Examining the increasingly powerful role of standards in the governing of economic, political and social life, this book draws upon governmentality and actor network theory to explore how standards and standardizing projects are articulated and rendered workable in practice, and the objects, subjects and forms of identity to which this gives rise.
V. Higgins
environment Figuration gender government identity politics social justice social science sustainability
'This excellent collection of essays gets beneath the surface of the 'world of standards' which we inhabit. At the point of their enactment and materialization in checklists, registers, accounting statements and questionnaires, standards are necessarily enmeshed in complex local webs of action and reaction. Each contribution shows how standards and the forms of calculation which they engender are always incomplete yet powerful projects of social and economic organization'. - Professor Michael Power, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK