The orderly use of experience: Pragmatism and the development of hospital industry self‐regulation

Abstract

Abstract This article focuses on the origins and the development of American hospital industry self‐regulation. Drawing on extensive archival research, this article suggests that the American College of Surgeon’s Hospital Standardization Program was closely linked to the American pragmatist tradition. So understood, the Program represents a major milestone in the history of American regulation, perhaps the first self‐regulatory system steeped in pragmatist principles of social ordering, a Progressive‐era model of governance that long ago foreshadowed some of today’s most significant regulatory innovations.