Calculating the Social: Standards and the Reconfiguration of Governing

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Calculating the Social Standards and the Reconfiguration of Governing

Edited by

Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-19

Calculating the Social

10.1057/9780230289673 - Calculating the Social, Edited by Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner

Also by Vaughan Higgins RURAL GOVERNANCE: International Perspectives (co-edited)

AGRICULTURAL GOVERNANCE: Globalization and the New Politics of Regulation (co-edited) PEDAGOGICAL MACHINES: ICTs and Neoliberal Governance of the University ENVIRONMENT, SOCIETY AND NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: Theoretical Perspectives from Australasia and the Americas (co-edited)

Also by Wendy Larner THE POINT IS TO CHANGE IT: Geographies of Hope and Survival in an Age of Crises (co-edited) GLOBAL GOVERNMENTALITY: New Perspectives on International Rule (co-edited)



CONSTRUCTING REFORM: Economic Expertise and the Governing of Agricultural Change in Australia

Standards and the Reconfiguration of Governing Edited by

Vaughan Higgins Monash University, Australia and

Wendy Larner University of Bristol, UK



Calculating the Social

Selection and editorial matter © Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner 2010 Individual chapters © their respective authors 2010

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–57931–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Calculating the social: standards and the reconfiguration of governing / edited by Vaughan Higgins, Wendy Larner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–57931–6 (hardback) 1. Standardization. 2. Power (Social sciences) 3. Social structure. 4. Social sciences. I. Higgins, Vaughan, 1974– II. Larner, Wendy. HD62.C25 2010 389⬘.6—dc22 2010023888 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Notes on Contributors

vii

Acknowledgements

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1 Standards and Standardization as a Social Scientific Problem Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner

1

Part I The Global and Local Politics of Standardizing

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2 Calculating Hybrids Peter Miller, Liisa Kurunmäki, and Ted O’Leary

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3 Gendering Codes of Conduct: Chiquita Bananas and Nicaraguan Women Workers Marina Prieto-Carrón and Wendy Larner 4 The Practice of Third-Party Certification: Enhancing Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice in the Global South? Carmen Bain and Maki Hatanaka Part II Technologies of Governing and the Standardizing of the Social

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56

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5 E-Government and the Production of Standardized Individuality Paul Henman and Mitchell Dean

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6 New Modes of Governance and the Standardization of Nursing Competencies: An Australian Case Study Anni Dugdale and Laurie Grealish

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7 Industry Analysts and the Labour of Comparison Neil Pollock

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8 Sticking Plasters and the Standardizations of Everyday Life Mike Michael

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Part III The Contestation and Adaptation of Standardizing Practices 9 Local Experiments with Global Certificates: How Russian Software Testers are Inventing Themselves as a Profession Melanie Feakins v


149 151


Contents

Contents

10 Adapting Standards: The Case of Environmental Management Systems in Australia Vaughan Higgins, Jacqui Dibden and Chris Cocklin

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11 Standards, Orphan Drugs, and Pharmaceutical Markets Carlos Novas

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Part IV Conclusion

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12 From Standardization to Standardizing Work Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner

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Index

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Carmen Bain is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Iowa State University. Her research interests include the political economy of global agri-food systems, international development and social studies of science and technology. She has conducted research in Chile, Ghana, New Zealand and the US. Her work has been published in the journals Rural Sociology and Food Policy and several edited volumes including Agricultural Governance: Globalization and the New Politics of Regulation (edited by Vaughan Higgins and Geoffrey Lawrence, 2005); Supermarkets and Agri-food Supply Chains (edited by David Burch and Geoffrey Lawrence, 2007); and Between the Local and the Global: Confronting Complexity in the Contemporary Food Sector (edited by Terry Marsden and Jonathon Murdoch, 2006). Chris Cocklin is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation) at James Cook University, Queensland, Australia. He has written widely on regulatory change and sustainability in a rural context, on land use change and on rural communities and environmental issues. With Ian Bowler and Chris Bryant he edited The Sustainability of Rural Systems (Kluwer, 2002) and, with Jacqui Dibden, Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia (UNSW Press, 2005). Mitchell Dean is Professor of Sociology and formerly Dean of the Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy at Macquarie University, Australia. He is currently research professor in the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion. Mitchell is the author of four books and other publications which draw upon various aspects of Foucauldian scholarship. These works include The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance (1991); Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods and Historical Sociology (1994), Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (2010, 2nd revised edition); and Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and International Rule (2007). Jacqui Dibden is a senior research fellow with the Monash Regional Australia Project, School of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Australia. She has a background in social anthropology and community development. She has undertaken research on social impacts of rural restructuring, sustainability of rural towns, immigrant settlement in rural areas, governance of natural resources in farming areas vii




viii Notes on Contributors

Anni Dugdale is a senior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Canberra, Australia. Her research focuses broadly on the sociology of science and technology, health policy, reproductive technologies and gender, technology and development. Melanie Feakins received her DPhil in Geography from Oxford University and is currently a visiting assistant professor at UC Berkeley. Her current research explores offshore outsourcing of software and IT services in Russia, focusing on the microscale practices that comprise the untold stories of globalization. Her work has appeared in journals such as Environment and Planning A and Global Networks. She is currently writing a book about Offshore Outsourcing from the perspective of ‘Offshore Russia’. Laurie Grealish is Associate Professor in nursing at the University of Canberra, Australia. Her current research activities centre on the assessment of nursing competence in clinical contexts, and the development and monitoring of workplace learning more generally. She has held leadership positions in cancer and palliative care nursing and is currently the Associate Dean (Education) in the Faculty of Health. Maki Hatanaka is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Sam Houston State University. Her areas of specialization include development, globalization and food and agriculture. In particular, her current research projects focus on emerging governance mechanisms in food and agriculture, i.e., standards, certification and labelling. Specifically, she is interested in the ways these mechanisms are developed, as well as their implications for producers in the global South. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including Agriculture and Human Values, Food Policy, The Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, Sociologia Ruralis and World Development. Paul Henman is a senior lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Queensland, Australia. His main research interest is in the nexus between social policy, public administration and information technology, where he is an international expert on the social study of e-government. His most recent books are Administering Welfare Reform: International Transformations in Welfare Governance (Policy, 2006; edited with Menno Fenger)



and land stewardship. With Chris Cocklin, she edited a book on regional Australia, titled Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005). Her current research interests are in environmental management systems, agri-environmental policy and changing land uses.

Notes on Contributors ix

Vaughan Higgins is a senior lecturer in Sociology at Monash University, Australia. With a particular interest in the analytical approaches of governmentality and actor network theory, Vaughan’s work is oriented towards the study of how programmes, protocols, standards and related instruments of governing are implemented in practice, and the various ways in which these mechanisms, and the conduct of those who are governed, are shaped as a consequence. Recent books include Rural Governance: International Perspectives (Routledge, 2007, with Lynda Cheshire and Geoffrey Lawrence); Agricultural Governance: Globalization and the New Politics of Regulation (Routledge, 2005, with Geoffrey Lawrence); and Constructing Reform: Economic Expertise and the Governing of Agricultural Change in Australia (Nova Science, 2002). Liisa Kurunmäki is a reader in Accounting, and a Research Associate of the ESRC Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR) at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Liisa joined LSE as a Lecturer in 1999, and holds an MSc and a PhD from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She has authored and co-authored numerous articles in scholarly publications. Her research focuses primarily on the consequences of the encounter between accounting, accountants and non-accountants in the context of the ongoing public sector reforms. A list of selected publications can be found at http://www2.lse.ac.uk/ accounting/facultyAndStaff/profiles/kurunmaki.aspx. Wendy Larner is Professor of Human Geography and Sociology at the University of Bristol. Her research is situated in the interdisciplinary fields of globalization, governance and gender, and links insights from critical social theory with a strong commitment to empirical research. She challenges conventional understandings of globalization as an inevitable ‘new reality’ by showing that it is a contested and contradictory process in the making. Relatedly, she has long-standing research interests in theorizing neoliberalism and ‘post-welfarist’ governance. In addition to publishing widely across the social sciences, she is editor of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography and associate editor for Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society. Mike Michael is Professor of Sociology of Science and Technology, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, at the Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London. His main areas of research include the relation between everyday life and



and E-Government: Reconfigurations in Public Administration, Policy and Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).


science and technology, and biotechnological and biomedical innovation and culture. He is currently elaborating an interest in the interactions between design and social science disciplines. Recent publications include Technoscience and Everyday Life (Open University Press, 2006), and The Sacrifice: How Scientific Experiments Transform Animals and People (Purdue University Press, 2007, with Lynda Birke and Arnie Arluke). Peter Miller is Professor of Management Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation. He is an editor of Accounting, Organizations and Society, and has published in a wide range of accounting, management and sociology journals. He is co-editor of The Foucault Effect (1991) and Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice (1994). His most recent books are Governing the Present, written jointly with Nikolas Rose (Polity Press, 2008) and Accounting, Organizations and Institutions, jointly edited with Christopher Chapman and David Cooper (Oxford University Press, 2009). A list of selected publications can be found at http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/accounting/facultyAndStaff/profiles/ miller.htm. Carlos Novas is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, Canada. His current research interests relate to biopolitics, the life sciences, biotechnology firms, patients’ organizations and bioethics. Carlos has recently co-edited a volume with Sahra Gibbon titled Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities (2007). Ted O’Leary is a professor of Accounting at the University of Manchester, and an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). He held positions previously at the University of Illinois, and at the National University of Ireland. He has published numerous articles in scholarly publications in accounting and management. Neil Pollock is a reader at the University of Edinburgh where he teaches and researches on the sociology of information technologies. He has published his work in leading journals and has written with James Cornford Putting the University Online: Technology, Information and Organisation (Open University Press, 2003) and with Robin Williams Software and Organizations: The Biography of the Enterprise-Wide System – or How SAP Conquered the World (Routledge, 2008). Marina Prieto-Carrón is a lecturer in Geography at the University of Portsmouth. Her doctoral research work explored how women workers



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have experienced voluntary codes of conduct in the textile sector and on banana plantations in Central America. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Nicaragua. Her actual feminist research focuses on issues of gender and economic globalization and explores women’s empowerment. She has published on corporate social responsibility (CSR), women workers’ conditions, labour rights issues, women organizing strategies and gender violence in the journals Development, Development in Practice, Gender and Development, International Affairs and Journal of Corporate Social Responsibility as well as in various chapters in edited books. She has been a member of the Management Committee of the Central American Women’s Network (CAWN) and a research associate since 1997.



