholding of any of the available industrial forces, with a view to the special gain of any nation or any investor, unavoidably brings on a dislocation of the system; which involves a disproportionate lowering of its working efficiency and therefore a disproportionate loss to the whole, and therefore a net loss to all its parts. And all the while the statesmen are at work to divert and obstruct the working forces of this industrial system, here and there, for the special advantage of one nation and another at the cost of the rest; and the captains of finance are working, at cross purposes and in collusion, to divert whatever they can to the special gain of one vested interest and another, at any cost to the rest. So it happens that the industrial system is deliberately handicapped with dissension, misdirection, and unemployment of material resources, equipment, and man power, at every turn where the statesmen or the captains of finance can touch its mechanism; and all the civilized peoples are suffering privation together because their general staff of industrial experts are in this way required to take orders and submit to sabotage at the hands of the statesmen and the vested interests. Politics and investment are still allowed to decide matters of industrial policy which should plainly be left to the discretion of the general staff of production engineers driven by no commercial bias'.
This would lead him to suggest that 'these men of the industrial general staff must have a free hand, unhampered by commercial considerations and reservations', and to speculate on the (remote) possibility that the 'vested interests' and 'absentee owners' might voluntarily abdicate and hand industry over to a 'soviet' of production engineers. Such was the spirit of the age, with economies in crisis, rationalization and Taylorism in the ascendancy, and restraints on trade, profiteering and the repudiation of trusts widespread, that one could argue, as did IEC President Maurice Leblanc in October 1919, for standardization as a means 'to ensure the maximum production with the minimum labour', and pronounce it at the same time to be ''preeminently the democratic reform of production' (96). In short, whatever the justification given for standardization - be it altruism, national competitiveness, or the alleviation of class conflict - it was always assumed to entail the more efficient application of capital, increased productivity, expanded markets, and production on an extended scale. It logically entailed the diffusion of scientific advances, and the integration of the world market around advanced techniques of production; and the 'deliberative' method worked to reinforce the process. Because of the manner in which the 'common interest' (103) of producers and consumers was pursued, as represented by standardizing engineers, it was in the end the interest of globalizing capital.
Le Maistre's perspective was that the process 'encouraged participants to transcend self-interest in favour of the public interest' (105), while Ian Stewart, a long-time Australian participant, described the dialogues as 'a liberal education for all who participate in them' (106). It is here that Yates and Murphy develop the idea of a deliberative technocracy committed in general to mutual respect, full and fair hearings, and norms specific to scientific practice: 'The norms of providing detailed arguments rooted in shared scientific and engineering principles and of reaching decisions based on the force of the better technical argument reflected the epistemic foundation of the community, the profession of engineering, reinforced by the universal practice of seeking wide consensus among participants' (107). At the same time: 'The norms of science demanded that minority opinions be duly considered and decisions, including published standards, be recognized as fallible and subject to reconsideration when new information and new arguments arose. Moreover, the skepticism that was central to the scientific approach encouraged participants to recognize that their own preferences might not be fixed or might simply be unknown as a result of the complexity of the technology involved and the uncertainty about how technology would develop in the future' (107). In every respect, I suggest, these precepts advanced the development of the world market.
All the same, the inherently international/global dynamic would not emerge in full until after the Second World War. At national level, progress was fastest in Germany, with over 300 standards adopted per year through the 1920s, and widely adopted, then in the Soviet Union (289 per year, compared to an average of 14 for the US and the UK), so again the notion of 'backwardness' offers a key. An attempt was launched in 1926 to create an international federation of national associations, to be known as the ISA. It never prospered, in part because of US insistence that it should have the power only to coordinate, not to set formal standards, and British refusal to join (until 1937) over a concern, shared by the US, that universal standards might mean adoption of the metric system (this being a time too, curiously, at which 'the British inch and the American inch were still different lengths, 118). In the 1930s and during the Second World War the national/empire focus was if anything intensified, as first world trade spiralled down, then states sought to boost productivity for the war effort. At the same time the war brought out the significance of differing standards across the allied powers, and prompted a renewed effort to set international standards - for example, English parts did not fit American planes, which hampered timely and effective repair (141-2). In May 1944 the time-limited United Nations Standard Coordinating Committee came into being, with Le Maistre as its secretary, quickly accumulated more than a dozen members, and set out to lay the foundations of a permanent international body. The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) was eventually created in October 1946, with US private interests central: Yates and Murphy highlight as immediate context the International Business Conference called in November 1944 by the American Section of the International Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Foreign Trade Council: 'It was meant to be the private-sector equivalent of the conference on postwar planning held at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, from August through October 1944, and it followed the precedent of a similar meeting at the end of the First World War. ... [Its] main theme ... was developing strategies to break down economic barriers between countries and regions as rapidly as possible. The goal was a truly global economy, and for that reason, the desirability of establishing international standards was raised repeatedly' (144). In the run-up to the creation of the ISO a majority of members of the 'rival' ISA declared that association to be dissolved (149); belligerent and neutral countries from the war period were admitted (the Federal Republic of Germany in 1951 and Japan in 1952) well before they were permitted to join the UN; India was a founder member, and by 1960, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Uruguay and Venezuela among the 'less developed' countries were also members (150-53). China, however, would not join until 1977, due to concerns over US opposition.
Yates and Murphy identify the period from the 1960s to the 1980s as that in which 'the community of standardizers and network of organizations established by the standardization movement shifted focus from setting national standards for producers and users of industrial products to setting international standards that facilitated commerce more broadly, including through incorporation into official regulations' (158). The leading figure in this period was Olle Sturén, a civil engineer by training, who combined a career within the Swedish Standards Institute (becoming its director in 1957) with the role of Secretary of the Swedish Lawn Tennis Association, and an interest in modular kitchen design (159). Prior to his long period as ISO Secretary-General, commencing in 1968, he worked with the British Standards Institution and the German DIN on the formation between 1958 and 1961 of the European Committee for Standardization, CEN, bringing together the six original members of the EEC and the seven members of EFTA. By now, the logic of building the world market through regional and eventual global competition was explicit. As Sturén reported to the Swedish institute in 1958: 'If a free European market means anything at all, it means more competition. It means opening national markets to the competition of all Europe, allowing the European consumer to buy from the most efficient producer in his continent'; at the same time, 'international standards of a regional character' gave Western Europe, with its heavy reliance on global trade, 'an interest in promoting world standardization as a framework for its own standards' (161). The wording is critical, suggesting that it was not a question of imposing European standards on the world, but rather of having a genuinely global standard-setting organization from which European standards would in turn be taken.
