Lou,
ASGCA has some standards for membership, kind of. When any applicant has his/her courses reviewed, there is a place for the reviewer and owner to mark 0-25%, 25-50%, 50-75% or 75+% repsonsible for any particular phase (routing, permitting, feature design, etc.) To get in, the people reviewing the course don't have any specific guidelines, since each office works differently, and we know that no one would be 100% responsible for everything, save the one man office.
As to outside credit for associates, we have traditionally left that up to the principles. Some are quite generous in crediting associates, others prefer that they get all the credit. Some of the bigger firms tell me that they actually have employment contracts whereby when they hire someone, they anticipate his departure and put some kind of limits on what they can say, how long, etc. Most of us just consider that our former associates will do the right thing and tell the basic truth, such as "I was project architect on the Tiddly Links Project while working under the direction of Jeffrey D. Brauer" rather than "I designed Tiddly Links."
But, I have heard some principles complain about former associates or their new clients using terms like "XXX was the DRIVING FORCE behind the XXX project" to imply that their guy did the design of a course that he didn't really do.
Its also considered bad form to blast your former boss, saying "I did all the work while he was drunk" but it seems as if it might have been a pretty true statement, at least back in the old days!
I can understand where Phil and company are coming from on this whole deal, but have also seen both the detail of who did what get debated a lot (and never really settled, see below) and the written record be dramatically off. For that matter, I tend to believe that in the old days, they had an easier time of putting out what they wanted to put out than they do these days, since the press was less questioning in general, or more polite in most cases.
As to credit for any individual features, we sat down in the office one day a few years ago to figure out who really did each green on a project, just for historical purposes. On one green in particular, I recalled that I wanted to generally reverse the pattern of XXX green, but there was some office discussion and the green got smaller due to budget and site, the draftsman recalled changing 3 bunkers into one big one, and the field guy recalled changing it a few times in the field, softening some slopes, adding a fw chipping area, etc.
A year after the project, we found that we couldn't really attribute the design to any one person easily. If you are looking for detail 60-80 years later, I can see how it would be impossible to determine. Memories like Burbeck Jr, Francis at Merion, etc. all get clouded really quickly. Burbeck could have been right about seeing plans on his Dad's desk, etc. but not sure exactly what they meant, even if he was doodling on them and making changes. As per above, he could have decided (this being the depression and all) that he loved Tillie's 4th green but had to make it 10% smaller and draw right over it, giving the impression that he designed the green.