Notes on Contributors xi

We would like to thank, first and foremost, all contributors for their commitment to the production of this book. This collection would not have been possible without their intellectual contribution and willingness to support the project. We are also grateful to the efforts of Olivia Middleton and Philippa Grand from Palgrave Macmillan who provided editorial advice and assistance, and who enthusiastically supported the book. We acknowledge the important input made by Simon Kitto in the early part of this project, and, in particular, for assisting us with the writing of the original book proposal. In addition, we would like to thank Elsevier for granting us permission to use previously published material for Chapter 2. Finally, our most important acknowledgement is to our partners – Melanie and Don – for their understanding and support throughout the process of preparing this manuscript.

xii



Acknowledgements

Standards and Standardization as a Social Scientific Problem Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner

In recent years there has been an increased interest among social scientists in issues of standards and attempts at standardization in all aspects of economic, political and social life. Once regarded as technical issues of concern primarily to specialists (see Barry, 2001, p. 63), standardization is now viewed as a legitimate site of social scientific study. Such an interest has been provoked largely by questions concerning how successful co-ordination among a variety of different actors, organizations and levels of governing is achieved in a globalizing world where the state is no longer the main form of regulation, and particularly how public and private entities might most effectively shape conduct ‘at a distance’ within this environment. In particular, the globalization of scientized knowledge systems as social and cultural institutions is argued to accelerate a rationalization of the social world (see Weber, 1968) in which professional and organizational knowledge-practices are reinvented in increasingly formalized, universalized and standardized ways (Drori et al., 2006, pp. 13–14). This gives rise to a wide range of standards, protocols, certification and auditing systems which form a pervasive and powerful mechanism for governing conduct within contemporary economies and societies (e.g., Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000; Power, 1997; Strathern, 2000; Tamm Hallström, 2004). Much of the existing scholarly work in this area adopts a broadly realist, macrostructural approach and focuses on three broad themes: the work of international authorities responsible for setting standards; the global diffusion of particular standards schemes; and the democratic consequences as non-state authorities exert increasing control over the setting and verification of standards (e.g., Borraz, 2007; Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000; Kerwer, 2005; Tamm Hallström, 2004). Standards are argued to become increasingly significant mechanisms for governing 1



1

Standards and Standardization

as part of shifts in regulatory processes at a global level. They progressively penetrate new domains and this leads to an increase in control by standards-makers. From this perspective, academic attention needs to examine the structures, logics and actors that contribute to international standardization, as well as the state and non-state agencies who play an important role in mediating and legitimizing the diffusion of standards. The existing literature has yielded important insights into the diffusion of standards schemes, the work of standard-makers and the consequences of standardization for democratic accountability. Yet there has been little coherent social scientific investigation of how standards, and standardization projects, are articulated and rendered workable in local settings and interactions, and how such processes relate to, make possible, as well as contest broader forms of governing conduct. As Mennicken (2008, p. 385) argues, the literature ‘has paid much attention to the rise and spread of global rules at the international level, but not to their actual involvement in the reorganising and redefining of local practices’. Thus, there is a tendency to focus on the development of standards at the macrolevel, and on the organizations and agencies involved in the setting of international rules and standards. While there has been some attempt to recognize the power relations that shape efforts to standardize (e.g., Botzem and Quack, 2006), in general ‘a more constructionist actor and power-centred research viewpoint’ is viewed as an area for prospective future research (Tamm Hallström, 2004, p. 190), or overlooked entirely. A more sustained focus on the intersections between ‘global’ and ‘national’ standardization aspirations and ‘local’ (re)configurations of governing – or what we, adapting from Tamm Hallström (2004, p. 187), refer to as the dynamics of standardization work – raises a number of key analytical questions, such as • How are particular standards constituted across different social domains and contexts? • What are the effects of standards in different areas of social, economic and political life? • Do certain ‘types’ of standards have more of an impact on social life than others? Why? • In what ways do standards relate to, and reconfigure, existing forms of public and private governing? • How do these mechanisms work in practice, and which sites, spaces and agents of governing are privileged?



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Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner 3

This edited collection examines these questions. The aim of the book is to draw together current research on the relationship between standards and governing, and to explore critically the forms of the economic, political and social that emerge through these assemblages of regulation. In particular, contributors engage with the issue of how standards contribute to both sameness and difference, and how they penetrate institutional forms and the everyday life of individuals. In pursuing this aim the book uses a specific theoretical framing of standardization which draws from Foucauldian governmentality research as well as social studies of science. We recognize that this type of framing has already been used to some extent to make sense of standards (e.g., Barry, 2001; Feakins, 2007; Mennicken, 2008; Strathern, 2000). Most notably, the recent collection by Lampland and Star (2009) underlines how standards and other calculative practices are now a central feature of social and cultural life. However, despite these influential contributions, overall this research remains fragmented and there is a need to explore, in a more integrated way, how these analytical approaches can advance scholarly thinking on standards across a range of social domains. The framing of the book in this way provides an important contribution to the existing literature in terms of exploring – through case studies that are empirically rich, and which cover a diverse range of contexts – how standards and standardization projects are implemented and rendered governable.

1.1 The discursive and material construction of standards Broadly, the analytical approach which frames the chapters in this book may be described as post-realist in terms of its interest in the discursive and material relations through which standards are produced and rendered workable as objects of knowledge, and the consequences for who has the capacity to exert power. Two main bodies of literature exist in this area – one drawing upon Foucault’s notion of governmentality, and the other located in social studies of science which uses what has been referred to as actor network theory (ANT). We first examine governmentality approaches to standards. For governmentality scholars, standards are conceptualized as ‘technologies’ for the governing of conduct. Technologies may be defined as



• What, if any, is the relationship between standards, standardization and neoliberal regimes of governing? • What are the consequences of these arrangements for how populations and individuals are governed, and govern themselves?


assemblages ‘of forms of practical knowledge … traversed and transacted by aspirations to achieve certain outcomes in terms of the conduct of the governed’ (Rose, 1999, p. 52). As such, technologies do not simply intervene in, and govern, pre-existing social problems or domains. Far from existing as benign and neutral tools for achieving harmonization of existing socio-technical practices, standards, according to Miller and O’Leary (1987, p. 239), serve to construct ‘a particular field of visibility’ which makes social domains knowable and governable. This means that standards, and the forms of expertise and practical knowledge surrounding them, are involved in the constitution of those domains which they seek to govern. In addition, standards are imbued with a will to govern which involves ‘aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects and averting certain undesired effects’ (Rose, 1999, p. 52). Such aspirations are underpinned by broader ‘rationalities’ for the organization and governing of social life. As Miller and Rose (1990, p. 7) note, these rationalities ‘seek to ground themselves in a positive knowledge of that which is to be governed, ways of reasoning about it, analysing it and evaluating it, identifying its problems and devising solutions’. The linking of rationalities to technologies is what makes programmes of governing possible. Through rendering thought into a technical form, authorities are able to act on conduct ‘at a distance’ aligning the aspirations of individuals and organizations with political objectives. However, this is not an unproblematic process. Miller and Rose (1990, p. 10) argue that ‘whilst “governmentality” is eternally optimistic, “government” is a congenitally failing operation … The “will to govern” needs to be understood less in terms of its success than in terms of the difficulties of operationalizing it’. The distinction between rationalities and technologies forms the basis of governmentality analyses of standards. For instance, in their groundbreaking work on accountancy as a technique of governing, Miller and O’Leary (1987, p. 243) draw upon this distinction in examining the emergence of standard costing and budgeting ‘as a form of social power’ in which the individual is subject ‘to an increasingly detailed form of observation and scrutiny’. This type of analysis is also taken up in Power’s (1997) influential work on auditing which seeks to ‘understand how official accounts of practices endure and constitute auditing as an institutionalized field of knowledge’ (1997, p. 8). Power pays particular attention to the links between auditing techniques and the rationalities of governing which have made the idea of audit possible. He is interested specifically in how the audit explosion is not simply a neutral response to a technical problem, a way of ‘adding credibility



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to financial reporting’ (Power, 1996, p. 290), ‘it also makes possible ways of redesigning the practice of government’ (1997, p. 11). More recently, this type of approach has been extended to examine the role of standards in the constitution of global, rather than simply national, economic spaces. The work of Larner and Le Heron (2004) is notable in this respect in exploring the relationship between benchmarking techniques and evolving systems of globalizing competition. Focusing on land-based sectors in New Zealand, Larner and Le Heron (2004) are particularly interested in how the calculative practices of benchmarking contribute to the constitution of globalizing economic spaces. While studies of governmentality draw attention to how standards are constituted as objects of knowledge, and the consequences for practices of governing, this body of literature can be criticized for focusing primarily on rule at the programmatic level. This arguably limits the capacity for governmentality studies to engage in a meaningful way with the complexities of how governing ‘works’ and achieves particular effects. Such a limitation can be traced to the distinction between rationalities and technologies of governing. Technologies are conceptualized as the technical means for making (discursive) rationalities of rule possible in a programmatic form. What is overlooked, however, is the material problematics of making such programmes workable in practice. Miller and Rose (1990) draw upon Latour’s notion of ‘action at a distance’ (1987) to enable an examination of governing that centres on the circulation of immutable mobiles. Latour argues that through the assemblage of various technical means such as maps, printing and other representational devices these can act as centres of calculation which enable those at the centre to articulate with those distant from it. However, there is always the question of the mutability of immutable mobiles. Technical devices can enact political programmes at a distance, but they can also act in contradiction to the intended political objectives for which they are deployed. This neglect of the productive and disruptive power of technical devices has contributed to critcisms of the governmentality literature for providing studies of ‘government programmes as univocal and as overly coherent and systematic’ (O’Malley et al., 1997, p. 501). In short, many of the empirical analyses in the governmentality literature have been criticized for tending to study how technologies of governing are constituted discursively from the perspective of those ‘programmers’ seeking to govern, rather than investigate, how they are put into place and the consequences of this at the level of everyday practice. ANT provides a conceptually coherent, and complementary, approach that addresses these limitations (see Higgins and Kitto, 2004; Kitto and Higgins, 2009; Rutland and Aylett, 2008).