Well, that was over sixty years ago. And it is over fifty years since Sturén injected new life into the ISO, after a period in which it made little impact under the cautious leadership of American diplomat Henry St Leger, and his short-lived successor, Charles Sharpston. The most striking thing to emerge from the story Yates and Murphy tell from this mid-point on is just how focussed Sturén would prove to be, and how complicated and drawn out the creation of a genuine world market and the efforts to further it by international and global action would be all the same. As they summarize Sturén's position, the ISO 'needed to set its own agenda that reflected the needs of the global economy; "We must cease to think of ISO as the fire brigade that responds to national requests"' (163-4). The process of issuing standards could be greatly speeded up; many national bodies would simply endorse them, as would the CEN; and the European Commission in Brussels would refer to them in its technical regulations, as would the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in Eastern Europe (164). And in fact in 1973-4 the ISO and IEC agreed a code of practice which stated that 'wherever international standards exist, national authorities and intergovernmental organizations should refer thereto in their regulatory texts either directly or through harmonized national standards' (165). Sturén would visit 60 countries over the next decade, the most significant being China, in 1976 and 1978, on either side of its joining the ISO. This section of the book ('Olle Sturén: Standardization Entrepreneur', 159-68) is pivotal, and establishes clearly the significance of standardization as a European project aimed at the systematic building of an integrated world market. The case study of the development of standard containers as the basis for global transportation infrastructure that follows, however, reflects the need to reconcile European domination of the institutionalised process with the US lead in 'intermodal unified transport', and the capacity on both sides to compromise when the prospective gains were sufficiently high. The requirement was for standard sizes that could be efficiently handled mechanically, and containers that could withstand transport by road, rail and sea. In practical terms, would standard sizes be measured in feet or metres? And how would containers be made to withstand handling in the most stressful situations on the most rudimentary transport equipment (such as uncushioned coupling and uncoupling on trains)? Given the US lead in the industry, the early running was made by the American Standards Association, at which standard lengths of 10, 20, 30 and 40 feet with 8 foot by 8 foot cross-sections were agreed in 1961 (173). The 20 foot container would become the point of reference (TEU - Twenty Foot Equivalent Unit) and the 40-foot the most common, with larger sizes added as capacity increased. Western European and Russian pressure for recognition of their different preferred (metric) standards was accommodated by designating them as alternative series (Series II and III), but no market for them developed. The definition of 'standard corners' was more complicated, but featured the relinquishing of key patents, and cooperation among competing producers to produce a new and improved design (177). As a result, transport handling costs would fall by over 90 per cent, in what was a classic case of capital investment and machinery replacing workers: there were 1.5 million containers in circulation by 1978, and more than ten times as many today. In contrast, efforts to arrive at a common standard for monochrome and colour television were unsuccessful (180-90). Then again, this was a far less strategic in terms of the development of the world market, and it is a failure that does not seem to have mattered much.
A fundamental structural issue relevant to both these cases - the weight of the US as a 'continental' and world-leading economy versus the combined significance of the cluster of European states with much greater levels of mutual and global trade - was relevant in the final case of the 'second wave': radio frequency interference and more general electromagnetic compatibility. The fact that radio transmissions interfere with each other and with other devices was problematic for effective communication and in widespread and growing markets for new consumer goods. It was an issue from the early 1920s: largely European initiatives led to the founding of the International Radio Union in 1925 and the CISPR (Comité international special des perturbations radioélectriques) in 1933. In the US an equivalent process of coordination of national producers operating different standards took place through committee C63 of the American Standards Association, resulting in different standards between Europe and the US for measuring interference, and different stances on the role for national laws. Yates and Murphy relate how standard setters in the United States, despite the initial lead held by US industries and the assumption that the rest of the world would just have to adopt US standards, 'gradually recognized the importance of international standardization and learned to participate in it effectively' (200). The dominant figure here was Ralph Showers, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), who first attended a CISPR meeting in 1958 and would be involved for a further 53 years, incidentally paying his own expenses for dozens of foreign trips throughout, and eventually becoming the chair of C63 in 1968, and the first US chair of CISPR in 1979. During this period, the logic of competitiveness asserted itself through the process of international standardization. Thriving as the US market was, US corporations producing in Europe or for the European market had to adapt: 'Since many European countries incorporated CISPR standards into national legislation, US products aimed at those markets (e.g., cars and computing equipment) might have to meet CISPR standards for radio wave emissions and immunity [from interference], a worry that would grow stronger in industry during the 1970s' (216). With government happy to take a back seat, and twelve national bodies needing to be coordinated through purely voluntary action, committee C63 proved unable to agree a unified national standard for electromagnetic compatibility in the early 1980s and the US shifted to a position of cooperation through CISPR, recognising the need to make periodic adjustments in response, for example, to EU directives on standards. As Yates and Murphy summarize: ''In the early 1970s, the US electronics industry began to recognize that it must be more competitive internationally, a realization that would grow throughout this period as it lost its preeminence in consumer electronics. It also learned that US participation in international standard setting improved competitiveness' (230-31). And in a further twist, the danger that active participation in CISPR might lead to de facto acceptance by the US of European standards led it to promote actively the further extension of the process on a genuinely global scale, initially in the context of the IEC (231).
The process of agreeing standards internationally was enormously cumbersome and time-consuming, especially in the days of typewriters and stencilled copies, and even after the invention of the photocopier. It was made more so by the requirements of the deliberative process. Documents were routinely required up to six months before meetings, dissenting views were circulated thereafter for a round of general consideration, and a voluminous correspondence was carried on alongside. As the pace of technological change increased, no sooner was a standard agreed than a process of revision began. The advent of the internet (and ARPANET before it), which was itself at the centre of the 'third wave' of standardization, would transform the process. First, innovation moved far too fast for such a process to be workable, and second, as is now familiar, the internet itself provided the solution, as email and online 'chatting' revolutionised the process of written communication. Simplifying ruthlessly (although the full story is interesting), a key issue, as Carl Cargill, of Sun Microsystems and then Adobe, would say in 1997, was that standard-setting through the 'traditional' system had become anticipatory: what had been a process of agreeing standards in a relatively settled area of production in a way that would still leave the process open for modification in the future became one of devising more or less empty frameworks to standardize a technology 'in advance of that technology being available as a product in any viable commercial form' (248). It didn't work. In the meantime, the implementation of TCP/IP protocols for internet working was developed by the US Defense Department and in use by civilian networks from 1983. This in turn gave rise to an informal network, the Internet Engineering Task Force, which first met in January 1986, and matters came to a head in 1992, the new spirit of the age being typified by Vinton Cerf's switching support to TCP/IP in 1992: 'stripping off his jacket, vest, and shirt during his talk to reveal a T-shirt reading "IP on Everything." More significantly for internet standardization, [David] Clark [previously holding out for an alternative approach] gave a rousing talk that summarized and lauded the IETF approach as follows: "We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code"' (250). In a way, this honoured previous principles, in that consensus was still the goal, and (in contrast to empty 'anticipatory' standards) procedures had to run and work on multiple implementations before they could be agreed as standards. But at the same time the IETF had no defined membership, as access was open to all, so had no requirement to balance consumers, producers and experts. And with the need to keep up with the breakneck pace of technological change imposing itself, a further shift was already taking place, to 'standards consortia', 'typically comprised of a set of vendors with aligned interests in creating interoperable products, who came together to create standards without first going through the time-consuming process of traditional multi-stakeholder standard setting or an expensive and time-consuming standards war' (255). Members of such consortia paid sometimes substantial membership fees, and could also undertake research and development, implementation and marketing - in effect, creating the product and the 'standard' simultaneously. Addressing relevant background, Yates and Murphy say: 'Turning to political economy rather than standards politics, historian Andrew Russell recently noted a US policy change as yet another factor: to increase American competitiveness, the National Cooperative Research Act of 1984 permitted cooperative standard setting under antitrust law as long as no price fixing or other collusive behaviors took place, opening the way to participation in standards consortia by American high-tech companies' (256 and Russell, 2008: 48). In response, Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) of the ISO and IEC responded in 1994 by creating a procedure, PAS, which allowed publicly available specifications to be fast-tracked to approval as international standards. Yates and Murphy note, 'We might view this integration of consortia into the private standard setting system as a version of economists Farrell and Saloner's notion of the most economically efficient world, with standard setting by private committees in a world in which powerful actors (in this case firms establishing consortia) can skip the process and set a standard that many others are likely to follow' (260, and Farrell and Saloner, 1988). At its limit this tendency is illustrated by the way in which three leading browser makers, Apple, Mozilla and Opera, worked between themselves outside W3C to update their systems continually through a Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group which continuously integrated improvements made by the individual companies to produce an evolving 'living standard', under a single chair who allowed no debate or appeal (286-7).
