BOOK: Joanne YATES & Craig MURPHY, Engineering Rules - Global Standard Setting since 1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). ISBN 9781421440033, 39.95 USD

 

(Source: JHUP)

JHUP has published a new book on the history of global standard setting.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Private, voluntary standards shape almost everything we use, from screw threads to shipping containers to e-readers. They have been critical to every major change in the world economy for more than a century, including the rise of global manufacturing and the ubiquity of the internet. In Engineering Rules, JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy trace the standard-setting system's evolution through time, revealing a process with an astonishingly pervasive, if rarely noticed, impact on all of our lives.

This type of standard setting was established in the 1880s, when engineers aimed to prove their status as professionals by creating useful standards that would be widely adopted by manufacturers while satisfying corporate customers. Yates and Murphy explain how these engineers' processes provided a timely way to set desirable standards that would have taken much longer to emerge from the market and that governments were rarely willing to set. By the 1920s, the standardizers began to think of themselves as critical to global prosperity and world peace. After World War II, standardizers transcended Cold War divisions to create standards that made the global economy possible. Finally, Yates and Murphy reveal how, since 1990, a new generation of standardizers has focused on supporting the internet and web while applying the same standard-setting process to regulate the potential social and environmental harms of the increasingly global economy.

Drawing on archival materials from three continents, Yates and Murphy describe the positive ideals that sparked the standardization movement, the ways its leaders tried to realize those ideals, and the challenges the movement faces today. Engineering Rules is a riveting global history of the people, processes, and organizations that created and maintain this nearly invisible infrastructure of today's economy, which is just as important as the state or the global market.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yoanne Yates is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management, Emerita, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management and Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century. 

Craig N. Murphy is the Betty Freyhof Johnson '44 Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. He is the author of The United Nations Development Programme: A Better Way? and International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance since 1850.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Acronyms

Introduction

Part I. The First Wave

1. Engineering Professionalization and Private Standard Setting for Industry before 1900

2. Organizing Private Standard Setting within and across Borders, 1900 to World War I

3. A Community and a Movement, World War I to the Great Depression

Part II. The Second Wave

4. Decline and Revival of the Movement, the 1930s to the 1950s

5. Standards for a Global Market, the 1960s to the 1980s

6. US Participation in International RFI/EMC Standardization, World War II to the 1980s

Part III. The Third Wave

7. Computer Networking Ushers in a New Era in Standard Setting, 1980s to 2000s

8. Development of the W3C WebCrypto API Standard, 2012 to 2017

9. Voluntary Standards for Quality Management and Social Responsibility since the 1980s

Conclusion

Essay on Primary Sources

Notes

Index

 

More info here

CALL FOR PAPERS: International Conference: ‘The evolution of transnational private rule-makers: Understanding drivers and dynamics’ (Tilburg, 3-4 December 2020) (DEADLINE: 31 August 2020)

(Source: Tilburg University)

We learned of a conference at the University of Tilburg within the context of a 5-year research project funded by the European Research Council titled ‘The resilience and evolution of voluntary economic activism and the role of law’ (REVEAL). Themes and topics include:

Themes and topics • Evolution in the form and content of standards (finance/manufacturing) • Theoretical approaches to evolving dynamics and resilience in private rule-making • External drivers and dynamics for the evolution of private standard-setters • Emergence and/or internal change of private standard-setters in connection to regulatory crises and policy failures • Role of industry and non-industry actors in the establishment of private standard-setters • Dynamics of cooperation and competition between private standard-setters and the role of policy change or external large-scale events • Monopolist standard-setters’ regulatory power and their influence on public authority • Interactions with national/regional legalregimes and their effects on public and private rules • Effects of international law on private regimes’ rules and procedure • Lobbying strategies by private standard-setters (both internally and vis-à-vis a supervisory authority/ies) • Mediation of interests between various stakeholder groups and outcomes of mediation within private standard-setters • Internal and organisational enablers of evolution and resilience of private standard-setters • Constraints and limits to the evolution and resilience of private standard-setters • Empirical accounts of survival strategies or discontinuance in private standard-setters • Effects and distributional implications of evolution and resilience in private rule-making

The full call can be found here

CALL FOR PAPERS: Ökonomische Krisen als Chance? Kooperation und Regulation in historischer Perspektive (Heidelberg, 1-3 July 2020) (DEADLINE: 15 January 2020)

(Source: Hsozkult.de)

We learned of a call for papers for an interdisciplinary conference on regulatory cooperation during economic crises from a historical perspective.

“Economic crises have abounded since the 19th century, affecting states as well as every individual. The responses to such crises are therefore understandably diverse and complex, ranging from the fear of loss of work and strikes (workers), to measures to secure employment (unions), short-time work and rationalisation (companies), to subsidy and deflation policies, research and funding programs (politics).” […]

The full call can be found on Hsozkult

NOTICE: "George C. Lamb Jr. Visiting Fellows in Regulatory Governance" (2015-2016)

Rethinking Regulation at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, in collaboration with Duke’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and the Fuqua School of Business, invites outstanding scholars of regulatory governance to apply for 1-2 residential George C. Lamb, Jr. Fellowships for the 2015-16 academic year. The Rethinking Regulation program is a multi-disciplinary community comprised of faculty members and graduate/professional students from many academic departments and professional schools at Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University. The group’s members study and assess “regulation in action” – the evolving politics, operations, and culture of regulatory institutions, their interactions with regulated businesses and other interest groups, and normative frameworks for the evaluation of regulatory policy. Find out more [here].

In addition to pursuing their own research, Lamb Fellows will be expected to participate in Rethinking Regulation seminars and workshops, as well as Kenan Institute for Ethics workshops and seminars. They will also help shape a significant collaborative research project along with other members of the Rethinking regulation community. As part of that collaboration, Fellows will undertake some teaching responsibilities in Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and/or Fuqua School of Business – most likely co-teaching an advanced research seminar focused on subject matter of the collaborative research project, though other arrangements are possible. Fellows can come from any relevant academic discipline, including political science, public policy/administration, history, economics, sociology, cognitive psychology, anthropology, business management, law, environmental studies, risk analysis, and engineering.