ANT addresses the problem of materiality that is overlooked in governmentality. It provides a process-based alternative through thick descriptions of the politics and problematics of governing populations. This approach focuses on how a range of materials and techniques – conceptualized as ‘technologies of governing’ in governmentality studies – are drawn upon and deployed by actors such as scientists, managers and other ‘authorities’ in order to enrol others and so extend their influence beyond the ‘localized’ space of laboratories, offices and factories. From this perspective, standards may be conceptualized as immutable and combinable mobiles that enable a centre to act ‘at a distance’ (Latour, 1987). However, these immutable mobiles do not, of themselves, have momentum or power. They can only do so when articulated with other non-human and human allies as part of attempts to construct a stable and durable centre of calculation. Translation is an analytical approach and vocabulary for exploring the often precarious process through which an actor, or group of actors, attempts to build a centre of calculation. Callon (1986) identifies four ‘moments’ in the translation process: (a) Problematization, where an actor, or group of actors, defines an issue as problematic and positions him or herself as the indispensable solution to the problem; (b) Interessment, where devices are deployed in order to impose roles and identities upon other actors that were defined through problematization; (c) The success of these two moments leads to enrolment, which involves the stabilization of the network of alliances; and (d) Mobilization, where the newly created network is mobilized and the ‘solution’ proposed is accepted provisionally until further translations occur. The translation approach suggests that governing through the application of calculative devices, such as standards, is a complex and precarious process. Standardization, if it occurs at all, is something to be explained rather than assuming that it is a logical outcome of the power of particular social groups such as standard-makers. While it could be argued that much of the early ANT literature was interested fundamentally in studying attempts to standardize, standards themselves were not given explicit attention (Bowker and Star, 1999, p. 48). It has only been in the last 15 years that scholars in this area have sought to study standards in more detailed ways. Of particular note is the work of Berg who applies – and develops – this approach to standards within medical settings. Focusing specifically on medical protocols, this author is interested broadly in the relationship between standards and ‘local’ medical practices. Rather than operating as a neutral tool which displaces previous disorder with the orderliness and homogeneity of



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‘good’ medical practice, Berg argues that protocols transform practices in the process of acting on them. In order for protocols to work, the elements that constitute medical practices must be disciplined ‘to behave in a uniform, stable and predictable way’ (Berg, 1998, p. 234). At the same time, the disciplining of existing practices involves tensions and negotiations with a range of elements – including nurses, physicians, patients, laboratory tests, blood cells and auscultatory sounds (sounds heard through a stethoscope) (Berg, 1997, p. 79) – which are reflected in how the protocol is used. Thus, protocols cannot simply be imposed; for Berg (1998, p. 235) they form a part of ongoing negotiations in which ‘practices are transformed and the tool itself acquires its final shape’. In a co-authored paper with Timmermans, Berg explores a related issue of how ‘universality’ is achieved through medical protocols. Focusing on the Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) protocol, the authors argue that far from existing as a universal tool which is applied in a standardized way at local sites, the CPR protocol is a crystallization of multiple trajectories which function through a network of heterogeneous actors and practices (Timmermans and Berg, 1997). As a consequence, the CPR protocol needs to be viewed as an accomplishment since universality ‘emerges from this seemingly chaotic interaction of multiple trajectories’ (Timmermans and Berg, 1997, p. 298). The most recent contribution to discussions of standards in science studies considers a specific question: ‘How have people dealt, in ordinary ways, with these millions of interlocking standards?’ (Lampland and Star, 2009, p. 4). Using popular vignettes and academic studies, this edited collection offers both empirical examples and analytical concepts for research on standards in a set of diverse fields including biomedicine, labour force organization, social security and information infrastructures. Of particular value is their insistence on the ‘nested’ and ‘integrated’ aspects of standards. Fans of British comedy series Little Britain will be familiar with Carol Beer and her famous signature line ‘Computer says No’. Lampland and Star (2009) would argue that this phrase encapsulates the way in which an apparently insignificant standard (such as the need for a telephone number or an address in an online form) can have recursive implications throughout many imbricated standardizing systems. At the same time they, like us, are keen to show that standards are unequally distributed and embody particular ethics and values. Their collection establishes a clear research agenda for socio-technical studies of standards and begins to reveal the complex relationships that lie behind the ways in which technical and behavioural norms have become ‘black boxed’.





While recognized as making a distinctive contribution to science studies (Yearley, 2005), aspects of ANT have been the subject of critique. These criticisms are well rehearsed elsewhere (see Collins and Yearley, 1992; Lee and Brown, 1994) and it is not our intention to repeat these arguments here. However, there is one key issue which is of central relevance to this book. ANT analyses are well suited to studying the localized processes through which standards are implemented, rendered workable and shape identities. Yet they appear less capable of providing insight into the broader regimes of governing that are involved in the constitution of standards schemes as solutions to the problems facing organizations as well as government and non-government agencies. This is where governmentality – with its focus on the rationalities and technologies of governing that enable particular standards schemes to be constituted as objects of knowledge – usefully complements an ANT approach. On this basis, we argue that despite their different theoretical histories, these approaches provide complementary analytical tools for studying the construction of standards and attempts to standardize. Contributors to this book engage with one or other (and in some cases both) of these analytical approaches. Through application to empirical cases, the book demonstrates the merits of governmentality and ANT in making sense of how standards construct, and are constructed at, ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ levels of governing, and the often precarious processes through which these domains are linked.

1.2 Outline of chapters Three themes run through this book: namely, the global and local politics of standardizing; technologies of governing and the standardizing of the social; and the contestation and adaptation of standardizing practices. We have used these themes to frame the subsections and ordering of the chapters. However, because the individual chapters often deal with more than one of these themes, the subsections are not mutually exclusive. Rather, we use them to flag initial relationships between the chapters in this collection and broader debates in the social scientific literatures on standards and standardization which we then revisit in the conclusion. The global and local politics of standardizing The first theme explores the relationship between globalization and the emergence of privatized technologies of governing. The rise of transnational corporations (TNCs) and global governance agencies – such



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as the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank – has contributed to a reconfiguration of political power in which the state is no longer the predominant political actor (e.g., Holton, 1998; King and Kendall, 2004). While much has been written in sociology, geography and anthropology attempting to identify the key actors and processes behind this shift, surprisingly little is known about how these shape social relations (for a notable exception see Larner and Walters, 2004). An important task for social scientists is therefore to examine critically the variety of techniques and practices – such as standards, benchmarking, auditing systems and forms of accounting – that make possible multilayered forms of governance. We have included three chapters in this subsection, beginning with Peter Miller et al. on management accounting as a hybridizing process. Drawing from science studies literatures that examine how hybrid forms emerge out of the intersections between two or more previously separate types, the focus in this chapter is on how accounting expertise has hybridized in the ‘technology road maps’ used in the semiconductor industry, and the novel organizational forms that are emerging in the health sector. The deliberate use of two contrasting examples allows the authors to emphasize the diverse processes, practices and expertises that come together in these novel hybridizing assemblages, showing how in both cases these processes, practices and expertises cross-cut accepted dichotomies such as state and market, science and economy, finance and management and so on. Marina Prieto-Carrón and Wendy Larner are also concerned with how standardizing processes draw together diverse processes, practices and expertises. In their case, the focus is on examining the possibilities that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) might offer the empowerment of vulnerable women agricultural workers. Seen in the context of the arguments made in the proceeding chapter, CSR is an example of a hybridizing assemblage that draws together business and equity issues. Using a case study of Chiquita’s banana plantations in Nicaragua, the authors argue that despite the development of Codes of Conduct aimed at protecting vulnerable women workers, the representations of gender in these Codes and their interpretation by international certification experts mean that women working in the plantations have seen few benefits. Despite these findings, the authors argue that Codes could also be used for worker’s education and advocacy work. In this regard, the work of ‘hybridizing’ may offer potential for new forms of gendered politics. Carmen Bain and Maki Hatanaka also focus on attempts to govern the global commodity chains of agri-food systems, and examine the





third-party certification processes discussed briefly in the chapter by Prieto-Carrón and Larner. Drawing from comparative research on an NGO-driven certification programme in Indonesia and a retailer-driven programme in Chile, they show how the appeal to techno-scientific values privileges external ‘expert’ knowledge, whereas the knowledge and experience of farmers and workers tend to be marginalized. Moreover, they point out that while third-party certification is designed to address problems associated with the lack of transparency and public oversight of self-audits and government regulation, confidentiality requirements by the certifiers themselves means the data collected is unavailable for public review and discussion. Seen together, these three chapters underline our first theme by showing that social scientific studies of standards cannot assume taken-forgranted dichotomies such as global and local, state and market, public and private. They are not simply imposed by transnational corporations and/or international institutions. Rather they emerge out of complex articulations between actors in multiple locations. What is also significant about these forms of governing is that they are not necessarily statebased, but comprise a mix of private and public regulation. Finally, while such techniques and practices are frequently represented as non-political, and therefore a more accurate and objective means for governing than simply through the state, these chapters all explore the specific contexts through which such techniques of governing become political, and the consequences of such politicized attempts to govern. Technologies of governing and the standardizing of the social The second theme focuses on the ways in which standards transform the objects and subjects that they aspire to govern. There are extensive literatures which inform aspects of this discussion. Examples include the now well-developed accounts of the constitution of ‘active’ or ‘entrepreneurial’ subjects in a diverse range of spheres (see, for examples, Dean, 1999; du Gay, 1997; Garland, 1997; Rankin, 2004; Rose, 1999). These literatures are complemented by accounts of how information technologies operate as a central tool in constituting and governing ‘technological’ citizens who are expected to be information literate and self-regulatory by placing themselves within interactive networked information systems in society (Barry, 2001; Lyon, 2001). Finally, there is a growing literature on the ‘making up’ of ‘macro-subjects’ such as communities, markets and economies (Gibson-Graham, 2006; MacKenzie et al., 2007; Mitchell, 2002). But often such accounts assume that standards and standardization are disciplining, normalizing and individualizing. What else can be