Browser makers, on whom all application developers necessarily depend, play 'a powerful gatekeeping role' (289) in W3C, the most prominent consortium. It emerged from the hypertext browsing system created at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) from the late 1980s by Tim Berners-Lee. CERN released the code to the public in 1993, Berners-Lee moved to MIT, and established W3C in 1994, and in no time HTML, URLs, and HTTP were ubiquitous as the building blocks of the world-wide web. Yates and Murphy offer a case study of the development of the W3C WebCrypto API (application programming interface) Standard (termed a Recommendation) between 2012 and 2017. The Web Cryptography Working Group develops standards for tools for building secure applications for such elements as payment modules on commercial apps. It runs through email and audio teleconferences, with occasional face-to-face meetings, and has a designated editor who controls all changes to any emerging draft specification, while the working group votes to approve working drafts for publication, and new versions of the spec produced for each stage, the last of these being a W3C Recommendation. It was set up in May 2012 with a view to producing a standard by March 2014, but produced it only in 2017 (273), and has up-dated it since. A central issue was how prescriptive the API should be: 'whether to write a high-level API that restricted developers to "safe" cryptography or a low-level API that provided a tool box but let developers choose what cryptographic methods were appropriate for their particular applications' (275). Ryan (who represented a browser maker), who championed the latter course over the opposition of some application developers, was able to become editor and push through a recommendation with known weak elements but on which developers could build varied high-level systems to suit their own needs (although he would resign due to pressure of other work a year before it was published in final form). Obviously, the underlying technical issues here are fast-moving and complex, as you can verify by checking in on Ryan (Sleevi) at work earlier this year, and well outside my intellectual grasp. Yates and Murphy do an excellent job in addressing the process, the declared altruism of some if not all participants, and the continuing if a little attenuated commitment to democracy and deliberation. But it looks likely that in the end, as Ryan stated when interviewed by Yates, 'what matters is not process track documents, what matters is what browsers implement, are willing to implement, think should be implemented' (288). The other thing that should be noted, of course, is that the web builders between them have massively expanded the world market, not only by the creation of 'new needs', but also by creating the technical infrastructure through which they can be quickly satisfied, on a global scale.
The final substantive chapter takes a different turn, addressing voluntary standards for quality management and social responsibility. It is focused first on the ISO 9000 series on quality management inaugurated in 1987, and necessarily moves beyond the engineering community and the issue of interoperability. Yates and Murphy conclude, convincingly, that 'competition for the ISO 9000 "business" made the entire network [of standard-setting] more complicated, less coherent, and, ironically, less focused on the social good' (294). It then recounts the attempt of the ISO to step onto the social and environmental standards 'bandwagon', and its complex and contested consequences, and branches out to cover further and increasingly dubious initiatives from Alice Tepper Marlin, the UN, and the World Economic Forum. The chapter provides an excellent critical summary of these initiatives, while as noted above moving away from the principal themes of the book. Neither working academics nor their 'customers' will need convincing that a quality 'kite-mark' is generally evidence that resources have been stripped out of education (or the production of other goods and services), and diverted into formalistic routines that fuel the lucrative boom in certification and accreditation.
After all this, the brief conclusion is mildly disappointing. No matter. It does make the strong point that although standard setting has been dominated for the most part by initiatives originating in Europe or the United States, China is already the largest consumer of standards, and set to be a dominant force in the future in their production too. It also laments the dearth of enthusiastic volunteers outside China, while reiterating that technological change is now so fast that no formally organised process that allows a degree of deliberation could possibly keep up. I would add that the very success of standardization in securing interoperability between competing producers has helped to make it largely redundant as a process organized outside production itself, as a result of the degree of coordination that is now necessary to ensure that global production chains can operate, along with the instant access to relevant information that digital platforms provide. Interoperability is practiced globally, every day, in real time, in the organization of production itself. So if standardization, spurred on by continually changing levels of competitiveness across the global economy, has played a part in bringing into being a world market that was only incipient in 1880, and if that world market has now developed a momentum that leaves standardization through deliberative technocracies behind, we should not be surprised. As Paul Agnew, long-serving secretary to the American Engineering Standards Committee, remarked in 1940, 'standards underlie all mass production methods, and ... facilitate the integrating processes necessary to large-scale production and distribution' (133). But the time may be past when they can be produced as they were in his day. Ever-changing ad hoc standards consortia internal to production processes themselves may instead become the order of the day.
Underlying the standardization movement from the start was the recognition that competing firms need a common infrastructure or network in order to create and extend markets for products; and in turn they need to create new markets, and new products, because they are capitalist enterprises, competing against each other in 'the market'. That market is tendentially global: Marx described the world market as the 'precondition and result' of capitalist development, suggesting both that foreign trade promoted global competitiveness, and that only with completion of the world market would the disciplines of capitalist competition become fully operative. He was able to observe only the beginnings of its emergence, dying in 1881 at a point when the UK still dominated, and the cross-national 'standard setting' that Yates and Murphy address was just getting under way. To me, their signal achievement is to bring out the part played by the standardization movement in creating the world market. Specific individuals often saw themselves as champions of the company or the state from which they came; governments sought to protect narrowly conceived interests; leaders of the movement embodied the highest levels of altruism in their devotion to standard setting as a service to the greater good for humanity at large; but all the same, their combined efforts smoothed and speeded the development of the world market by pushing forward the frontier on which global competition took place.
