This ready reference surveys the discipline of standards and standardization, defining common terms, clarifying descriptions, describing how standards could be used to restrain trade, and explaining how international trade is stimulated by the due process provisions of standards writing organizations. Containing real-world examples provided by experienced standards professionals, Standardization Essentials is a vital, forward-looking reference for mechanical, civil, electrical and electronics, materials, chemical, mineral, cost, quality, reliability, industrial, developmental, safety, forensic, and consulting engineers; standards managers; architects; project managers; upper-level undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education students in these disciplines. Crystallizes the essential role that standards play in strategic standardization management, purchasing, contractual agreements, and international trade! Covering costs, benefits, limitations, uses, and abuses of standardization programs, Standardization Essentials Considers whether standards build or bar trade and the use of international standards to leverage world markets Presents a case study of conformity assessment related to international technical trade barriers Focuses on consumer safety standards for automobile tires and other products Addresses implementation of ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 management system standards in industry Highlights voluntary (nongovernmental) and mandatory (governmental) standards and regulations developed by a variety of organizations Reveals competition, incongruities, and harmonization among national and international standards

The first global history of voluntary consensus standard setting. Finalist, Hagley Prize in Business History, The Hagley Museum and Library / The Business History Conference Private, voluntary standards shape almost everything we use, from screw threads to shipping containers to e-readers. They have been critical to every major change in the world economy for more than a century, including the rise of global manufacturing and the ubiquity of the internet. In Engineering Rules, JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy trace the standard-setting system's evolution through time, revealing a process with an astonishingly pervasive, if rarely noticed, impact on all of our lives. This type of standard setting was established in the 1880s, when engineers aimed to prove their status as professionals by creating useful standards that would be widely adopted by manufacturers while satisfying corporate customers. Yates and Murphy explain how these engineers' processes provided a timely way to set desirable standards that would have taken much longer to emerge from the market and that governments were rarely willing to set. By the 1920s, the standardizers began to think of themselves as critical to global prosperity and world peace. After World War II, standardizers transcended Cold War divisions to create standards that made the global economy possible. Finally, Yates and Murphy reveal how, since 1990, a new generation of standardizers has focused on supporting the internet and web while applying the same standard-setting process to regulate the potential social and environmental harms of the increasingly global economy. Drawing on archival materials from three continents, Yates and Murphy describe the positive ideals that sparked the standardization movement, the ways its leaders tried to realize those ideals, and the challenges the movement faces today. Engineering Rules is a riveting global history of the people, processes, and organizations that created and maintain this nearly invisible infrastructure of today's economy, which is just as important as the state or the global market.