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said about the relationships between technologies of governing and the standardizing of the social? Paul Henman and Mitchell Dean begin by offering an account of the role of information and communications technologies (ICTs) and their use by state agencies in the wider networks of circulation and operation that make up contemporary forms of e-government. They challenge accounts that posit a focus on individual self-government as the dominant expression of individualized service delivery. Rather they argue that informational and computer technologies produce a more basic style of individuality based not on creative self-making by an entrepreneurial subject but on ‘social sorting’ structured by quotidian responses to standardized forms. Complementing Lampland and Star’s (2009) science studies interest in what these quotidian developments might mean for everyday life, Henman and Dean are more concerned with how socio-technical developments might indicate new lines of governmental innovation. Their chapter adds to existing work by providing a critical case study of how techno-intense assemblages of governing penetrate into the everyday life of citizens asking what kinds of new surveillance mechanisms are activated? What kind of subjectivities are formed under such regimes and what are the conditions of freedom that exist in technological societies? What kinds of opportunities for resistance, or reinvention are provided for individuals when authorities deploy ICTs for the purpose of governing at a distance? Health care delivery systems have also been a useful site for social scientists to explore the deployment of standards due to the pervasiveness of managerialism in this sector, and the concomitant pressure to develop standardized and evidence-based processes aimed at improving the accountability and efficiency of medical work as well as the quality of patient care (Mykhalovskiy and Weir, 2004; Timmermans and Berg, 2003). Anni Dugdale and Laurie Grealish contribute to this discussion by drawing on the governmentality literature to analyse how competency standards govern both nurses and nursing practice. They argue that the standardization and assessment of nursing competencies now organize nursing as a profession, and also underpin how health care service organizations engage in risk governance. By showing how competency standards become enacted in the everyday lives of hospital nurses, they reveal new patterns of life for both nurses and the competency preceptors. Moreover this is an ongoing process. Because competency standards aim to create an auditable trail that can be opened up to scrutiny by external stakeholders, they are continuously reinvented as hospitals, various levels of government, nursing professional organizations and





university-based nurse educators all contribute to the constitution of competency as a ‘standards assemblage’. Complementing the two earlier chapters that focus on the work that comparisons do, Neil Pollock focuses on the actual labour of comparison through an investigation of an industry analysis tool – the Magic Quadrant – that facilitates comparison between vendors in the market for ICTs. By analysing how the industry analysts go about producing Magic Quadrants, and then how these same analysts attempt to create the world the tool points to, the chapter makes an important contribution to the recent upsurge in interest in how theories and objects ‘perform’ economic markets. In terms of the broader arguments of the book, this chapter underlines the importance of interrogating the content of expertise and the tools associated with producing particular forms of knowledge. It shows that it takes actual labour to generate the comparisons that make the incommensurable commensurable, and that integral to this labour is the understanding that the Magic Quadrant is not a simple description of the ICT marketplace but one that interacts with and changes its object of study. Finally in this theme, Mike Michael’s chapter addresses the forms of standardization that surround the everyday medical object of the ‘sticking plaster’ or ‘band aid’. According to Michael, analysts have shown how in the enactment of standards – from the use of genetically identical lab animals in experiments through to the classification of Australian fauna, from the measurement of the volt through to the operation of large-scale surveillance systems – non-standardization is chronic. In other words, the development and application of standards rests on a nexus of tacit assumptions, relations, practices and materials that resist the transparency associated with standardization. As such, standardization can be said, despite appearances, to be ‘soft’ in the sense of embodying a range of ‘unclarities’. This chapter explores some of these ‘unclarities’ in the soft standardization of the ‘sticking plaster’ in everyday life. It analyses a number of ways in which the sticking plaster is ‘hard standardised’ for users through ‘clarified’ accounts of ‘models’ of the body, of the user, of practice and of social relationships attached to sticking plasters (e.g., the Elastoplast website). It ends with a reflection on some of the larger implications of the present analysis of standardization, especially for the relationship between standardization, politics and temporality. The contestation and adaptation of standardizing practices Our final theme involves examining the ways in which standardizing practices are both contested and adapted. We have already seen examples



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of this in earlier chapters (including Miller; Prieto-Carrón and Larner; Dugdale and Grealish), but the chapters in this section focus explicitly on this issue. Scholars drawing upon governmentality and actor network approaches have already established that standards are rarely fixed, and are subject to contestation and alteration. For example, Barry (2001, p. 63) argues that ‘while many standards are fixed and accepted, standardisation is a never completed process’. This is largely due to the diversity and complexity of the localized practices, routines and infrastructures which standards seek to transform. While standards attempt to change and replace existing practices, Timmermans and Berg (1997, p. 274) note that they must also, ‘to a certain degree, incorporate and extend those routines’. Indeed, some contestation and adaptation is necessary in order to make standards locally meaningful and workable. In turn, as standards are adapted and contested, so too do they rework the relationships between public and private forms of regulation. These issues are addressed in different ways by each of the contributions to this theme. We begin with Melanie Feakins who is concerned with the significant increase in the offshoring and outsourcing of software production and IT services. In this sector certification has gained increasing attention because of the necessity to organize the production of services according to specific templates of action, protocols and communicative codes that make work and organizational processes recognizable and understandable ‘at a distance’. Drawing on fieldwork with the software and IT services community in St Petersburg, Russia and their clients based in the UK and the US, she shows how this underwrites the need for globally familiar forms of certification. She argues that the prominent certifications in this sphere create complex webs of governance. Rather than simply imposing external certification processes, people and firms generate multisited governance through the certification practices they employ, consider, interpret, reject and recast. The chapter concludes that certification strategies (not certification itself) in this sector have come to govern work and organization offshore. Vaughan Higgins et al. focus on environmental certification schemes. Environmental standards and certification systems are frequently conceptualized as either public or private – in terms of the actors, agencies and processes responsible for their creation and implementation. However, the increasingly blurred boundaries between these forms of regulation suggest that greater attention is needed to standards and certification as part of hybrid strategies of governing. For them environmental governance provides a fruitful field in which to investigate the hybridity





of standards. They focus on the implementation and adaptation of environmental management systems (EMS) – based on the international standard ISO14001 – within Australian agriculture. They show that while the original intent of EMS was to assist Australian farmers in verifying the ‘clean and green’ credentials of their commodities through third-party certification, the absence of significant market incentives has contributed to EMS being adapted regionally in a variety of different ways. They examine a case study in the Australian dairy industry of such adaptation and reflect on the implications for future studies exploring the relationship between standards and governing. Finally, Carlos Novas uses Michel Foucault’s writings on biopower and government to explore the connections between biopolitics and bioeconomics. Using the example of the orphan drug problem which emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the US, he considers the various ways in which the problem of developing drugs to treat rare diseases was made knowable to political authorities through a combination of congressional hearings, surveys, academic conferences, media reports and patient group activism. His chapter considers some of the ways in which the successes and failures of orphan drug legislation are made knowable to political intervention and measured on a number of economic scales. It concludes by examining some of the contemporary biopolitical problems which orphan drugs pose in terms of the high cost of a number of therapies developed under the auspices of this legislation. The emerging contours of this problem consists of reconciling providing expensive treatments for a small number of patients while still trying to meet the general health care needs of the population.

1.3 Conclusion Calculative practices such as standards, certification schemes, auditing and accounting systems have become a significant part of contemporary forms of governing within an ever-expanding range of domains. These practices are contributing to the rise of new understandings of economic, political and social spheres as well as to the self-ordering projects of individuals themselves. This edited collection draws together research from a wide range of substantive areas to examine how attempts to standardize are tied to these new forms of governing and the effects that they have. Through the application of the post-realist approaches of governmentality and actor network theory, the book underlines the fact that standards can no longer be regarded as a mundane or boring technical issue of little relevance or interest to social scientists. It shows that



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standards are central features of our contemporary existence and play a key role in constituting governmental objects, subjects and practices.

Barry, A. (2001), Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (London: The Athlone Press). Berg, M. (1997), Rationalizing Medical Work: Decision-Support Techniques and Medical Practices (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Berg, M. (1998), ‘Order(s) and Disorder(s): Of Protocols and Medical Practices’, in M. Berg and A. Mol (eds), Differences in Medicine: Unraveling Practices, Techniques, and Bodies (Durham: Duke University Press). Borraz, O. (2007), ‘Governing Standards: The Rise of Standardization Processes in France and the EU’, Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions 20 (1), pp. 57–84. Botzem, S. and S. Quack (2006), ‘Contested Rules and Shifting Boundaries: International Standard-Setting in Accounting’, in M-L. Djelic and K. SahlinAndersson (eds), Transnational Governance: Institutional Dynamics of Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Bowker, G. C. and Star, S. L. (1999), Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Brunsson, N. and B. Jacobssen (eds) (2000), A World of Standards (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Callon, M. (1986), ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’, in J. Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Collins, H. M. and S. Yearley (1992), ‘Epistemological Chicken’, in A. Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Dean, M. (1999), Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage). Du Gay, P. (1997), ‘Organising Identity: Making Up People at Work’ in P. Du Gay (ed.), Production of Culture / Cultures of Production (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). Drori, G. S., J. W. Meyer and H. Hwang (2006), ‘Introduction’, in G. S. Drori, J. W. Meyer and H. Hwang (eds), Globalization and Organization: World Society and Organizational Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Feakins, M. (2007), ‘Off and Out: The Spaces for Certification – Offshore Outsourcing in St Petersburg, Russia’, Environment and Planning A 39, pp. 1889–1907. Garland, D. (1997), ‘Governmentality and the Problem of Crime: Foucault, Criminology, Sociology’, Theoretical Criminology 1/2, pp. 173–214. Gibson-Graham, J-K. (2006), A Post-Capitalist Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Higgins, V. and S. Kitto (2004), ‘Mapping the Dynamics of New Forms of Technological Governance in Agriculture: Methodological Considerations’, Environment and Planning A 36, pp. 1397–410. Holton, R. (1998), Globalization and the Nation-State (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). King, R. and G. Kendall (2004), The State, Democracy and Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).