References and further reading
Farrell, Joseph, and Garth Saloner. 1988. Coordination through Committees and Markets. RAND Journal of Economics, 19, 2, 235-52.
Nielson, Brett, Ned Rossiter and Ranabir Samaddar, eds. 2018. Logistical Asia; The Labour of Making a World Region. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.
OECD. 2017. International Regulatory Co-operation: The Role of International Organisations in Fostering Better Rules of Globalisation. Paris: OECD.
Russell, Andrew L. 2008. Dot-org Entrepreneurship: Weaving a Web of Trust', Entreprise et histoire, 51.
US-China Business Council. 2020. China in International Standards Setting: USCBC Recommendations for Constructive Participation, Washington: UCSBC.
Standardization was pursued, as early as the 1880s, through 'consensus-seeking committees of technical experts representing a range of stakeholders. Through iterative research, discussion, deliberation, and often voting, members of these committees attempted to reach a consensus that had the buy-in necessary for voluntary adoption by all parties' (3): committees at the national level 'were typically designed to balance membership of engineers from producer companies, user or consumer companies, and those unaffiliated with either category. No category of participant was allowed to dominate' (9). 'From the inside,' Yates and Murphy summarise, 'the decision-making process in standard-setting committees has looked a lot like deliberative democracy - a careful process that allows all voices to be heard and all positions to be considered before working toward a consensus' (9). From the outside, however, it more resembled a technocracy: 'Moreover, most of the technical experts represented profit-making companies, the producers and main consumers of most of what has been standardized' (10). Yates and Murphy note here the salience of 'ideas about transcending interests and acting to support technical excellence and the public good' (12), and insist that accounts based 'purely on economic interest also leave unexplained, for example, Charles Le Maistre's and Olle Sturén's efforts to bring more and more countries into the international standardization network, lessening the influence of the developed countries that pioneered it' (13, Le Maistre and Sturén being the founder (in 1946) and longest-serving head (1968-86) respectively of the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO for short). In summary: 'We believe that a better way to approach private standardization is to see it as an entirely different realm with a very different logic from either commerce or politics, something that developed in response to the greater social complexity that accompanied the pressure toward the greater economic integration of industrial capitalism' (13). I give this formulation a slight twist, suggesting that the 'very different logic' of private standardization is that of the emergent world market through competition.
Of course, efforts to create an institutional and infrastructural basis for the world market long predated the late nineteenth century emergence of the private associations discussed here. So, for example, the 1855 creation of the Association for Obtaining a Uniform Decimal System of Measures, Weights, and Coins, with international banker Baron Jacques Rothschild as its first president (20), stemming from the French Republican promotion of the metric system, was a step in a series of initiatives dating back to antiquity as much as a precursor of subsequent developments. But the key issue in this period was the challenge of telegraphic communication across borders and the development of long-distance and undersea cables, prompting a concern for standardized units for electrical resistance and related measures: 'Indeed, before the establishment of the ITU [International Telegraph Union, 1865], at each border crossing, transnational telegraphs were written out on paper, physically carried across the frontier, and then retransmitted on the other side' (24). As summarised, 'During the nineteenth century, treaty-based public international unions set primarily administrative rules, rather than technical standards, that extended communication and transportation networks across national boundaries' (25). And despite the rise of private standard setting, there would remain areas where differing national standards and the sunk costs they reflected would preclude universal harmonisation - railway gauges and electrical sockets being notable examples.
Against this background, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the creation of professional institutes of engineers at national level in the UK, US, and Japan, and widely across continental Europe (26-8), while international meetings brought engineers together to discuss shared concerns, notably around metrics, testing and quality standards (41-5). The French government used the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition to promote the metric system, while the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition shocked German engineers into recognition of their backwardness in relation to US production techniques and quality, prompting a turn towards the pursuit of excellence. Yates and Murphy (36) quote from a secondary source Engels' description of the Exposition as 'the industrial Jena' [the battle at which Napoleon defeated the Prussians in 1806]. The original source, the preface to the second German edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England (1892) is actually directly concerned with the transformation of the world market since the book was first published in 1845, and notes, along with other changes, that 'the new means of communication introduced at the close of the preceding period - railways and ocean steamers - were now worked out on an international scale; they realised actually what had hitherto existed only potentially, a world-market' (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf, pp. 19-20). French, German, and especially American industrial production now rivalled that of Great Britain, transforming a situation in which the latter had briefly been the only major exporter of industrial goods. This was the broader context in which the events narrated by Yates and Murphy would unfold.
At the very end of the nineteenth century the American Institute of Electrical Engineers constituted a Committee on Standardization composed of two professors, two engineers from companies who were consumers of power equipment, and two representatives of the leading manufacturer, General Electric, after some discussion on the merits of including the latter and its resolution on the grounds that representation of 'the manufacturer, the purchaser and the consulting engineer' was essential (39). But it was only after the turn of the century that the first wave of private standardization organizations gained momentum. Yates and Murphy describe the resulting process as follows: 'Engineers sought to serve the public by broadening and coordinating standard setting across multiple engineering fields and industry communities as a way to improve the efficiency, interoperability, safety, and output quality of manufacturing industries at home (and, in some cases, within sprawling empires), and to improve their economic competitiveness internationally (52). The focus on competitiveness was perfectly represented by Sir Douglas Fox, president of the British Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), who lamented, in his 1899 Presidential Address, that Great Britain had fallen behind Germany and the United States in particular, pointing to successes in standardization in both cases, and 'wondering "whether competition in the world's race could be facilitated by the establishment, upon sufficient authority, of standard specifications for such materials as steel and cement, and the introduction of standard types for bridgework, roofing, and other structures, ... and for locomotives and rolling stock"' (55). That is to say, the initiative arose out of emerging relative backwardness. In 1901, the ICE created a Committee on Standard Sections (of iron and steel), and by the end of the year, with support from the Board of Trade and the India Office, it became the Engineering Standards Committee, adding ship-building, locomotives, rolling stock and rails and electrical plants to its remit by 1902, and further types of production thereafter (58). Its first British Standards were published in 1903. Another prominent figure in the ICE and the second President of the Engineering Standards Committee, Sir John Wolfe-Barry, expected in 1908 that these developments 'should very materially assist in keeping the trade of our Colonial Empire in the hands of British manufacturers' (60), and in 1917 set out eight principles of standardization that had guided him, the first being that participants should represent all interested parties, and both producers and purchasers, and the second and third that it should take the form of private self-regulation of a voluntary nature (61). The eighth 'emphasized the need for regular revision of standards to avoid having them become an impediment to progress' (62).
