Standardization, Globalization and Rationalities of Government

Abstract

Organizational analysts have remarked on the retreat from `hard' regulation by nation-states and the formal international bodies they have ratified, in favour of `soft' regulation, particularly in the form of standards issued by transnational bodies whose authority does not derive from state sovereignty. This article problematizes the role of international standardization in the current trend, and locates its new regulatory role in the Foucauldian theorization of political rationalities (or `rationalities of government') and the `technologies' that operationalize them. This strategy illuminates how an originally modest, technical instrument of socio-economic coordination has attained the salience, ubiquity and authority that it enjoys as a discursive practice in today's global regulation. Standardization constitutes a vital technology of government that serves the now dominant rationality in the international practice of government, neo-liberalism. Particularly in the development of management standards from the 1980s, the International Organization of Standardization has produced a vital relay in the practice of `government at a distance', and a platform for self-presentation to audit—an updated version of earlier `practices of the self'.