Engineering Rules

Global Standard Setting since 1880

Craig N Murphy author JoAnne Yates author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Johns Hopkins University Press

Published:1st Apr '21

Should be back in stock very soon

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Engineering Rules cover

The first global history of voluntary consensus standard setting.

Finalist, Hagley Prize in Business History, The Hagley Museum and Library / The Business History Conference

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

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

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

Every standards professional should own this book. Bottom line—an A+.
Standards Engineering
By recounting the story of standardization, Yates and Murphy demonstrate how human and organizational actions slowly sediment into institutions that melt into the background of our lives.
Administrative Science Quarterly
Yates and Murphy provide an engaging narrative about the people and processes responsible for making the technologies we have today work with one another
New Books Network
The book is an extraordinarily detailed history of the movement from national to international standards creation and use. It introduces as its heroes . . . a series of men of rectitude and accomplishment who selflessly built the practice.
Yale Journal on Regulation
A comprehensive, readable account of private standard setting that should interest legal scholars, lawyers, and law students. Yates and Murphy have provided a great service with their illuminating history of the private world of standard setting.
The Regulatory Review
This book is history at its finest. It is not only a technical and business history of engineering standards but also a deeply researched social history of communities of standardizers. It is also elegantly written—a testament to Yates's and Murphy's research and writing skills. Historians of capitalism and technology will find it required reading, but this book also stands a fair chance of engaging a mass readership.
Business History Review

  • Runner-up for Hagley Business History Prize 2020 (United States)

ISBN: 9781421440033

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 29mm

Weight: 590g

440 pages