This arrangement reflected a concerted private effort to address national concerns regarding failing competitiveness. Five years after the founding of the ESC, discussions that began at the St Louis International Electrical Congress led to the founding in 1906 of the International Electrotechnical Commission, initially with 13 countries represented (ten in Western Europe, along with Canada, Hungary and the United States). The leading figure here was Colonel Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton, who had come to electrical engineering from a background in military service and transportation. The organising committee included Alexander Siemens (head of the British branch of the German company) and William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, who would become the first president of the IEC, to be followed in 1908 by Elihu Thomson, the Manchester-born and Philadelphia-raised scientist and entrepreneur whose company eventually became General Electric. Its Acting and then General Secretary, Charles Le Maistre, a bilingual native of Jersey, in the Channel Isles, would retain the position until his death in 1953, and become the dominant figure in international standard setting over his lifetime. Importantly, the new Commission established a rule of 'one country, one vote', intended both to secure equality between technical societies, and to boost the stimulus to internationalization, with representation not from governments, but from nationally recognised technical societies, though in the interest of inclusiveness, governments could nominate representation where such societies did not yet exist (67-8). It was to be, as far as possible, 'a nongovernmental association of national electrical engineering societies' (69).
In due course, national standards committees were established in Germany in 1917 (eventually becoming the Deutsche Institut für Normung, DIN), and in the United States in 1918 (the American Engineering Standards Committee). Both opted for membership, as the AESC expressed it, 'made up of representatives of producers, consumers and general interests, no one of these interests to form a majority' (76). In a practice that encapsulated the drive for the use of standards to promote scientific and technological advance, the German Committee (in the summary offered by Brady, 1933: 25-6) embedded five principles into its work: '(1) initiating standardization only when rapid technical change and improvement of a product, part or process had ended; (2) allowing change and revision; (3); creating standards with the needs of industry in mind; (4) making sure that all standards were consistent with one another; all of which requires that (5) "the process of standardization be made as scientific as possible"' (79). As Yates and Murphy demonstrate, the German standardizers were committed in principle to the projection of standards to the international level. In short, there were three key principles inherent in the logic of national competitiveness. First, care had to be taken to avoid a premature fixing of standards that would 'throttle development' (77); so second, the setting of standards ought to be consistent with and supportive of technical and scientific advance; and third, the conquest of overseas markets which was the objective of the agenda of competitiveness could only be fully realized if standards were established through consensus-building on an international scale. This agenda opened the way to a progressive self-image that came to typify the organizations that emerged and the individuals prominent in them.
So, the account of developments from the First World War to the great depression foregrounds the extent to which 'the early industrial standard setters formed an international community and understood themselves as a progressive movement that created a network of standard-setting organizations worldwide. Many standardizers even considered themselves to be the leading edge of a global movement of engineers that was making a more prosperous, peaceful and humane world' (81). No doubt they did. Even in the context of preoccupation with readiness for war one could see the movement, as did British Secretary of State for War Richard Haldane in 1906, in a view that was widely shared, as 'an omen of the peaceful management of the world in the future', and a promise of 'universal peace' (70). Prominent figures in the movement were fully committed to 'cooperative action, mutual concession and ultimate agreement between all the interests concerned', as le Maistre expressed it in 1916 (84), and Yates and Murphy trace the emergence of a transnational community of practice, 'disrupted but not destroyed' by the First World War. It is notable that in this period the focus appears to have shifted from national competitiveness towards economic progress as a means of alleviating class conflict, and to rationalization as a means to greater productivity. A report in Electrical World of a meeting of local sections of eighteen engineering societies in New York on 29 March 1919 on the theme of the duties of the engineer in government affairs, particularly addressed to means and methods of increasing productivity of labour, recorded that 'Comfort A. Adams, president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, in his paper on the “Relations of the Engineer to Distribution and Production” pointed out that if engineers could so improve methods and machinery that the productivity of labour would be increased until it is possible to pay labour a real living wage and still have a fair return for capital, then they will have the remedy for the present undercurrent of industrial unrest' (Vol. 78, No. 13, p. 648, referenced here p. 90 and ft. 35, p. 360). In August of the same year, he would tell members of the AESC: 'We must either face the possibility of a Bolshevik movement in this country or devise some means for increasing the average productivity of labour. This can be done by cooperation and standardization, which go hand in hand' (93). Yates and Murphy recall Veblen's critique of a business world committed to restricting competition rather than to promoting more efficient production through the application of science, and briefly reference his set of essays from 1919, published in 1921 as The Engineers and the Price System (text accessible online, but you didn't learn this from me). It merits closer inspection than they give it. It contrasted Veblen's customary attack on 'absentee' ownership and vested interests with a vision of production and consulting engineers as 'the general staff' of modern industry, capable of bringing about a revolution in productivity and production if freed from dependence on the 'captains of finance'. Veblen strikingly highlights the negative consequences of 'financialization' in the late nineteenth century, as the wave of entrepreneurs who had transformed industry through invention and the application of science were displaced by financiers, and private enterprise lost its ability to deliver 'the progressive increase of productive capacity': the captains of finance were 'unremittingly engaged in a routine of acquisition, in which they habitually reach their ends by a shrewd restriction of output; and yet they continue to be entrusted with the community's industrial welfare, which calls for maximum production'. Channelling the Communist Manifesto, Veblen noted that: 'In point of material welfare, all the civilized peoples have been drawn together by the state of the industrial arts into a single going concern'; but he went on to argue that the rational development of this 'single going concern' was blocked by the subordination of' industrial experts' to states and captains of finance motivated by narrow interests:
'And for the due working of this inclusive going concern it is essential that that corps of technological specialists who by training, insight, and interest make up the general staff of industry must have a free hand in the disposal of its available resources, in materials, equipment, and man power, regardless of any national pretensions or any vested interests. Any degree of obstruction, diversion, or withholding of any of the available industrial forces, with a view to the special gain of any nation or any investor, unavoidably brings on a dislocation of the system; which involves a disproportionate lowering of its working efficiency and therefore a disproportionate loss to the whole, and therefore a net loss to all its parts. And all the while the statesmen are at work to divert and obstruct the working forces of this industrial system, here and there, for the special advantage of one nation and another at the cost of the rest; and the captains of finance are working, at cross purposes and in collusion, to divert whatever they can to the special gain of one vested interest and another, at any cost to the rest. So it happens that the industrial system is deliberately handicapped with dissension, misdirection, and unemployment of material resources, equipment, and man power, at every turn where the statesmen or the captains of finance can touch its mechanism; and all the civilized peoples are suffering privation together because their general staff of industrial experts are in this way required to take orders and submit to sabotage at the hands of the statesmen and the vested interests. Politics and investment are still allowed to decide matters of industrial policy which should plainly be left to the discretion of the general staff of production engineers driven by no commercial bias'.
