The ISO Under Stress: Will It Bend or Break?

• In Event: Transnational Private Governance Under Stress: The Case of Standardization

Abstract

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has undergone almost constant change since its founding in 1947. The rate of change in both ISO and its environment has increased dramatically in this century as competing transnational standard-setting organizations have proliferated, new actors—from developing countries to management consultants to civil society—have entered ISO committees, and standardization activity has expanded far beyond its formerly technical confines. Drawing on the author’s two decades of research and participant observation in ISO, this paper examines ISO’s position and role in contemporary transformations of global standardization. What are the main stressors? How is power shifting between established and new actors? How do ISO and its constituents mobilize or react to these forces? What strategies—flexibility or rigidity, openness or retrenchment—favour its continued pre-eminence, and which tend to its decline? Opening to new and diverse communities of practice could be both the key to ISO’s continued pre-eminence but also a threat to its coherence. How ISO resolves this paradox confronting it will determine its future.

Author

• Stepan Wood, University of British Columbia