ABSTRACT
Conformance assessment has turned many national standards bodies into profitable businesses-into organizations that look as much like multinational corporations as they do like NGOs (non-governmental organizations) or the constituent parts of the United Nations (UN) system. The greatest spur to the expanding business of conformance assessment has been ISO’s publication, in 1987, of a quality management standard, ISO 9000. ISO’s experience with that standard, has, for the first time, given the organization the desire and the capacity to take on a much broader agenda of social regulation. Therefore, somewhat paradoxically, at the very moment at which some observers have begun to worry that key voluntary standard setting bodies have lost their “secret strength”—their immersion in a “civic culture” that values much more than profit-making1-ISO has actually begun to become an alternative to our ineffective UN system of intergovernmental organization, a development that some observers of voluntary consensus standard setting have championed for almost a century. Even if ISO could hardly be thought of as a replacement for the UN,
through its work in environmental and social responsibility standards, ISO has begun to contribute, directly, to the goals of “sustainable human development” that it shares with the UN. This chapter explores the origins of ISO 9000 and why it spread. We
then turn to the links between this quality management standard and ISO’s work on environmental standards and standards for corporate social responsibility (CSR). We link ISO’s work to current debates about the UN’s Global Compact and other global governance initiatives that rely on businesses and professional associations. The chapter could have been entitled “Shaping Quality-Enhancing
Competition” because that is how many of those who work with and within ISO conceive of the link between ISO 9000 and the later series of standards on the environment (ISO 14000) and social responsibility
(ISO 26000). Fundamental standards (like weights and measures) and product standards (ISO’s original forte) shape competition by limiting some of the differences between similar products that different companies bring to the market: “better” product standards are those that convince companies to compete over features that matter most to consumers. The standards discussed in this chapter shape competition in a different way. “Quality management” standards are supposed to improve all of an organization’s processes so that, over time, all of the features of all of its products will improve. Effective environmental standards, labor standards, and human rights standards push firms toward different overall business strategies, strategies that-again-enhance conditions that many people consider to be socially desirable overall. Quality management standards and high social standards also tend
to reinforce each other. Political economists Michael J. Piore2 and Stephen Herzenberg3 argue that improving global labor standards would tend to push businesses toward quality-enhancing types of competition because, in order to cover the costs associated with making improvements in labor conditions, companies would need to invest in improvements in labor productivity. Increased productivity would, in turn, tend to lead to higher-quality products because productivity gains would probably require improving workers’ skills, which tends to reduce defects. Similarly, when a firm has invested in a quality management system, it is likely to invest in additional training and more general education for its workers. Those investments will be needed to give workers the capacity to use the new management system effectively, and those improvements in “human capital,” in turn, are likely to lead to improvements in working conditions, even if only indirectly, simply because more skilled workers generally are able to make greater demands on their employers. Of course, having organizations adopt ISO standards is far from the
only way either to improve the quality of management or to better society more generally. The fields of social and economic development are concerned with the much broader range of techniques that are available. They include government programs to improve education and training (developing human capital), the adoption of model legal codes, encouraging the formation of a vibrant civil society (developing “social capital”), and the ratification of international treaties that lay out specific individual and collective rights. ISO standard setters simply argue that some international voluntary consensus standards can contribute to an environmentally sustainable form of such development. This is a very different argument from the one that was used to jus-
tify ISO at its foundation: the argument that international standards
help create the widest possible trading area in which regions and firms can find their comparative advantage.
