ABSTRACT
Although standardization is not an invention of the twentieth century, its institutionalization at the national level started in most industrialized countries at the beginning of the last century. The British Standards Institution (BSI) was created in 1901, the predecessor of the Deutsche Insitut fiir Normung (DIN) in 1917, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1918, and the Association Francaise de Normalization (AFNOR) in 1926. Like many other organizational structures, the standardization process reflects the specific institutional patterns in different countries, in particular with regard to its integration into the country's general legal and economic framework and its preference for centralized or decentralized structures.
