Stephen Mihm

2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

Abstract: In general, the United States has delegated the important job of setting industry-wide standards to the private sector. This development, though, was hardly inevitable. When Congress created the Bureau of Standards in 1900, the leaders of this new federal bureaucracy sought to play a key role in setting the nation’s standards. It immediately encountered intense resistance, and eventually found itself in an uneasy relationship with an ascendant private organization dedicated to this same task: the American Engineering Standards Committee. This organization decisively seized the powers of standards setting from the federal government and transferred it to the private sector. This paper examines how this happened. At first, during the heyday of the “associative state” during the 1920s, the powers of AESC remained relatively circumscribed. But during the New Deal, when the scope of the federal government grew dramatically in every other respect, business interests managed to commandeer the power to set standards for themselves. This move, largely forgotten now, would have profound consequences for the evolution of the regulatory state in the postwar era.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: Business in the United States has long dominated the process of setting industry-wide standards. But this state of affairs was hardly a foregone conclusion in the early twentieth century, when federal bureaucracies like the Bureau of Standards and later, the Department of Commerce, came to play a significant role in setting standards for private industry. This paper explains how these initial experiments with government-sponsored standards came undone in the 1920s and 1930s. It does so by examining the career of Paul Gough Agnew, an engineer who steered a new private organization – the American Engineering Standards Committee, and later, the American Standards Association – to a dominant place in setting standards, effectively usurping government control over this critical area of economic power. The paper examines how this little-known engineer forged close connections to corporate interests, building a pro-business organization that would dominate standards setting for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

2026 London

Abstract: This presentation examines the history of industrial standards as a site of co-creation between governments, industries, engineers, and consumers. It argues that measurement systems, quality norms, and technological standards did not arise from unilateral authority but from complex negotiations that shaped both industrial practices and state–market relations. Through comparative historical case studies, Mihm traces how the development of shared standards fostered trust, coordination, and innovation across sectors and borders. By analysing how these standards were collaboratively (and sometimes contentiously) defined, the paper shows how technical systems became arenas of co-production between public and private actors. It also reveals how standards structured global competition, industrial modernisation, and transnational governance. Placing standardisation within the framework of co-creation, Mihm demonstrates that the evolution of measurement and quality systems illuminates how societies balance innovation with regulation, autonomy with cooperation—issues that remain at the heart of sustainable industrial development today.