This would lead him to suggest that 'these men of the industrial general staff must have a free hand, unhampered by commercial considerations and reservations', and to speculate on the (remote) possibility that the 'vested interests' and 'absentee owners' might voluntarily abdicate and hand industry over to a 'soviet' of production engineers. Such was the spirit of the age, with economies in crisis, rationalization and Taylorism in the ascendancy, and restraints on trade, profiteering and the repudiation of trusts widespread, that one could argue, as did IEC President Maurice Leblanc in October 1919, for standardization as a means 'to ensure the maximum production with the minimum labour', and pronounce it at the same time to be ''preeminently the democratic reform of production' (96). In short, whatever the justification given for standardization - be it altruism, national competitiveness, or the alleviation of class conflict - it was always assumed to entail the more efficient application of capital, increased productivity, expanded markets, and production on an extended scale. It logically entailed the diffusion of scientific advances, and the integration of the world market around advanced techniques of production; and the 'deliberative' method worked to reinforce the process. Because of the manner in which the 'common interest' (103) of producers and consumers was pursued, as represented by standardizing engineers, it was in the end the interest of globalizing capital.
Le Maistre's perspective was that the process 'encouraged participants to transcend self-interest in favour of the public interest' (105), while Ian Stewart, a long-time Australian participant, described the dialogues as 'a liberal education for all who participate in them' (106). It is here that Yates and Murphy develop the idea of a deliberative technocracy committed in general to mutual respect, full and fair hearings, and norms specific to scientific practice: 'The norms of providing detailed arguments rooted in shared scientific and engineering principles and of reaching decisions based on the force of the better technical argument reflected the epistemic foundation of the community, the profession of engineering, reinforced by the universal practice of seeking wide consensus among participants' (107). At the same time: 'The norms of science demanded that minority opinions be duly considered and decisions, including published standards, be recognized as fallible and subject to reconsideration when new information and new arguments arose. Moreover, the skepticism that was central to the scientific approach encouraged participants to recognize that their own preferences might not be fixed or might simply be unknown as a result of the complexity of the technology involved and the uncertainty about how technology would develop in the future' (107). In every respect, I suggest, these precepts advanced the development of the world market.
All the same, the inherently international/global dynamic would not emerge in full until after the Second World War. At national level, progress was fastest in Germany, with over 300 standards adopted per year through the 1920s, and widely adopted, then in the Soviet Union (289 per year, compared to an average of 14 for the US and the UK), so again the notion of 'backwardness' offers a key. An attempt was launched in 1926 to create an international federation of national associations, to be known as the ISA. It never prospered, in part because of US insistence that it should have the power only to coordinate, not to set formal standards, and British refusal to join (until 1937) over a concern, shared by the US, that universal standards might mean adoption of the metric system (this being a time too, curiously, at which 'the British inch and the American inch were still different lengths, 118). In the 1930s and during the Second World War the national/empire focus was if anything intensified, as first world trade spiralled down, then states sought to boost productivity for the war effort. At the same time the war brought out the significance of differing standards across the allied powers, and prompted a renewed effort to set international standards - for example, English parts did not fit American planes, which hampered timely and effective repair (141-2). In May 1944 the time-limited United Nations Standard Coordinating Committee came into being, with Le Maistre as its secretary, quickly accumulated more than a dozen members, and set out to lay the foundations of a permanent international body. The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) was eventually created in October 1946, with US private interests central: Yates and Murphy highlight as immediate context the International Business Conference called in November 1944 by the American Section of the International Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Foreign Trade Council: 'It was meant to be the private-sector equivalent of the conference on postwar planning held at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, from August through October 1944, and it followed the precedent of a similar meeting at the end of the First World War. ... [Its] main theme ... was developing strategies to break down economic barriers between countries and regions as rapidly as possible. The goal was a truly global economy, and for that reason, the desirability of establishing international standards was raised repeatedly' (144). In the run-up to the creation of the ISO a majority of members of the 'rival' ISA declared that association to be dissolved (149); belligerent and neutral countries from the war period were admitted (the Federal Republic of Germany in 1951 and Japan in 1952) well before they were permitted to join the UN; India was a founder member, and by 1960, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Uruguay and Venezuela among the 'less developed' countries were also members (150-53). China, however, would not join until 1977, due to concerns over US opposition.
Yates and Murphy identify the period from the 1960s to the 1980s as that in which 'the community of standardizers and network of organizations established by the standardization movement shifted focus from setting national standards for producers and users of industrial products to setting international standards that facilitated commerce more broadly, including through incorporation into official regulations' (158). The leading figure in this period was Olle Sturén, a civil engineer by training, who combined a career within the Swedish Standards Institute (becoming its director in 1957) with the role of Secretary of the Swedish Lawn Tennis Association, and an interest in modular kitchen design (159). Prior to his long period as ISO Secretary-General, commencing in 1968, he worked with the British Standards Institution and the German DIN on the formation between 1958 and 1961 of the European Committee for Standardization, CEN, bringing together the six original members of the EEC and the seven members of EFTA. By now, the logic of building the world market through regional and eventual global competition was explicit. As Sturén reported to the Swedish institute in 1958: 'If a free European market means anything at all, it means more competition. It means opening national markets to the competition of all Europe, allowing the European consumer to buy from the most efficient producer in his continent'; at the same time, 'international standards of a regional character' gave Western Europe, with its heavy reliance on global trade, 'an interest in promoting world standardization as a framework for its own standards' (161). The wording is critical, suggesting that it was not a question of imposing European standards on the world, but rather of having a genuinely global standard-setting organization from which European standards would in turn be taken.
