From Standardization to Standardizing Work

Abstract

The main aim of this book has been to explore how standards — and associated technologies of governing — are produced as objects of knowledge, and the various ways in which they contribute to the configuring as well as reorganizing of local practices. In pursuing this aim, contributors have drawn upon post-realist analytical approaches, and specifically the rich bodies of work labelled as governmentality and actor network theory The application of these approaches to a range of substantive case studies illustrates the significance and pervasiveness of what we term standardizing work as an ongoing and never completed process of ‘making up’ objects, subjects and practices of modern governing. This needs to be contrasted with standardization which implies a process that is complete, successful and black-boxed. Realist approaches focus on the macro-structural regulatory processes and actors through which standards are created and given momentum (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000; Drori et al., 2006; Tamm Hallström, 2004). From this perspective, the rise of standards is reflective of a progressive rationalization of the social world. Their global diffusion and penetration of new domains leads to ever more formalized ways of categorizing and judging social domains and practices. In contrast, the approach taken by contributors to this book emphasizes the significance of various practices and agents in constructing spaces and subjects that are amenable to standardizing, and through which standards ‘projects’ are rendered knowable and governable. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.