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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]