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Kitto, S. and V. Higgins (2009), Pedagogical Machines: ICTs and Neoliberal Governance in the Modern University (New York: Nova Science). Kerwer, D. (2005), ‘Rules that Many Use: Standards and Global Regulation’, Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions 18 (4), pp. 611–32. Lampland, M. and S. L. Star (eds) (2009), Standards and their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Larner, W. and R. Le Heron (2004), ‘Global Benchmarking: Participating “at a Distance” in the Globalizing Economy’, in W. Larner and W. Walters (eds), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge). Larner, W. and W. Walters (eds) (2004), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge). Latour, B. (1987), Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Lee, N. and S. Brown (1994), ‘Otherness and the Actor Network: The Undiscovered Continent’, American Behavioural Scientist 37(6), pp. 772–90. Lyon, D. (2001), Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). MacKenzie, D., F. Muniesa and L. Siu (eds) (2007), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Mennicken, A. (2008), ‘Connecting Worlds: The Translation of International Auditing Standards into Post-Soviet Audit Practice’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 33, pp. 384–414. Miller, P. and T. O’Leary (1987), ‘Accounting and the Construction of the Governable Person’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 12, pp. 235–65. Miller, P. and N. Rose (1990), ‘Governing Economic Life’, Economy and Society 19, pp. 1–31. Mitchell, T. (2002), Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (London: University of California Press). Mykhalovskiy, E. and L. Weir (2004), ‘The Problem of Evidence-Based Medicine: Directions for Social Science’, Social Science and Medicine 59(5), pp. 1059–69. O’Malley, P., L. Weir and C. Shearing (1997), ‘Governmentality, Criticism, Politics’, Economy and Society 26, pp. 501–17. Power, M. (1996), ‘Making Things Auditable’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 21(2), pp. 289–315. Power, M. (1997), The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Rankin, K. (2004), The Cultural Politics of Markets: Economic Liberalisation and Social Change in Nepal (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Rose, N. (1999), Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rutland, T. and A. Aylett (2008), ‘The Work of Policy: Actor Networks, Governmentality, and Local Action on Climate Change in Portland, Oregon’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26, pp. 627–46. Strathern, M. (ed.) (2000), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (London: Routledge). Tamm Hallström, K. (2004), Organizing International Standardization: ISO and the IASC in Quest of Authority (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar).



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Timmermans, S. and M. Berg (1997), ‘Standardization in Action: Achieving Local Universality through Medical Protocols’, Social Studies of Science 27, pp. 273–305. Timmermans, S. and M. Berg (2003), The Gold Standard: The Challenge of EvidenceBased Medicine and Standardization in Health Care (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press). Weber, M. (1968), Economy and Society, 3 Volumes (New York: Bedminster Press). Yearley, S. (2005), Making Sense of Science: Understanding the Social Study of Science (London: Sage).






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Part I The Global and Local Politics of Standardizing




2 Peter Miller, Liisa Kurunmäki, and Ted O’Leary

2.1 Introduction Calculating, standardizing, and governing go hand in hand.1 Yet the ways in which calculating interacts with other forms of expertise to facilitate particular modes of governing have been given little attention. If we are to understand how calculating operates as a mode of standardizing and governing in local, yet connected, contexts, we suggest that it is important to examine such interactions. As others have argued, we need to look beyond the boundaries of firms, organizations, and nation states if we are to understand phenomena such as ‘meta-organizations’, ‘transnational regulation’, the ‘modern world polity’, ‘global assemblages’, and ‘global governmentality’ (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson, 2006; Drori et al., 2003, 2006; Lipschutz and Rowe, 2005; Mennicken, 2008; Ong and Collier, 2005; Tamm Hallström, 2004). We endorse these calls to attend to modes of governing that bridge the global and the local, and that take place across, within, and between national boundaries. But, rather than focusing on the distinctive entities or modes of organization that characterize the present, we focus here on the calculative practices through which they operate (Larner and Le Heron, 2004; Miller, 1994; Power, 1997). For it is through these, we suggest, that the linking up and mixing up of so many actors, agents, and aspirations is achieved. We draw attention in particular to those calculative practices that typically go under the name of management accounting, and we highlight a distinctive feature of these – the constant process of hybridizing they undergo, as they come into contact with other bodies of expertise, and with the expectations and demands of other actors and agents. As Latour (1993) has observed, we are confronted daily with imbroglios 21



Calculating Hybrids

Calculating Hybrids

that mix up apparently disparate things such as science, politics, economy, law, and so on. In turn, he suggests, these are ‘purified’ or repartitioned according to the binary divide of nature and culture. Our concern here is with a similar process of hybridizing, although our focus is not on the hybridizing and partitioning of nature and culture. Our concern is with the hybridizing of calculative expertise, in particular the ways in which the calculative practices of accounting enable a hybridizing of the economy and science on the one hand (in the context of the microprocessor industry), and the economy and medicine on the other (in the context of the ‘new public management’ reforms). We suggest that this hybridizing of calculative expertise, its incessant redefinition at the margins (Miller, 1998), is central to the bridging of domains and the aligning of otherwise distinct and possibly conflicting expectations. Accounting practices, one might say, are constantly engaged in a dual hybridization process, seeking to make visible and calculable the hybrids that they encounter, while at the same time hybridizing themselves through encounters with a range of other bodies of expertise. Hybridizing in this sense, we suggest, is itself a process, and assumes variable forms. Not all calculative practices, processes, and expertises hybridize with equal ease. Once formed, a hybrid may revert to its original form, as in the botanical world. Or the newly formed hybrid may stabilize for a sufficient period of time to be termed an ‘institution’.2 Similarly, once a hybrid is formed, then hybridization can commence anew, as the recently formed hybrid comes into contact with others. While disciplines vie with each other for the control of domains and institutions, and worry about their identity and self-image, the punctuated process of hybridizing carries on behind the scenes, sometimes noisily and sometimes quietly. This suggests an important lesson about hybrids. Not only are hybrids prevalent, and varied in type, but a specific class of hybrids – those formed at the intersection with the calculative practices and expertise of accounting – are of particular significance. For it is through intersections such as those between financial calculation and technological dreams, or between the ideals and instruments of costing, curing, and caring, that a particular modality of governing economic and social life is made possible. The calculating self, one might say, is increasingly a hybrid, as are the tools that the calculating self can deploy (Miller, 1994). The hybridizing of accounting practices, processes, and expertise is of particular concern to those who have examined the intersection of scientific and economic domains, and specifically those who have drawn upon the science studies literatures to inform their analyses.



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Whether couched in the language of ‘actor-network theory’, ‘technoeconomic networks’ or the plainer language of ‘mediating instruments’ and ‘mediating machines’, the impulse has been the same: to examine the range of hybrid forms that have emerged out of the intersection between two or more previously separate types.3 This entails no a priori delimiting of the field, and no restricting of hybrids to a particular class of objects. Almost anything, it seems, can be a hybrid. This does not exclude organizational forms, but nor does it accord them priority. It locates them on a horizontal plane, along with all the other practices and processes that make up a body of expertise such as accounting. For instance, Power (1994) has remarked on the interactions between administrative and scientific practices, while Robson (1994) has pointed to the interactions of economic calculation and investments in science and technology through the case of R&D expenditure. Miller and O’Leary (1994a, 1994b) have examined a worldwide factory modernization project, and the invention of a new financial-engineering metric – termed ‘investment bundling’ – to co-ordinate and assess the project at a corporate level. They have also examined the hybridizing of technological and financial trajectories in the case of the microprocessor industry through a particular set of metrics that mediate between science and the economy (Miller and O’Leary, 2007), which we examine in greater detail below. Briers and Chua (2001), through a field study of the implementation of activity-based costing, have examined the creation and maintenance of ‘boundary objects’, phenomena able to reside within and mediate among diverse actor worlds. And, in a very different context that we also discuss below, Kurunmäki (2004) has shown how medical and financial expertise can hybridize under certain conditions. This chapter addresses these issues in two main stages. In the next section, we consider the hybridizing of accounting expertise in the setting of the microprocessor industry, and by reference to both ‘technology roadmaps’ and the so-called Moore’s Law – the somewhat puzzling prediction made by Gordon Moore (the co-founder of Intel) in 1965 that the power of computer chips could be doubled approximately every two years, with no increase in cost per chip. This prediction that has since been termed a ‘law’ continues to underpin the microprocessor and related industries even after more than four decades. In the section that follows, we consider the various encounters between medical and financial expertise in the context of the ‘New Public Management’ reforms. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of this broader definition of hybrids and hybridizing for the ongoing



