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This book examines the delegation of regulatory authority from governments to a single international private-sector body by focusing on three powerful global private regulators, or focal rule-making institutions: the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The book shows how the simultaneous privatization and internationalization of governance is driven, in part, by governments' lack of requisite technical expertise, financial resources, or flexibility to deal expeditiously with ever more complex and urgent regulatory tasks. Its main argument is that technical expertise and financial resources are necessary but not sufficient conditions for successful involvement in global private-sector standardization. To make its case, the book explores global private regulation in global financial and product markets.

This chapter examines the role of private regulators in global product markets, with particular emphasis on institutional structure and institutional complementarity in product regulation. It first provides an overview of how the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) became, for most industries, the focal rule-making institutions for setting international product standards. It then considers the global institutional structure and decision-making procedures before describing the domestic structures in Europe and the United States. It shows that the institutional structure for setting product standards in the United States is characterized by institutional fragmentation and contestation among competing standard-setters. In Europe, by contrast, the domestic standard-setting institutions are characterized by a high degree of coordination and organizational hierarchy.

This chapter examines how companies affected by international product standards assess these standards and the extent to which they are able to influence rule-making in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Drawing on the results of a business survey among standards experts in firms in the United States and four European countries (Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom), the chapter considers the importance of institutional complementarity in international standard-setting across five industries: chemicals; rubber and plastic products; medical instruments and medical devices; petroleum products; and iron and steel products. It shows that high complementarity between standard-setting institutions at the domestic level and the institutional structure of standardization at the international level favors European over American interests in ISO and IEC. By contrast, the relatively poor fit between U.S. domestic institutions and the international structure puts U.S. firms at a disadvantage.

This book has explored global private governance by three focal rule-making institutions: the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). It has shown that, in rapidly growing areas of global private regulation, where central state institutions are not directly involved, the representation of domestic regulatory preferences is to a large extent mediated by, or channeled through, domestic governance structures that are also private. This concluding chapter considers the implications of these findings for public policy and for normative debates over global governance more generally. It highlights two key issues: institutional reform to improve the fit between domestic and international institutions, and the questions of legitimacy raised by private rule-making.

This chapter examines why states decided to delegate key monitoring tasks to private actors in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. It first provides an overview of the origins of the CDM before discussing the involvement of the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in the CDM. It also presents three reasons behind delegated authority in the CDM, and specifically why private actors were selected to serve as the “atmospheric police” of the CDM. First, the private sector had relatively long-standing experience in the intricacies of measuring carbon offsets. Second, powerful states agreed that this market mechanism should be part of the Protocol, and that a third-party verifier was needed to monitor the quality of offset projects. Finally, there was a focal institution, the CDM Executive Board, to screen and oversee agents.

This chapter examines how the content of standards is formed and discusses the knowledge base of standards, using the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) 9000 series of quality standards as an empirical example. The ISO 9000 standards have influenced many other standards related to quality and the management of organizations. This standard is described in more detail and the assumptions about organizations from which the standard was developed are considered. The standard is then compared, first with scholarly thinking on how organizations function, and then with the popular management culture.

This chapter describes how an international standards organization is established and how one can create agreement about standards and legitimacy for the organization and its standards. Standards are sometimes developed by organizations other than those which have standardization as their official purpose. The International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) Technical Committee 176, which is responsible for the ISO 9000 standard, is used as a case study to analyze how international standards organizations develop standards and how problems and ways of solving them are identified and discussed within the organization. The study focuses on the organizational aspects of international standardization work.

This chapter looks at three case studies of standardizers within the quality area as the basis for a discussion of how standardizers try to persuade others to follow their standards. All three standardizers are from Sweden: the Swedish Institute for Quality and its Swedish Quality Award, the national standards organization Standardization in Sweden and the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) 9000 family of standards, and a consulting firm with its model of management by objectives. All three standards are intended to guarantee that production has been organized according to a number of structural elements which reflect certain minimum requirements.

The Drug Efficacy Study Initiative decisively reshaped modern drug regulation. Our purpose in reviewing the development of the Drug Efficacy Study and its implementation is threefold: to demonstrate how the process of standardization emerged in FDA drug regulation and contributed to FDA’s power, to highlight the ways in which DESI and FDA’s process of standardization evoke long-standing debate on the impact of product regulation, and to suggest potential durable legacies DESI may have on pharmaceutical markets and public health.

This chapter analyzes international harmonization of product standards and accreditation (section 1) and of food safety standards (section 2), which are conducted by different standard setting bodies and regulated by separate Agreements of the WTO. While these standards are non-binding, leaving states with discretion as to whether to adopt them in domestic regulation, the WTO Agreements have added legally binding force by mandating members to base domestic standards on harmonized ones. This change and resulting public concern regarding the legitimacy of international harmonization have led to substantive reform of standard setting procedures and of the public information policy of standard setting bodies.

This chapter presents case studies of non-binding norms and compliance with trade agreements. Topics covered include efforts against money laundering, the International Organization for Standardization, the World Bank Operational Standards, and environmental norms in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

This chapter establishes the standardization of the wall paintings in terms of painting style, subject matter, and detail, and determine the major social, political, and religious ideas that contributed to the production of the wall paintings and provided a rationale for the standardized format. The murals evince exceptional consistency in choice of subject matter, representation of imagery, and arrangement within an architectural space across the central zone from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. Each temple contains variations in style, modes of representation, and design, yet all sites draw upon an established group of structures and material so that the differences reveal continuities in subject matter and organization diachronically and synchronically. Although the subject matter of the wall paintings appears to comprise an extensive body of material, the focus upon a specific repertoire for more than a century and the fact that it falls within narrow thematic parameters – the centrality of Gotama, how to worship him, and the power that emanates from spiritual awakening – demonstrates the religious and social constraints placed upon it.

