ABSTRACT
To understand ISO’s current role, and its future, it is essential to understand its past. That is the purpose of this chapter. We first consider the general roles that standard setting has played in all economies; standards both help determine with whom people trade-the boundaries of trading areas-as well as the form of technological innovation that takes place within a trading area. We then turn to the idea of voluntary consensus standard setting and the advantages that this method was perceived to have by its inventors, engineers active more than a century ago. ISO grew from the vision of the engineers, and from their work throughout the first half the last century, which is the next issue that this chapter addresses. Finally, we outline three eras in ISO’s 60 years of operation, beginning with the two decades in which it established its capacity and developed its procedures. In the following two decades, until the late 1980s, ISO’s work focused on helping create the current global trading area. In the last two decades, the focus has shifted to the broad area of management standards, and to forms of social regulation within the new global market that states have failed to provide.