Peter Miller, Liisa Kurunmäki, and Ted O’Leary 23

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Calculating Hybrids

2.2 The Hybridizing of Financial and Technological Trajectories Consider first the practice of ‘technology road mapping’ as used to inform investment appraisal and co-ordination in the semiconductor industry (Miller and O’Leary, 2005a, 2005b, 2007). Technology road mapping refers to an information-sharing framework that operates internationally across very different kinds of organizations, including large-scale semiconductor firms, suppliers, consortia, start-up firms, government agencies, and university laboratories (Semiconductor Industry Association, 2005, p. i). Road maps are produced and updated annually in what has been termed a ‘world-wide consensus building process’ on the part of delegates from firms and scientific agencies in Europe, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and the USA (ibid, p. i). The declared aim is to form shared expectations across the entities, for periods of up to 15 years ahead, as to when innovations by each of the entities should come to fruition, and how they should interoperate, to enable the production of new and more powerful semiconductor devices. Technology road maps are information-sharing arrangements that are themselves hybrids, as well as devices that help both to create hybrid organizational forms and to act on the interrelations among their constituents. They are central to the formation and mediation of relations between entities in a dense and changing set of firms and organizations, a network that a senior Intel executive described in the following terms: ‘We [Intel] are part of an ecosystem, and you can’t really be an outlier. You may be a leading force, a leading element’.4 Intel has sought to be a ‘leading force’ in this ‘ecosystem’ by participating at the most senior levels in the preparation and updating of the industry’s international technology road map. It has done so as a critical part of managing the firm’s strategic investment decisions (Miller and O’Leary, 2005a, 2005b, 2007). For it is by means of road maps that Intel’s CEO seeks to co-ordinate such investments with those of a host of other firms and agencies, thus managing the risks of widely distributed sets of interrelated innovations: ‘We obviously do ROIs [Return on Investment calculations] on products and things of that sort, but the core decisions the company makes, the core decisions are basically technology roadmap decisions’.5 Road maps, the CEO pointed out, enable Intel to take part in ‘a managing – a partial managing – of the resources of the virtual



reconfiguring of modes of governing that are both transnational and standardizing in their aspirations.

firm, the virtual firm being ourselves and a bunch of others bringing product to market’.6 It is through their involvement in negotiating and updating the international road map, and by scrutinizing its contents before major capital commitments are made, that Intel’s most senior executives interact with a hybrid organization that traverses the semiconductor and related industries, and that links the firm with entities as diverse as university laboratories in Europe devising immersion lithography, the US Department of Energy’s Virtual National Laboratory, Nikon, and TRW. For unless those other entities invest in ways that align with and complement Intel’s capital spending, the latter’s returns on investment in new process technologies, products, and the formation of markets, may be reduced dramatically. It is worth noting the stable rates of change in both microprocessor functionality (the technological trajectory) and cost (the financial trajectory) that underpin the road map. Functionality, as measured by the number of electronic elements on a chip, is expected to double every three years with a corresponding decrease in cost per element of 65 per cent triennially, or 29 per cent per year.7 Such a simple set of relations sets in train complex negotiations on rates of investment among firms and agencies around the world. It is a set of relations derived from one of the most significant hybrid practices of our time. This is the so-called Moore’s Law, named after Intel co-founder and now chairman-emeritus, Gordon Moore.8 If technology road mapping is itself a hybrid, insofar as it combines in one metric both technological and financial trajectories, then Moore’s Law underpins such a practice through making indissociable technological improvements (device complexity) and financial benefits (cost reductions per technology generation). Moore’s Law dates back to a set of graphs drafted by Gordon Moore during 1965, setting out his predictions for the semiconductor components industry for the ensuing decade.9 The set of U-shaped curves reflected a relation between the number of electronic elements on a semiconductor product, which he called ‘device complexity’, and the cost of manufacture. At the time of preparing the graphs, Moore had available only a very small number of historical data points. The continued ability to miniaturize electronic elements like transistors was at the core of the industry, Moore thought. In the downward slope of each curve, he sought to represent the industry’s ability to effect steep reductions in manufacturing cost per element by continuing to miniaturize elements and thus fitting more of them on a chip. Consumers could enjoy the benefits of dramatic increases in the numbers of electronic elements on a semiconductor, and thus in the




Calculating Hybrids

power and capability of the device, at a greatly reducing cost per element. But, at some point, each slope bottomed-out. Beyond that point, which Moore referred to as ‘device complexity for minimum component cost’, the curve rose steeply as firms were unable to manufacture more complex devices effectively and with acceptable yield levels. Moore saw no fundamental barriers in physics or chemistry to a continuation of historic rates of miniaturization for a decade or more. Indeed, he thought: ‘With unit cost falling as the number of components per circuit rises, by 1975 economics may dictate squeezing as many as 65,000 components on a single silicon chip’.10 That startling prediction was based on a simple, straight-line extrapolation from the curves that Moore had drawn in 1965.11 Looking back in 1975, Moore argued that the prediction had indeed come to pass, and that dramatic increases in device power and reductions in cost were set to continue.12 Even today, Moore’s Law continues to set the essential guideline for the industry’s international technology road map. His forecasts, now over 40 years old, are the basis for the estimates in the 2005 road map referred to above, namely, that the functionality of a microprocessor can continue to double every three years at a 65 per cent reduction in cost per electronic element. A hybrid practice to its core, Moore’s Law both links and governs the technological and financial trajectories that underpin the microprocessor industry along with a whole host of related industries.

2.3 The Hybridizing of Costing, Curing, and Caring Hybridizing is also found in very different locales. Take for example the encounter between medical and financial expertise in the ‘New Public Management’ reforms of the past two decades (Hopwood, 1984; McSweeney, 1994; Olson et al., 1998). Here we find many hybrids, and of differing types. We also find a hybridizing process that is much more variable and less stable than in the previous case, both over time and from one country to another. In what follows, we consider just some instances of this variation. No doubt this variation is due in large part to variation in public policy, despite the transnational nature of the reform agenda, as well as variation in the ways in which professional bodies define, differentiate, and organize themselves. Hybridizing in this arena, one might say, has become both an object and an objective of public policy. ‘Regulated hybrids’, that is, hybrids that have been made and shaped in large part by explicit public policy and regulation, are often the norm (Kurunmäki and Miller, forthcoming).



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The attempt to make medicine calculable has a long history on both sides of the Atlantic. Since the late 1970s, a cascade of managerial reforms has sought to involve clinicians in the financial management of their specialties and the hospital as a whole (Chua, 1995; Perrin, 1978; Preston et al., 1992). For several decades, however, medics in many contexts, such as the UK National Health Service, have sought to preserve intact the boundaries of the medical enclosure, and to inhibit or prevent the forming of a medical-financial hybrid (Jones and Dewing, 1997; Pollitt et al., 1988; Rose and Miller, 1992). This longstanding reluctance on the part of the UK clinicians to participate actively in this hybridizing of medical and financial expertise seems to persist, at least within some quarters of the medical profession. A recent Audit Commission (2006) report, that analyses key reasons for the financial failings of 11 NHS organizations in 2004–5, identifies a disengagement of senior clinicians from core management processes as a reliable indicator of impending financial trouble in Hospital Trusts. Even today, financial expertise is typically not viewed by many senior clinicians as something that they should acquire. Rather, it is often considered the job of the Finance Director to produce a ‘financial fix’ to keep the organization intact until the year end (Audit Commission, 2006), or the job of the management accountants to redefine budgetary overspends as ‘needed’ expenditure (Kurunmäki et al., 2003, 2006). A very different picture appears, however, if one considers the encounter between clinicians and the New Public Management reforms in the Finnish context.13 Here, one sees a relatively straightforward hybridizing of medical and financial expertise. Contrary to their UK counterparts, senior clinicians in Finnish hospitals expressed early on a willingness to acquire financial competency. The process began in the late 1980s when medical professionals were made financially responsible through delegated budgets. The participation of Chief Physicians and Nurses was central to these initial budgeting experiments that took place on a voluntary basis, and in the localized settings of individual hospitals. So was the combining of financial and non-financial measures in the reports. At the level of the clinical unit, and in the context of a specific ward, budgets would include both operational and financial targets. They would be prepared in part on the basis of information provided by the hospital administration, and in part from information produced within the unit in question. Networks of calculation, in which medical experts were central, emerged gradually as key actors came to endorse the ideas of financial management, and the number of participants multiplied. As the ideas of markets, customers, and contracts began to




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achieve acceptance in the Finnish health care field in the early 1990s, clinicians – with their recently acquired budgeting expertise – took readily to the detailed tasks of calculating costs, allocating overheads, and setting prices. Senior clinicians in the Finnish hospital settings took control of the financial management of their clinical units. Some of them spoke proudly of the price lists they had prepared and the average costs they had calculated for different operations. Others spoke equally proudly of the fact that they had prepared costing and pricing information with little or no help from the finance unit in the hospital. The acquisition of financial expertise was considered to be relatively straightforward and unchallenging by both medics and accountants, when set alongside the acquisition of clinical skills and expertise. Medical and financial expertise thus hybridized relatively rapidly in the Finnish context, as clinicians came to view it as normal and even desirable to include the key calculative practices of the accountant as part of their repertoire. Consider a further and related example, where hybridizing has been made both a key object and objective of public policy. The specific context is the UK, and the ‘Modernizing Government’ programme introduced in the late 1990s by the newly elected Labour government. The attempt was to promote ‘partnership’ working among a range of service providers as part of a more general attempt to transform the political lexicon in the UK.14 An incitation to co-operate was to take centre stage, supplanting the harsh language of markets and competition that characterized politics and public policy in the 1980s and early 1990s. The programme overall was originally outlined in the White Paper Modern Public Services for Britain: Investing in Reform (CM4011, 1998), and later presented in more detail in the Modernising Government White Paper (CM4310, 1999). And health care, together with the links between health and social care, were identified as central to this programme in two separate White Papers.15 Giving individual departments separate responsibility for tackling one part of a multifaceted problem was viewed as a ‘recipe for failure’ by policymakers.16 The answer was held to be ‘joined-up’ working, since this would match the joined-up nature of the problems themselves. This proposed solution was viewed as having widespread applicability for issues as diverse as unemployment, homelessness, and poor health (CM4011, 1998). Service providers were called upon to co-operate, and to build services ‘around the needs of those who use them’ (Department of Health, 1998, p. 5). This enthusiasm for so-called partnership working was not unique to the UK. Under various labels and guises, the notion of co-operation