Well, that was over sixty years ago. And it is over fifty years since Sturén injected new life into the ISO, after a period in which it made little impact under the cautious leadership of American diplomat Henry St Leger, and his short-lived successor, Charles Sharpston. The most striking thing to emerge from the story Yates and Murphy tell from this mid-point on is just how focussed Sturén would prove to be, and how complicated and drawn out the creation of a genuine world market and the efforts to further it by international and global action would be all the same. As they summarize Sturén's position, the ISO 'needed to set its own agenda that reflected the needs of the global economy; "We must cease to think of ISO as the fire brigade that responds to national requests"' (163-4). The process of issuing standards could be greatly speeded up; many national bodies would simply endorse them, as would the CEN; and the European Commission in Brussels would refer to them in its technical regulations, as would the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in Eastern Europe (164). And in fact in 1973-4 the ISO and IEC agreed a code of practice which stated that 'wherever international standards exist, national authorities and intergovernmental organizations should refer thereto in their regulatory texts either directly or through harmonized national standards' (165). Sturén would visit 60 countries over the next decade, the most significant being China, in 1976 and 1978, on either side of its joining the ISO. This section of the book ('Olle Sturén: Standardization Entrepreneur', 159-68) is pivotal, and establishes clearly the significance of standardization as a European project aimed at the systematic building of an integrated world market. The case study of the development of standard containers as the basis for global transportation infrastructure that follows, however, reflects the need to reconcile European domination of the institutionalised process with the US lead in 'intermodal unified transport', and the capacity on both sides to compromise when the prospective gains were sufficiently high. The requirement was for standard sizes that could be efficiently handled mechanically, and containers that could withstand transport by road, rail and sea. In practical terms, would standard sizes be measured in feet or metres? And how would containers be made to withstand handling in the most stressful situations on the most rudimentary transport equipment (such as uncushioned coupling and uncoupling on trains)? Given the US lead in the industry, the early running was made by the American Standards Association, at which standard lengths of 10, 20, 30 and 40 feet with 8 foot by 8 foot cross-sections were agreed in 1961 (173). The 20 foot container would become the point of reference (TEU - Twenty Foot Equivalent Unit) and the 40-foot the most common, with larger sizes added as capacity increased. Western European and Russian pressure for recognition of their different preferred (metric) standards was accommodated by designating them as alternative series (Series II and III), but no market for them developed. The definition of 'standard corners' was more complicated, but featured the relinquishing of key patents, and cooperation among competing producers to produce a new and improved design (177). As a result, transport handling costs would fall by over 90 per cent, in what was a classic case of capital investment and machinery replacing workers: there were 1.5 million containers in circulation by 1978, and more than ten times as many today. In contrast, efforts to arrive at a common standard for monochrome and colour television were unsuccessful (180-90). Then again, this was a far less strategic in terms of the development of the world market, and it is a failure that does not seem to have mattered much.
A fundamental structural issue relevant to both these cases - the weight of the US as a 'continental' and world-leading economy versus the combined significance of the cluster of European states with much greater levels of mutual and global trade - was relevant in the final case of the 'second wave': radio frequency interference and more general electromagnetic compatibility. The fact that radio transmissions interfere with each other and with other devices was problematic for effective communication and in widespread and growing markets for new consumer goods. It was an issue from the early 1920s: largely European initiatives led to the founding of the International Radio Union in 1925 and the CISPR (Comité international special des perturbations radioélectriques) in 1933. In the US an equivalent process of coordination of national producers operating different standards took place through committee C63 of the American Standards Association, resulting in different standards between Europe and the US for measuring interference, and different stances on the role for national laws. Yates and Murphy relate how standard setters in the United States, despite the initial lead held by US industries and the assumption that the rest of the world would just have to adopt US standards, 'gradually recognized the importance of international standardization and learned to participate in it effectively' (200). The dominant figure here was Ralph Showers, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), who first attended a CISPR meeting in 1958 and would be involved for a further 53 years, incidentally paying his own expenses for dozens of foreign trips throughout, and eventually becoming the chair of C63 in 1968, and the first US chair of CISPR in 1979. During this period, the logic of competitiveness asserted itself through the process of international standardization. Thriving as the US market was, US corporations producing in Europe or for the European market had to adapt: 'Since many European countries incorporated CISPR standards into national legislation, US products aimed at those markets (e.g., cars and computing equipment) might have to meet CISPR standards for radio wave emissions and immunity [from interference], a worry that would grow stronger in industry during the 1970s' (216). With government happy to take a back seat, and twelve national bodies needing to be coordinated through purely voluntary action, committee C63 proved unable to agree a unified national standard for electromagnetic compatibility in the early 1980s and the US shifted to a position of cooperation through CISPR, recognising the need to make periodic adjustments in response, for example, to EU directives on standards. As Yates and Murphy summarize: ''In the early 1970s, the US electronics industry began to recognize that it must be more competitive internationally, a realization that would grow throughout this period as it lost its preeminence in consumer electronics. It also learned that US participation in international standard setting improved competitiveness' (230-31). And in a further twist, the danger that active participation in CISPR might lead to de facto acceptance by the US of European standards led it to promote actively the further extension of the process on a genuinely global scale, initially in the context of the IEC (231).
The process of agreeing standards internationally was enormously cumbersome and time-consuming, especially in the days of typewriters and stencilled copies, and even after the invention of the photocopier. It was made more so by the requirements of the deliberative process. Documents were routinely required up to six months before meetings, dissenting views were circulated thereafter for a round of general consideration, and a voluminous correspondence was carried on alongside. As the pace of technological change increased, no sooner was a standard agreed than a process of revision began. The advent of the internet (and ARPANET before it), which was itself at the centre of the 'third wave' of standardization, would transform the process. First, innovation moved far too fast for such a process to be workable, and second, as is now familiar, the internet itself provided the solution, as email and online 'chatting' revolutionised the process of written communication. Simplifying ruthlessly (although the full story is interesting), a key issue, as Carl Cargill, of Sun Microsystems and then Adobe, would say in 1997, was that standard-setting through the 'traditional' system had become anticipatory: what had been a process of agreeing standards in a relatively settled area of production in a way that would still leave the process open for modification in the future became one of devising more or less empty frameworks to standardize a technology 'in advance of that technology being available as a product in any viable commercial form' (248). It didn't work. In the meantime, the implementation of TCP/IP protocols for internet working was developed by the US Defense Department and in use by civilian networks from 1983. This in turn gave rise to an informal network, the Internet Engineering Task Force, which first met in January 1986, and matters came to a head in 1992, the new spirit of the age being typified by Vinton Cerf's switching support to TCP/IP in 1992: 'stripping off his jacket, vest, and shirt during his talk to reveal a T-shirt reading "IP on Everything." More significantly for internet standardization, [David] Clark [previously holding out for an alternative approach] gave a rousing talk that summarized and lauded the IETF approach as follows: "We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code"' (250). In a way, this honoured previous principles, in that consensus was still the goal, and (in contrast to empty 'anticipatory' standards) procedures had to run and work on multiple implementations before they could be agreed as standards. But at the same time the IETF had no defined membership, as access was open to all, so had no requirement to balance consumers, producers and experts. And with the need to keep up with the breakneck pace of technological change imposing itself, a further shift was already taking place, to 'standards consortia', 'typically comprised of a set of vendors with aligned interests in creating interoperable products, who came together to create standards without first going through the time-consuming process of traditional multi-stakeholder standard setting or an expensive and time-consuming standards war' (255). Members of such consortia paid sometimes substantial membership fees, and could also undertake research and development, implementation and marketing - in effect, creating the product and the 'standard' simultaneously. Addressing relevant background, Yates and Murphy say: 'Turning to political economy rather than standards politics, historian Andrew Russell recently noted a US policy change as yet another factor: to increase American competitiveness, the National Cooperative Research Act of 1984 permitted cooperative standard setting under antitrust law as long as no price fixing or other collusive behaviors took place, opening the way to participation in standards consortia by American high-tech companies' (256 and Russell, 2008: 48). In response, Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) of the ISO and IEC responded in 1994 by creating a procedure, PAS, which allowed publicly available specifications to be fast-tracked to approval as international standards. Yates and Murphy note, 'We might view this integration of consortia into the private standard setting system as a version of economists Farrell and Saloner's notion of the most economically efficient world, with standard setting by private committees in a world in which powerful actors (in this case firms establishing consortia) can skip the process and set a standard that many others are likely to follow' (260, and Farrell and Saloner, 1988). At its limit this tendency is illustrated by the way in which three leading browser makers, Apple, Mozilla and Opera, worked between themselves outside W3C to update their systems continually through a Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group which continuously integrated improvements made by the individual companies to produce an evolving 'living standard', under a single chair who allowed no debate or appeal (286-7).
