ABSTRACT: Top Down or Bottom Up? A Tale of Two Standards Systems

Andrew Updegrove

5/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 4/29/2005)

National standards systems typically echo the political methodologies of the countries in which they operate. This is hardly surprising, in that the consensus-based process of developing standards is in many respects political in nature. As a result, those countries that exercise the most centralized federal control are more likely to have a single national standards organization, while those that have political systems that are more locally responsive are apt to have distributed infrastructures that evolve more organically and dynamically. The two countries that perhaps most dramatically exemplify this observation are the Peoples Republic of China and the United States. In the nomenclature most often used in American standards circles, the two countries have adopted "top down" and "bottom up" approaches, respectively. The question of which system (if either) is "better" than the other is an interesting one. Equally significant are the related questions of whether, if one system indeed is better, when is that the case, and why? This article examines, and seeks to answer, each of these questions.