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became a leitmotif for the reform of public services in the late 1990s. Whether one looks to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the UK, the political vocabulary is remarkably similar. Terms such as ‘joined-up government’, ‘connected government’, ‘networked government’, and ‘whole-of-government’ gave voice to a widely shared political diagnosis that aspired to resolve problems as diverse as the increasing demands and expectations of citizens, budgetary pressures, globalization, fragmentation of service provision, as well as the perceived conservatism of public servants, their risk avoidance and lack of innovation. An avalanche of policy documents recommended ‘horizontal management’, ‘inter-agency’, ‘inter-sectoral’, ‘inter-departmental’, and ‘multiorganizational’ co-operation.17 Hybridization became the watchword, even if its precise form and labelling varied from country to country. In the UK, and with respect to health and social care, the Health Act 1999 gave form to this incitation to co-operate, while Section 31 of this Act proposed a range of hybrids as the solution.18 The hybrids in this instance were called ‘flexibilities’, and they were multiple. They could take the form of new entities, new processes, new practices, or a combination. ‘Flexibilities’ could take the shape of novel organizational forms, such as integrated service provision through newly created organizations termed ‘Care Trusts’, which had as their aim to provide health care and social services side-by-side. They could also take the form of co-operation across organizational boundaries, by allowing service providers to bring together resources and create ‘pooled budgets’ for specified client groups. Finally, flexibilities could take the form of partnership working based on the joint commissioning of services, such as care home placements. Co-operative working was of course not an absolute invention of the ‘modernizing government’ initiative. Well before the Health Act 1999 and its related reforms, local actors had engaged in all sorts of informal co-operation and hybridization, as this arose around immediate issue of service delivery. Delayed hospital discharges, lack of hospital beds during the winter months, and overdue assessments of care needs that were often linked to eligibility for continuing care placements are just some of the issues around which it emerged prior to the Health Act 1999. Informal hybrids had been formed, such as local agreements for joint targets for maximum delays, money transfers between health care and social service organizations, and multidisciplinary care assessment and commissioning teams.19 The contribution of the Health Act 1999 was to make hybrids an objective of public policy. By institutionalizing and formalizing locally developed and established practices and




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processes, as well as newly created ones, ‘regulated hybrids’ were to be formed. In place of informal co-operation, the Health Act ‘flexibilities’ required formal ‘notification’ through appropriate documentation and paperwork. The signatories to these notifications were, for example, required to demonstrate that there existed robust arrangements for governance, regular reviews of such arrangements, agreed terms, conditions and policies for human resources, information-sharing practices, clear identification of functions, eligibility criteria and assessment processes, complaints procedures, dispute resolution mechanisms, and plans for exit strategies (Kurunmäki and Miller, 2006). When placed alongside the active hybridizing of medical and financial expertise in the Finnish context during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the recourse to legislation in the UK context in the late 1990s might at the very least be viewed as symptomatic of a less conducive environment for co-operation to flourish. But our aim here is not to assess such matters. Nor is it to adjudicate on the relative merits of hybridizing in the two contexts. We are concerned primarily to identify some of the differing modes of hybridizing, and the variety of conditions under which it occurs. In the Finnish context, one sees a relatively rapid hybridizing of clinical expertise. In the UK context, one sees hybridizing made into an explicit objective of public policy. Both cases reinforce our argument for focusing on the hybridizing of a particular set of practices, processes, and expertises, for it is these that enable the linking of domains and the mediating between them.

2.4 Conclusion and Implications If calculating and standardizing are intrinsically related, then hybridizing enables the governing of conduct to adapt to the specifics of the domain or activity in question. For hybridizing is a continually inventive process, one in which proliferation and multiplication is the norm. We have argued for a focus on the hybridizing of calculative practices and expertise, for it is these that link the multiplicity of actors, agencies, and aspirations that seek to govern our present. We have drawn attention in this chapter to the importance of hybrids in both the public and private sectors, and across the boundaries of these increasingly overlapping domains. In no way has our selection aspired to be comprehensive for either the areas or individual examples. But we do think they indicate the considerable variety and significance of hybrids. For instance, we have shown how technology road maps facilitate co-ordination across subunits of the firm, as well as between the firm



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and those with whom it co-operates, and with whom it shares substantial amounts of information. We have indicated how ‘Moore’s Law’, which pre-dates and broadly defines the contours that road maps have to follow, mediates between science and the economy, and defines the rules under which co-operation and competition occur in the microprocessor industry. In a very different context – an encounter between medical and financial expertise – we have shown the process of hybridizing to be equally important. As senior hospital clinicians in Finland showed a willingness to acquire competence in budgeting, costing, and pricing, and to attend associated training schemes designed specifically for medics, their skill-sets changed. In countries such as the UK at that time, and in contrast, the boundaries between medical and financial expertise within hospitals remained more clearly drawn. Nonetheless, one can discern more recently signs of a different kind of hybridizing even in the UK, whether through calls for formal ‘partnership working’ or through other related initiatives (Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and Audit Commission, 2009).20 These brief examples are intended to be no more than indicative of the range and multiplicity of hybrids that we argue need to be more fully recognized. We could no doubt have pointed to other examples. We could have pointed to the hybridizing of financial and medical expertise in the form of ‘Reference Costing’, which has been given particular prominence in the context of the ‘Payment by Results’ programme recently introduced for the NHS in England (Department of Health, 2002, Llewellyn and Northcott, 2005). While one might view reference costing as a traditional accounting calculation, it is considerably more than the production of conventional standard costs. For reference costing mixes up and links up elements from the medical domain (Healthcare Resource Groups, of which there exist currently over 1400 groupings) and the financial domain (standard costs, computed on the basis of numerical averages). In this exercise, classification on the basis of a longstanding set of clinical categories is blended with calculation on the basis of financial expertise.21 We could equally have pointed to the hybridizing of medical and financial expertise in the ‘technology appraisal guidance’ issued by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK. While such guidance does not ‘override the individual responsibility of healthcare professionals to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual patient’, they are nonetheless expected to ‘take it fully into account when exercising their clinical judgement’.22 Recent controversies surrounding this ‘guidance’ for drugs such as Herceptin




Calculating Hybrids

(for the treatment of breast cancer), Donepezil (for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease), and Temozolomide (for the treatment of brain tumours) have brought firmly into the public domain this hybridizing of medical and financial expertise which happens at a distance from the hospital and the individual patient. The hybridizing at issue here is between health economics and clinical judgement, which allows ‘guidance’ to be issued for prescribing on the basis of ‘cost per qualityadjusted life years’ relative to the average gain in ‘quality-adjusted life years’.23 Again, our concern here is not to adjudicate on the merits of this form of silent rationing, which has only reached the public domain relatively recently. It is simply to note that the hybridizing of financial and medical judgement continues, behind the scenes, even while some clinicians in hospitals may seek to distance themselves from financial judgement and expertise. We have deliberately taken examples from both the private and the public sector, and from more than one country. For hybridizing, insofar as it links the local and the global, is highly variable in both its emergence and stability; hence our emphasis on hybridizing as distinct from hybrids, even if the latter are the outcome typically observed. Hybridizing takes place in a multiplicity of sites and in relation to dispersed actors, as well as through diverse attempts to regulate domains. We do not conclude from the examples mentioned here that hybridizing is always and necessarily benign or malign. And clearly we have done no more here than provide vignettes that illustrate the diverse nature of hybridizing, and its role in linking calculating and governing. We suggest, however, that hybridizing enables a reconfiguring of modes of governing. This is one that takes place increasingly ‘beyond the state’, and in a multiplicity of sites. It entails a reconfiguring of modes of governing that links up and seeks to assemble together diverse regulatory initiatives, whether national or transnational in aspiration. In the process, conventional dichotomies – whether of states vs markets, science vs the economy, or financial management vs medicine – are increasingly attenuated or broken down. Such developments enable new modes of governing to emerge.

Notes 1. This chapter draws substantially on Miller, Kurunmäki, and O’Leary (2008). We would like to acknowledge comments received from colleagues at LSE in the Department of Accounting, and in the ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation. The support of the latter is gratefully acknowledged.



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2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

We would also like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their comments. To bring together the somewhat distinct language of actor-network theory and institutional theory, one might say that, as networks or assemblages come to be stabilized for reasonable periods, they take on the characteristics of institutions. On this, see for instance Callon (1991), Callon et al. (1992), Kalthoff (2005), Morrison and Morgan (1999), Robson (1994), and Wise (1988). From an interview with the former Chief Executive of Intel Capital, reported in Miller and O’Leary (2000). Interview with the former Chief Executive (now Chairman) of Intel Corporation; reported in Miller and O’Leary (2007). See Miller and O’Leary (2007). See International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, 2005 Edition, pp. 70, 71, 84. For an overview of the significance of Moore’s Law within the semiconductor industry, see Schaller (1997). Moore (1965, p. 115). Ibid., p. 114. See Moore (1965), p. 116. Moore (1975). See Kurunmäki (2004) for a more extended discussion of these issues. See also Lehtonen (2007). See Kurunmäki and Miller (2004, 2006, forthcoming) for a more extended discussion of these issues. New NHS: Modern, Dependable (CM3807, 1997); Modernising Social Services: Promoting Independence, Improving Protection, Raising Standards (CM4169, 1998). CM4011 (1998, Chapter 4, p. 2). For a review of the history and variety of concerns expressed about ‘fragmentation’ of services, see Ling (2002). See for example the document titled Connecting Government: Whole of Government Responses to Australia’s Priority Challenges, published by the Management Advisory Committee, Commonwealth of Australia, 2004. For New Zealand, see the Report of the Advisory Group on the Review of the Centre, presented to the Ministers of State Services and Finance in November 2001. And, for Canada, see Results for Canadians: A Management Framework for the Government of Canada, published by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Ottawa, Canada in 2002. The Health Act 1999 built on a number of earlier initiatives and tools, including Health Improvement Programmes, Joint Investment Plans, Health Action Zones, and partnership grants. One such multiagency team formed to conduct joint assessments for nursing home care included a consultant geriatrician, an occupational therapist, a community psychiatric nurse, a social services manager, a care manager, a community care manager, and a district nurse. See Clinicians and Finance: Improving Patient Care (2009), a joint statement by the Audit Commission, Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, Department of Health, the Healthcare Financial Management Association, NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, and the Royal College of Nursing, highlighting




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the importance of clinicians’ involvement in financial management to further improve the quality of care for patients. 21. See Bowker and Star (1999) on the classification of diseases. 22. NICE technology appraisal guidance 111, 2006. 23. NICE technology appraisal guidance 111, 2006, para 4.2.2.2. The basic unit of measurement here is a ‘quality-adjusted life year’ (QALY). The cost may be defined as drug costs only (as in an early independent study cited in this instance), and the benefits are typically defined as delays in the progression of disability or entry to residential nursing or NHS continuing care.

