EDPE Seminar: Private Standards and Public Power
Published: 9 November 2022
16 November. Stephen Mihm, University of Georgia
Professor Stephen Mihm, University of Georgia
Private Standards and Public Power: Paul Gough Agnew and the Corporate Capture of Standard Setting in the United States.
Wednesday 16 November
Room 107 Rankine Building
Together with the Centre for Business History in Scotland, Entrepreneurship, Development and Political Economy cluster will celebrate a seminar by Professor Stephen Mihm from the University of Georgia.
Stephen Mihm is the author of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Harvard University Press, 2007); and the co-author, with Nouriel Roubini, of Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (Penguin Press, 2010), which was named as one of the "Top Ten Books of 2010" by the New York Times. He is also the co-editor, with Katherine Ott and David Serlin, of Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (NYU, 2002); and the editor of The Life of P.T. Barnum (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2017). He is also the author of a number of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and academic essays.
Private Standards and Public Power: Paul Gough Agnew and the Corporate Capture of Standard Setting in the United States.
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.
For further information, please get in touch with business-school-research@glasgow.ac.uk.
We foster a positive and productive environment for seminars through our Code of conduct.
First published: 9 November 2022
<< 2022