ABSTRACT
The International Organization for Standardization, ISO, has existed for over 60 years. It has helped set industrial standards that touch almost every aspect of human life. Even if we retreat as far away from the world of industrial products as we possibly can, ISO standards will follow us. If we escape to an untouched wilderness-to a mountain park or to an island beach-there will still be ISO standards that define some parts of the backpack we carry with us, the water bottle that hangs from it, and even the water that bottle contains. Our hiking boots or our swimming suits probably came from the factories where they were made to stores where we bought them in ISO standard containers and the train, bus, boat, or car that took us to our pre-industrial idyll contained hundreds of ISO standard parts, many of them made under the eye of an ISO standard quality management system. Yet, for all of the ubiquity of ISO’s standards, few people ever think
about them, or about the process by which they are created and adopted. Nevertheless, for as long as this process has existed, there have always been a few political thinkers who have believed that that process was particularly important. ISO standards are adopted voluntarily, and they are created by the consensus of representatives of those who will use and those who will produce the products and services to which they apply. Ever since engineers invented voluntary consensus standard setting, there have men who have imagined that the process could be used to reach agreement on a whole range of progressive regulation that governments (for one reason or another) fail to provide. Voluntary consensus standard setting predates ISO by almost as
many years as ISO has existed, but, from the beginning, many of the believers in the importance of the process were convinced that such standard setting ultimately had to be done at a global level. After all, standards helped define the limits of economic units, of trading areas, and the industrial system would provide its greatest benefits (the standard
setters believed) if a single, global economic unit could be formed. The goal, from the beginning, was international standards. Nonetheless, throughout most of the twentieth century, and even in
the first two decades after ISO was created, most standard setting work operated at the level of the nation-state. The most important organizations were national standard setting bodies and it was national standard setting bodies-many of them private associations made up, themselves, of other private associations-that established ISO. By the 1980s, though, most of the work of the national standard
setting bodies, groups like BSI (the British Standards Institution, the oldest of the national bodies and the model for many of them) focused on setting global standards. Much of this work is achieved by taking part in ISO technical committees-the groups that set standards-and by volunteering to coordinate such committees, volunteering to act as their secretariat. The prominence of global industrial standard setting came, in part,
as an indirect consequence of some of ISO’s earlier work. In the 1960s and 1970s much of the attention of ISO’s own small Geneva-based secretariat, and much of the attention of many national standard setters, was focused on creating standards that would transform the global transportation and communication infrastructure, thus removing a major impediment to the creation of a global trading area. As that global trading area formed, the work of voluntary consensus standard setters shifted more and more toward the establishment of global standards. At the same time, the recent round of economic globalization con-
fronted companies throughout the world with greater competition as well as greater opportunities for new markets. This provided an incentive for many companies to adopt customer-oriented quality management systems. The ISO 9000 series provided one such system. In fact, it provided the system that has been, by far, the most widely adopted throughout the world. ISO 9000 proved an economic boon to many national standard set-
ting bodies (and, to a lesser extent, to ISO itself) and led to a strong interest in developing other management systems and other standards for work processes. Developing such standards has become a major focus of ISO’s work today. That work includes the now well-established series of ISO environmental standards (ISO 14000) as well as ongoing negotiations on a general standard for corporate social responsibility that will cover issues of labor rights and human rights in general, as well as questions of environmental stewardship, transparency, and support of the rule of law. As ISO has moved into these new fields, it has begun
to take on something of that long-anticipated role of setting global social standards-establishing regulations that governments find difficult to establish by themselves or through traditional intergovernmental agreements. As ISO’s role setting standards for quality management, environmental
management, and corporate social responsibility have increased, so has the organization’s visibility as a part of global governance. Companies advertise their adherence to ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 standards, and, in most countries, consumers have developed some awareness of what that means. Yet, at the same time that ISO’s visibility as part of global governance
has increased, the original role of voluntary consensus standard setting has diminished. Throughout the twentieth century, the greatest champions of voluntary consensus standard setting were engineers in the most innovative fields of the day-beginning with electrical engineers a century ago, in the early days of electric power. In today’s highesttechnology fields, innovation takes place so rapidly that ISO’s relatively slow process of building consensus among consumers and producers seems cumbersome and slow to many important stakeholders. Ad hoc consortia of information technology producers have become important standard setters and ISO’s goal of serving the public good has been adopted by the open source movement, which is largely made up of engineers in one of today’s leading technological fields. That change has not diminished ISO’s role, or that of voluntary con-
sensus standard setting. The organization sits at the center of a network of experts and industry representatives that is as large or larger than the professional staff of the entire United Nations system. The collective work of those standard setters may be as essential to today’s global political order as anything done by the UN system. ISO’s work is certainly as essential, perhaps more essential, to the governance of the global industrial economy.