Browser makers, on whom all application developers necessarily depend, play 'a powerful gatekeeping role' (289) in W3C, the most prominent consortium. It emerged from the hypertext browsing system created at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) from the late 1980s by Tim Berners-Lee. CERN released the code to the public in 1993, Berners-Lee moved to MIT, and established W3C in 1994, and in no time HTML, URLs, and HTTP were ubiquitous as the building blocks of the world-wide web. Yates and Murphy offer a case study of the development of the W3C WebCrypto API (application programming interface) Standard (termed a Recommendation) between 2012 and 2017. The Web Cryptography Working Group develops standards for tools for building secure applications for such elements as payment modules on commercial apps. It runs through email and audio teleconferences, with occasional face-to-face meetings, and has a designated editor who controls all changes to any emerging draft specification, while the working group votes to approve working drafts for publication, and new versions of the spec produced for each stage, the last of these being a W3C Recommendation. It was set up in May 2012 with a view to producing a standard by March 2014, but produced it only in 2017 (273), and has up-dated it since. A central issue was how prescriptive the API should be: 'whether to write a high-level API that restricted developers to "safe" cryptography or a low-level API that provided a tool box but let developers choose what cryptographic methods were appropriate for their particular applications' (275). Ryan (who represented a browser maker), who championed the latter course over the opposition of some application developers, was able to become editor and push through a recommendation with known weak elements but on which developers could build varied high-level systems to suit their own needs (although he would resign due to pressure of other work a year before it was published in final form). Obviously, the underlying technical issues here are fast-moving and complex, as you can verify by checking in on Ryan (Sleevi) at work earlier this year, and well outside my intellectual grasp. Yates and Murphy do an excellent job in addressing the process, the declared altruism of some if not all participants, and the continuing if a little attenuated commitment to democracy and deliberation. But it looks likely that in the end, as Ryan stated when interviewed by Yates, 'what matters is not process track documents, what matters is what browsers implement, are willing to implement, think should be implemented' (288). The other thing that should be noted, of course, is that the web builders between them have massively expanded the world market, not only by the creation of 'new needs', but also by creating the technical infrastructure through which they can be quickly satisfied, on a global scale.
The final substantive chapter takes a different turn, addressing voluntary standards for quality management and social responsibility. It is focused first on the ISO 9000 series on quality management inaugurated in 1987, and necessarily moves beyond the engineering community and the issue of interoperability. Yates and Murphy conclude, convincingly, that 'competition for the ISO 9000 "business" made the entire network [of standard-setting] more complicated, less coherent, and, ironically, less focused on the social good' (294). It then recounts the attempt of the ISO to step onto the social and environmental standards 'bandwagon', and its complex and contested consequences, and branches out to cover further and increasingly dubious initiatives from Alice Tepper Marlin, the UN, and the World Economic Forum. The chapter provides an excellent critical summary of these initiatives, while as noted above moving away from the principal themes of the book. Neither working academics nor their 'customers' will need convincing that a quality 'kite-mark' is generally evidence that resources have been stripped out of education (or the production of other goods and services), and diverted into formalistic routines that fuel the lucrative boom in certification and accreditation.
After all this, the brief conclusion is mildly disappointing. No matter. It does make the strong point that although standard setting has been dominated for the most part by initiatives originating in Europe or the United States, China is already the largest consumer of standards, and set to be a dominant force in the future in their production too. It also laments the dearth of enthusiastic volunteers outside China, while reiterating that technological change is now so fast that no formally organised process that allows a degree of deliberation could possibly keep up. I would add that the very success of standardization in securing interoperability between competing producers has helped to make it largely redundant as a process organized outside production itself, as a result of the degree of coordination that is now necessary to ensure that global production chains can operate, along with the instant access to relevant information that digital platforms provide. Interoperability is practiced globally, every day, in real time, in the organization of production itself. So if standardization, spurred on by continually changing levels of competitiveness across the global economy, has played a part in bringing into being a world market that was only incipient in 1880, and if that world market has now developed a momentum that leaves standardization through deliberative technocracies behind, we should not be surprised. As Paul Agnew, long-serving secretary to the American Engineering Standards Committee, remarked in 1940, 'standards underlie all mass production methods, and ... facilitate the integrating processes necessary to large-scale production and distribution' (133). But the time may be past when they can be produced as they were in his day. Ever-changing ad hoc standards consortia internal to production processes themselves may instead become the order of the day.
Underlying the standardization movement from the start was the recognition that competing firms need a common infrastructure or network in order to create and extend markets for products; and in turn they need to create new markets, and new products, because they are capitalist enterprises, competing against each other in 'the market'. That market is tendentially global: Marx described the world market as the 'precondition and result' of capitalist development, suggesting both that foreign trade promoted global competitiveness, and that only with completion of the world market would the disciplines of capitalist competition become fully operative. He was able to observe only the beginnings of its emergence, dying in 1881 at a point when the UK still dominated, and the cross-national 'standard setting' that Yates and Murphy address was just getting under way. To me, their signal achievement is to bring out the part played by the standardization movement in creating the world market. Specific individuals often saw themselves as champions of the company or the state from which they came; governments sought to protect narrowly conceived interests; leaders of the movement embodied the highest levels of altruism in their devotion to standard setting as a service to the greater good for humanity at large; but all the same, their combined efforts smoothed and speeded the development of the world market by pushing forward the frontier on which global competition took place.
References and further reading
Farrell, Joseph, and Garth Saloner. 1988. Coordination through Committees and Markets. RAND Journal of Economics, 19, 2, 235-52.
Nielson, Brett, Ned Rossiter and Ranabir Samaddar, eds. 2018. Logistical Asia; The Labour of Making a World Region. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.
OECD. 2017. International Regulatory Co-operation: The Role of International Organisations in Fostering Better Rules of Globalisation. Paris: OECD.
Russell, Andrew L. 2008. Dot-org Entrepreneurship: Weaving a Web of Trust', Entreprise et histoire, 51.
US-China Business Council. 2020. China in International Standards Setting: USCBC Recommendations for Constructive Participation, Washington: UCSBC.