Standardization also came to influence consumption through the regulation and testing of consumer goods. Systematic product testing has its origins in the work of early corporate laboratories. Independent testing was first conducted by state agencies such as the National Bureau of Standards, the Bureau of Chemistry, and the Federal Drug Administration, followed by various nongovernmental consumer advocacy organizations. The results of product testing eventually became regular content in a wide range of periodicals and other kinds of media, coming to perform a watchdog function, by working to ensure that manufactured products lived up to acceptable levels of functionality. Somewhat orthogonal to these developments were fundamental changes in the legal regulation of consumer transactions, with a gradual shift, over a period of about a century, in the locus of risk bearing from consumer to producer. These legal developments established contractual entitlements for consumers, in the form of the implied warranty, to what was considered fair and reasonable amounts of use value from the commodities they purchased.
In concert, these developments had the efect of presenting consumer goods as congealed quantities of potential utility, to which consumers were viewed as being entitled. Yet the exact nature of the entitlement is unclear. It did not follow automatically from the general ethical precepts that developed with markets—or from the noncontractual moral framework within which market contract became possible—because the strong version of consumer entitlement emerged only in the twentieth century. That was much later than the emergence of market society itself, which is typically dated to the eighteenth century in England, and the early nineteenth century in the United States (Polanyi 1957; Stanley 1998; Larson 2009). Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century the legal principle governing market transactions in the
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