After discussing the value of experimentally scrutinizing patients’ compliance to treatment regimes, this chapter turns to the study of clinicians’ compliance to standards. Following a similar rhetorical structure as the compliance debate on the actions of patients, the low adherence rates of healthcare professionals to clinical guidelines is often seen as highly problematic by health scientists and policy makers. However, as in the debate on patient adherence, the common ‘solutions’ to improve the success rate of implementation initiatives tend to leave the epistemological status of aggregated medical knowledge untouched. Such initiatives are caught up in a dichotomy of universal clinical knowledge and particular patient characteristics, which is not a productive rendering of the problems encountered in clinical practice. To explore a different notion of standardization, this chapter explores the experimental interventions in a healthcare improvement project at a hematology/oncology outpatient clinic. This project articulates the value of situated standardization for both clinical practice and for the integrated pathway movement, rather than following the above-mentioned extremes of striving for full rationalization of medical practice, or of celebrating complexity that boycotts standardization.

This chapter explores the consequences of situated standardization for the relation between standardization and patient-centeredness. In the medical sociological literature, ‘standardization’ and ‘patient-centered care’ have been positioned as perfect conceptual opposites. This chapter explore the specificities of this opposition, their limitations, and in which sense a reconceptualization of both concepts could lead to their pragmatic commensurability. Drawing empirically upon the development of patient-centered care pathways, and particularly on the disconcerting moments within empirical instances of biomedicalized and patient-centered care, situated standardization proves helpful for redefining patient-centeredness from a change in professional attitude toward ‘wholeness’, or a procedural focus on patient participation, to a material and organizational characteristic. This proves particularly important because other definitions of patient-centeredness can allow doctors to exert unprecedented power over their patients. By putting center stage the issues patients, care professionals and organizations face, care can be made patient-centered in more substantial, contestable and located ways.

Testing was a major tool for the Technical Institute for Construction and Cement in its active relationship with private industry, but one that threatened to turn it into the private industry's vestigial limb. Eduardo Torroja sought to reverse the situation by systematizing tests so that it shaped private production within the interests of the ITCC's industrialization project. This chapter explores this system – the Blue Point - as it was developed for prestressed concrete joists, as well as its rejection by private industrialists and the government. In the process of promoting international standards for concrete production, Eduardo Torroja and some collaborators became relevant figures in the technological integration of Europe. The chapter interprets the process of regulation as the transition not from an interventionist state to a liberalized one but as the transformation of intervention itself. The corporate state became a regulatory state.

When asked about risk and stress, controllers accounts contradict their emotion-laden narratives of Chapter 7. “Risky? No, no, why do you think it’s risky?” “Stressful? My drive into work is more stressful than this.” Some people distance themselves by redefining the situation: “It’s like the high you get when you’re coming down a ski slope.” “I think of it as pushing tin, or it’s just me and the pilot. If I thought there were 300 people on a plane, I couldn’t do the job.” The concluding section of the chapter, “The Social and Cultural Transformation of Risky Work,” reconciles this contradiction. It reveals how culture and cognition work to normalize risk and stress. Also in response to the pressures of the job, controllers’ individually and collectively create strategies that become cultural, easing their emotional labor. Gallows humor. Drawing analogies: “It’s like the high we get working out,” These strategies distance controllers from the experience of risk and stress. Similarly, objects act – architecture, devices, and technologies, routines, rules and procedures – stabilizing the inside world, giving controllers the opportunity to redefine their experiences and they do, mediating the experience of risk and stress so they can do the job.

In the 1990s, the automotive industry began to invest in sound design in novel ways. Whereas sound design had long focused on shielding the car’s interior from exterior noise, it became increasingly important to design target sounds for particular categories of consumer. Each element of the car, from engines towipers and alarm signals, needed to have a characteristic sound that expressed brand identityand spoke to specific types of motorist. This chapter not only explainsthat we can find the roots of this sensory marketingin the experience society, but also uncovers how car manufacturers struggled to keep this trend in line with a contrasting development: the harmonization of car sound levels and the standardization of its measurement.Finally, this chapter shows what the search for target sounds meant for listening behind the wheel at the test bench. It required lay listeners with the skills of expert listeners.

In chapter 6, we take a close look at something that surprised us. The classroom in VFS in 2011–2012, as in many other UK schools, was heavily framed by the measurement system implemented in support of the government-mandated national curriculum. The result was a discursive and practical focus on “levels”—with learning managed through a rigorous regime of quantification and standardization that extended across all subjects, even including out-of-school activities. As with the emphasis on civility, the focus on levels also served to bound the classroom as an inwardly focused space that impeded flexible flows of learning across home, school, and elsewhere, distancing parents and constraining teachers. Beyond the surprise of uncovering so endemic a language of learning, what surprised us even more was that the students, parents, and teachers all preferred to embrace levels rather than risk more diverse, creative, or networked visions of learning.

The cognitive institutions of knowledge and culture emerge, circulate, and evolve through communication. This chapter explores the scaffolding role of communication protocols and structures, which range from natural language to TCP/IP to electrochemical signaling via pheromones to networks like Facebook and the World Wide Web that emerge through interaction. I argue that by examining the process through which communication scaffolds knowledge and culture, we can understand how shifts in the (1) quantity and (2) quality of communication in a system influence its knowledge and culture. Communication enables information to be distributed, efficiently stored in and accessed through others. Rapid communication increases an individual’s reach to knowledge and culture across that system and consequently decreases the diameter and diversity of knowledge and culture as a whole. Communication also stores information in itself. The social structure of communication leaves a pattern that itself may be evaluated as compatible or incompatible with a sent message by the receiver. Together, these processes support, constrain and undercut the knowledge and culture that exist atop them.