Managing Globalization: “You like tomato and I like tomahto”

When people talk about the forces that make globalization happen, the first things that come to mind are often information technology, transportation and trade. But there's another important factor that connects all of them: standards.

International standards have become, at the same time, the price of admission to the global economy and the glue holding it together. They cover engineering, manufacturing, management, communications, packaging and just about any economic activity you can name. Adherence to the standards is a condition of entry to the World Trade Organization. And as the global economy grows, so do they.

You don't have to look far to see the usefulness of standards: what would happen if air traffic controllers didn't speak English? And you probably don't even notice the basic ones like time (seconds, minutes, hours, days) and location (latitude and longitude). Yet in industry, making sure that suppliers' products meet customers' expectations requires a much more specific and complex set of standards, a job for groups like the International Organization for Standardization.

"In 2005, ISO was producing more than 100 standards a month, a 40 percent increase compared with 2002," Alan Bryden, secretary general of the organization, said in an e-mailed response to questions. "Today, ISO's portfolio stands at over 16,140 standards, and they provide benefits for just about every sector of business and technology."

Bryden said the organization was extending its standards to several emerging fields, with new standards already established for food safety, information security and supply-chain security. The group is moving on to nanotechnology, geosynthetics and biometrics.

Developing those standards requires a long process of drafts and voting, in which standards bodies collect suggestions from businesses and governments around the world. The other forces of globalization have made that process easier in some ways and more difficult in others, said Kathleen Kono, vice president for global cooperation at ASTM International, an American standards group. "The Internet has revolutionized the standards development system," she said. "In the past, we sent all this paper material. If somebody in Beijing was on a technical committee, by the time they got a draft standard, the ballot had closed. Today, it's all at the same time."

Bryden pointed out that the standards themselves, at least the ones covering high-technology communications, are crucial for this process, thus facilitating their own perpetuation. Yet the lack of one big standard - a common language - has become more of a challenge as developing countries enter the global trading system.

Kono said: "We get lots of requests for standards in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc. It's not easy. If everybody spoke one language, it would be so much easier to communicate."

ASTM is preparing to start mini- Web sites, with material duplicated from its English-language site, in all three of those languages, she added.

For developing countries, standards can be a blessing and a curse as they move into new industries and export markets. On the one hand, they have a ready-made set of criteria, already established by a global body, which they can adopt for instant entry into the international trading system. On the other hand, they were not able to have a say in the existing standards, which may clash with their own procedures.

The key, Kono said, is to get these countries involved in the setting of new standards. But that doesn't always go smoothly.

"In the smaller, developing countries, it's harder to change that culture, to realize that even though you're a little guy, you can have a big voice in this system," she said.

ASTM's standard-setting works by a sort of modified consensus system, Kono said, where the objections of any member of a technical committee must be reconsidered by the committee before the standard can be approved.

As well as offering its standards to developing countries, ASTM International offers them technical assistance and free voting membership for their experts on standard-setting committees. So far, it has signed assistance agreements with 47 countries. But it's tough for poor countries to do the nitty-gritty work of contributing to new standards, Kono said.

"They don't have the infrastructure to be able to do that," she said. "Developing standards is labor-intensive, and there is a limited pool of experts in each of these industries who can do the scientific work to develop good standards."

Still, involving developing countries in the process gives the standards greater legitimacy, something that could be important as groups like the move by the International Organization for Standardization to institute standards for sensitive topics like greenhouse gas monitoring, water supply and even social responsibility.

"When it comes down to it," Bryden said of standards, "people only use them if they find them useful."