Engineering Rules examines the history of private voluntary standards from the 1880s until the present day. If the subject summons up mental images of a worthy but rather tedious and narrow work, such a description does not fit this book at all. Instead, Yates and Murphy combine impressively deep scholarly research with colorful personalities who have major agency in events, providing a careful and illuminating positioning of the story in the wider political economy. As a result, the authors rescue standards from obscurity and assert their role in providing "a critical infrastructure for the global economy" (p. 2).
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