Standards and (self)implosion: How the circulation of affects accelerates the spread of standards and intensifies the embodiment of colliding, temporal ontologies

Abstract

Standards constitute an interesting phenomenon in discussions on emotional circulation and subjectivities. Because standards travel. And they are usually on a mission: to standardize policies or products and consequently also those who are administered by them or consume them. Literature on the spread of standards often tends to conceptualize the traveling of standards as contagious processes resulting in epidemic spreads. In this article, the metaphor of epidemic spread is replaced by an analytical configuration of a new mode of educational governance in which orchestrating webs of incentives and anticipations is a major driver. International standards are propelled by material–affective infrastructures and the embodied interpretations that educational agents and organizations make of them. The article displays how standards make organizations and selves implode and how the impact of standardizing processes and colliding temporal ontologies is embodied in mid-level managers’ collapse between anticipatory and nauseating affects.

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