UNIFICATION. — The spontaneous tendency and reasoned purpose of individuals and of society, aimed at balancing the growing complexity and the growing dissipations that derive for social life in particular from the division and specialization of labor, but also from the excesses of free will in production and exchange.
It is parallel to the generalizing tendency of the theoretical sciences and to the standardizing tendency of the applied sciences. In production, unification resolves itself into the determination of commodity and construction types, as well as into measures and systems of measurement; in exchanges it manifests itself through the unification of commercial customs and of contract clauses. The establishment of a Committee for industrial and mechanical unification (UNIM) in Italy dates back to 1921, later transformed into the UNI (unification in industry) and finally (1946) into the Ente nazionale italiano d'unificazione, a national body, federated with other similar ones in the ISO (International Standard Organization), with headquarters in Geneva.
Contractual unifications are brought about by the so-called public services, whose greatest example is the Universal Postal Union (v. UNIONI AMMINISTRATIVE); and law (international, commercial, maritime and private; the protection of intellectual property, etc.), economic and social policy (customs lists and tariffs, welfare provisions and assistance, labor contracts, markets, currencies, armaments, etc.) are subject to unifying processes. The general purpose of all unifications is a greater simplicity and correctness of economic life, and, by reflection, of social life, through the concentration of services and the greater efficiency of bureaucratic and exchange labor.