Organizing International Standardization

This book investigates the ways in which global standardization organizations establish, negotiate, and maintain their authority and legitimacy, thereby inducing companies, states, and other organizations to adopt and implement the voluntary standards they produce.The book examines the structure and workings of two major standard-setters: the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC). Within ISO, the author studies Technical Committee 176, which is responsible for standards for quality assurance and quality management - the much-discussed ISO 9000 standards implemented by thousands of companies around the world. The IASC sets global accounting standards that are increasingly important in an era of rising demands for transparent, full-disclosure financial reporting. On the basis of extensive interviews and the analysis of documents produced by the standardization bodies, the author reveals the mechanisms, internal struggles, and variable logics of their globalizing efforts, showing how nominally voluntary implementation programs effectively produce widespread adoption and compliance with complex, highly technical standards. Kristina Tamm Hallstrom brings together organizational theory, discourse analysis, a global perspective, and an alert sensitivity to power relations to make sense of ISO TC 176 and the IASC. Theoretically nuanced and empirically rich, Organizing International Standardization offers much of value to scholars and practitioners in sociology, international relations, business, accounting, technical disciplines, organizational consulting, and related areas