Dr. Busch argues that standards play a central role in constructing reality.

Transcript

Brady Deaton: My guest today is Dr. Laurence Bush. He and I will be discussing his forthcoming book titled Standards: Recipes for Reality. The book will be published by MIT Press. Laurence Bush is university-distinguished professor in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University and co-directs the Center for the Study of Standards in Society. Larry, thanks so much for joining us.

 

Laurence Bush: Good morning, Brady. It's a pleasure to do so.

 

Brady:  Larry, after reading your book, I saw in every newspaper I picked up the issue of standards, and I found it was particularly relevant to the area of agriculture economics, but before I focus on those issues, I'd like to just start off broadly, and ask you about what you mean by the idea that standards are the way and the means by which we construct reality.

 

Laurence Bush: Yeah. The thing about standards is that they very, very quickly become taken for granted objects, whether they are texts, or they are physical objects, like for example, weights and measures. These things take on a taken for granted character, and as a result, become part of the reality that we expect. For example, if I get in a car that I've never seen, the cars are sufficiently standardized, and I can very quickly figure out how to drive that car. It doesn't require any special training. Once I've learned how to drive a car, I can drive any car.

 

Brady: In your book, you have a number of examples that are fascinating, and I wonder if you might just talk about some of the ways that we encounter standards that we might not think have found your discussion about time, and railroads, and the albino rats in the laboratory experiments particularly compelling. Could you pick a couple of those examples, and just discuss them?

 

Laurence Bush: Sure. Let's talk about the ones you mentioned, and maybe we'll move on to some others. If you take the example of railroads, obviously one realizes immediately that in order to have a system of railroads that crosses your entire country, you have to have the same track gauge. That part actually didn't occur in the United States until the 1880s, and was largely the result of building the transcontinental railroad, and deciding that a particular gauge was going to be used for that, and then gradually moving towards that being the standard gauge for all railroads. More complicated than that, and equally important, perhaps maybe even more important, was the fact that until something that used to be called railroad time, and that we today call standard time was developed, riding on trains was an extremely dangerous affair. Let me give you an example. Most railway tracks were single track lines, so that meant that if a train were to leave one end of the line, it had to arrive at a crossing somewhere, where there would be a siding.

It would pull off, and wait for a train coming the opposite direction to go past. Since you didn't have standard time, that is to say, every little town had its own time, what that meant was that it was very difficult to predict where those two trains were going to come to the crossing point, where they have to go past each other. The result was an enormous number of head-on collisions. There were several ways to solve that. The most obvious way to solve that was to build two tracks, but to build two tracks was quite an expensive proposition, especially if there wasn't sufficient freight on the line to justify a second track. The ultimate solution was the creation of standard time, which allowed a given train to leave at a particular time that would be immediately knowable to people on the other end of the line and thereby to ensure that the trains would manage to pass each other at a point where there was a siding, and wouldn't collide head-on.

I think that's just a few of the standards, but to that we would of course have to add that there needed to be standards for the track bed, so that trains that were heavier wouldn't sink into the mud. There had to be standards for bridges. There had to be just an enormous array of standards for the railways, and they had to be distributed across an entire nation, at the very least across an entire nation. In Europe, of course, they had to be distributed across many nations. Even today, there are several European nations that have standards that are not compatible with the most common standard, so Spain, for example, accepting its high-speed trains that have just recently been put in, all of the other lines in Spain are simply not compatible with the standards in the rest of Europe. You literally have to get off a train at the border, walk across, and get on another trainer. Obviously rather time-consuming and clumsy kind of thing to have to do.

One of the other cases where you find standards is in science itself, so for example, in order to produce rat studies, of which there are literally tens of thousands now, you had to have standardized rats, and starting in the 1930s, it was a major effort to create standard rats. Standard rats were not your typical sewer rat. That would probably be rather nasty. It would be of enormous genetic diversity, would have a rather poor diet, and an enormously variable diet, and the idea was to produce rats that had a standard diet, had a standard amount of exercise, had a standard genetic base, and that were relatively gentle in their demeanor, and would not resist human care. Doing that required the actual production of a detailed manual that went through everything from cage size to the position of water dispensers in the cage, to the kinds of specific nutritional elements that needed to be in the feed, and specific genetic types that were desirable.

Today, if you are a scientist who uses rats in the work, you will have to go and buy those rats from one of three or four companies that produce particular rats that are designed for particular kinds of scientific studies. Picking the rat that you find out of the sewer would actually make your results rather useless.

 

Brady: I think what's so compelling about those two examples is that if standards play a central role in coordinating our understanding of time, and developing our knowledge, i.e., the albino laboratory rat is central for scientific study, it's not surprising that we're seeing the role of standards in all of the issues that we're addressing. What this word standard, how is it ... How do you differentiate it? How is it associated with other similar words, like regulation, or law?

 

Laurence Bush: I think there's undoubtedly an irreducible ambiguity there. Standards, for example, may be produced. A good example would be building codes. The standards that are used in building codes are developed by the private sector. They're developed by architects, plumbers, electricians, and so on, and those are then adopted by government agencies and turned into law. There's a rather ambiguous border between standards and laws, but of course most standards are not legally required. That is to say, they're not written into law. They are at least in principle voluntary, although avoiding those standards is often nigh impossible, or extremely difficult and expensive. Even if the standard is not a legally regulated standard, it is necessary to pursue it. I think, again, I don't think there's any way you can clarify this. This is an ambiguity that's built into our behavior, so at certain times, certain things are seen as standards.

For example, until recently, whether or not smoking was allowed in a particular restaurant was up to the owner. These days, in most cases, smoking is legally prohibited in restaurants, so what was a private standard, what was a voluntary standard, becomes a law. The reverse, of course, occasionally occurs, although that tends to be relatively rare, where things that were in law are deleted, and left to the product sector. The other point I would emphasize here, too, is that given the enormous amount of technology that's constantly being developed, enormous number of products, processes, services that are constantly being developed, that there is a continuing and extraordinarily important need for new standards, without which these things literally can't function. A good example would be all of the IT information that ... I'm sorry, all the IT products that are available, which require literally thousands of standards. If I developed a new super duper computer that could do many, many things that are currently unavailable on existing computers, but I couldn't plug that into the larger system, so I couldn't connect it to the internet, I couldn't make it talk to other computers, I couldn't share files and so on, it would be essentially useless.

It's all those standards that allow compatibility, and what in the computer science community is known as interoperability, that make that kind of stuff possible. These are constantly changing, constantly being updated, constantly being modified as new technologies arrive.

 

Brady: Do you see that the role of standards has changed over time? Are there more of them, or are they changing in character, or have they always been this essential means by which we construct order in the economy, or amongst relationships between people?

 

Laurence Bush: I think there are two parts to the answer to that question. First, I think there's no question that over time, the number of standards has increased markedly. That's partially a function of the production of, mass production of various kinds of goods and services that st