The International Organization for Standardization

After decades of working in relative obscurity to standardize the technical infrastructure of global capitalism, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) began to attract attention from academics, civil society organizations and management professionals in the late 1980s when it began to expand the scope of its work beyond technical product standards to generic organizational management systems. This attention focused on the ISO 9000 quality management standards, ISO 14000 environmental management standards and the recently issued ISO 26000 standard for social responsibility. A few scholars (such as Tamm Hallström (2004); Murphy and Yates (2009)) have begun to examine ISO itself as an institution, as part of a renaissance of scholarly interest in standardization more generally. ¹ Building on earlier groundbreaking work on the subject, ² this growing body of work gives us an increasingly rich picture of the history, culture and politics of standardization. Missing from this picture, however, is serious attention to the relationship between standardization and development. This is unfortunate, because development is a central element of the international standardization agenda, and controversy over the role of developing countries in international standardization, and of international standards in developing countries' economies, is among the central issues facing ISO.