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Miller, P. (1998), ‘The Margins of Accounting’, The European Accounting Review 7, pp. 605–21. Miller, P. (1994) ‘Accounting and Objectivity: The Invention of Calculating Selves and Calculable Spaces’, in A. Megill (ed.), Rethinking Objectivity (Durham: Duke University Press). Miller, P., L. Kurunmäki, and T. O’Leary (2008), ‘Accounting, Hybrids and the Management of Risk’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 33, pp. 942–67. Miller, P. and T. O’Leary (1994a), ‘Accounting, “Economic Citizenship” and the Spatial Reordering of Manufacture’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 19, pp. 15–34. Miller, P. and T. O’Leary (1994b), ‘The Factory as Laboratory’, Science in Context 7, pp. 469–96. Miller, P. and T. O’Leary (2005a), ‘Managing Operational Flexibility in Investment Decisions’, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 17, pp. 18–24. Miller, P. and T. O’Leary (2005b), ‘Capital Budgeting, Coordination, and Strategy: A Field Study of Interfirm and Intrafirm Mechanisms’, in C. Chapman (ed.), Controlling Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Miller, P. and T. O’Leary (2007), ‘Mediating Instruments and Making Markets: Capital Budgeting, Science and the Economy’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 32, pp. 701–34. Moore, G. (1965), ‘Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits’, Electronics 35, pp. 114–17. Moore, G. (1975), ‘Progress in Digital Integrated Electronics’, in Technical Digest of International Electron Devices Meeting (New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Morrison, M. and M. S. Morgan (1999), ‘Models as Mediating Instruments’, in M. S. Morgan and M. Morrison (eds), Models as Mediators: Perspectives on Natural and Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Olson, O., J. Guthrie, and C. Humphrey (eds) (1998), Global Warning: Debating International Developments in New Public Financial Management (Oslo: Cappelan Akademisk Forlag As). Ong, A. and S. J. Collier (eds) (2005), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Oxford: Blackwell). Perrin, J. (1978), Management of Financial Resources in the National Health Service (London: HMSO). Pollitt, C., S. Harrison, D. Hunter, and G. Marnoch (1988), ‘The Reluctant Managers: Clinicians and Budgets in the NHS’, Financial Accountability and Management 4, pp. 213–33. Power, M. (1994), Accounting and Science: Natural Inquiry and Commercial Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Power, M. (1997), The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Preston, A. M., D. J. Cooper, and R. W. Coombs (1992), ‘Fabricating Budgets: A Study of the Production of Management Budgeting in the National Health Service’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 17, pp. 561–93. Robson, K. (1994), ‘Connecting Science to the Economic: Accounting Calculation and the Visibility of Research and Development’, Science in Context 7, pp. 497–514.



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Gendering Codes of Conduct: Chiquita Bananas and Nicaraguan Women Workers Marina Prieto-Carrón and Wendy Larner

3.1 Introduction When asked to name one brand of bananas, more consumers say Chiquita than any other brand. Chiquita is tops with consumers for taste, appearance, freshness, nutrition, value and size, too. (www.chiquitabanana.com) I’m Chiquita banana and I’ve come to say Bananas have to ripen in a certain way But, bananas like the climate of the very, very tropical equator So you should never put bananas in the refrigerator. (Banana jingle, 1944, sung by Miss Chiquita) All of us have probably eaten Chiquita bananas. Some of us may even remember the Chiquita banana jingle and the blue sticker with Miss Chiquita. Few of us know how the company has engaged with issues of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the implications for women workers in ‘the very, very tropical equator’ where bananas grow. CSR is now a buzzword for many different actors including companies, governments, international organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), trade unions, consultants, think tanks, research institutions and academics. It groups together a diverse range of activities – including environment, philanthropy, labour rights, sustainable development, corruption, staff motivation and workplace diversity – and then subjects them to similar political generalizations and regulatory approaches. Of particular interest to us are the voluntary ‘Codes of Conduct’ used within the CSR framework. These codes of conduct involve corporations 38



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self-regulating their activities using written statements of principles that serve as a commitment to particular ways of working (Ferguson, 1998). Codes are particularly visible when used by multinationals to stipulate social, labour and environmental standards in global supply chains ( Jenkins et al., 2002). The growth of codes of conduct dates from the early 1990s, when Levi Strauss & Co. published the first multinational code. Their rise is usually associated with changes in global political economy, including the failure of nation-state regulation to protect workers, the shift towards self-regulation by multinationals and the increasing likelihood that goods are produced in global supply chains (Jenkins, 2001). As flexible employment practices and informal work became more common, so too did concern about the labour conditions of workers grow (Ferguson, 1998; Friedberg, 2004). Trade unions and NGOs launched global campaigns against the most visible examples of corporate exploitation in globalized production processes (Barrientos and Smith, 2007). Self-regulation also increased as brands and corporate reputation became more important for consumers, investors and the media. This chapter examines how Chiquita Brands International Inc (Chiquita) uses codes of conduct in its relationships with ‘independent’ banana producers in Nicaragua.1 Workers in the Nicaraguan banana plantations are ‘disposable women’ (Wright, 2006) who suffer widespread discrimination and labour and human rights violations (Prieto-Carrón, 2006a). The chapter addresses three sets of questions: (1) What political rationalities inform Chiquita’s code of conduct? (2) What forms of expertise are utilized in these efforts to govern global supply chains? (3) What possibilities are there for the women themselves to use the codes to advance their concerns? It draws on extensive research on labour rights in Nicaraguan banana plantations since 2001, four focus groups conducted with unionized women workers and Chiquita’s own material on codes of conduct.2 Our aim is to bring a gender lens to broader debates about standards and standardization. We are also interested in the possibilities codes of conduct might offer – conceptually and politically – to efforts to improve the lives of vulnerable women workers in the global South.

3.2 Conceptualizing codes of conduct The mainstream CSR literature is overwhelmingly business friendly. In terms of labour issues, it presents a calculative, market-based, solution to a problem which is more about the political empowerment of workers (Lipschutz, 2004). There is also a critical literature that argues



Marina Prieto-Carrón and Wendy Larner 39

Gendering Codes of Conduct

CSR is an imperialist project that undercuts transformative change (O’Laughlin, 2008; Rajak, 2006). Rather than assuming CSR is either inherently good or bad, we begin from studies of global supply chains (variously called commodity chains, value chain/networks and global production networks) that explain why different types of global production and distribution networks arise and how they are coordinated and governed (Coe and Hess, 2005; Dolan and Humphrey, 2004). This literature shows that CSR is part of a multiplicity of corporate strategies and management systems that generate an uneven geography of production, distribution and consumption (Hughes, 2005, p. 1160). It has also used the governmentality approach to conceptualize both global value chains (Gibbon and Ponte, 2008; Larner and Le Heron, 2004) and CSR/ethical trade (Blowfield and Dolan, 2008; Hughes, 2001). Our analysis is inspired by these approaches and examines how the spaces and subjects of CSR (global supply chains, responsible corporations, ethical consumers) are produced through specific discourses and diverse calculative practices. To date, most global supply chain studies have marginalized labour in their accounts of ties between global buyers and local suppliers, and often ignore local context and the embeddedness of global standards (Coe et al., 2008; Nadvi, 2008). Relatively little is known about how codes of conduct work for the consumers, retailers, buyers, distributors, producers, business associations and workers who make up a global supply chain. There are studies which show that codes cannot benefit workers if commercial and purchasing practices are untouched (Raworth, 2004). It has also been established that gender is an important dimension of codes that is often ignored (see, for examples, Barrientos et al., 2003; Pearson, 2007; Prieto-Carrón, 2006a). For example, research by the Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI) (Barrientos and Smith, 2007) shows that codes impact on the physical conditions of work (e.g., the provision of emergency exits) but have not made any difference to entrenched social issues (e.g., discrimination against women, freedom of association), and have impacted little on the more vulnerable workers such as migrants, women and seasonal and home workers. Despite these findings, however, gendered power relations are still largely ignored in most analyses of CSR. If CSR and codes of conduct are supposed to benefit workers, particularly vulnerable women workers, these omissions seem curious. In large part, the problem is one of content. Codes of conduct do not often take gender seriously. They usually include a generic clause on freedom from discrimination following International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions on equality of remuneration and freedom from discrimination in employment and occupation. Feminist critiques of 10.1057/9780230289673 - Calculating the Social, Edited by Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner


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ILO standards have shown these standards are based on the ‘male breadwinner’ model (Robinson, 2006; Vosko, 2004). Few codes of conduct call for equal opportunities and even fewer spell out the grounds for discrimination or mention issues such as pregnancy (Seyfang, 1999; Smith and Feldman, 2003). Gender-aware wording is also rare. Moreover, even when gender is explicitly included, codes tend to adopt a liberal feminist perspective, treating women the same as men (even if this is also a challenge), therefore making codes insensitive to real life gender differences. The ‘gender pyramid’ developed by Barrientos et al. (2001) (see Figure 3.1) shows why this might be the case. They argue that ‘Codes of Conduct are generally oriented towards tackling overt aspects of

Coleman’s gender interventions

Women’s international conventionsi are applicable to the three levels ILO conventions

Codes

National legislation

A Equip the women

Create equal opportunities

Value difference

Make a new reality

Formal employment conditions and entitlements freedom of association collective bargaining safety and hygiene, equal & living wages, work hours contracts and discrimination

B Employment related issues and entitlements provision of housing, training, workplace childcare reproductive rights, maternity and paternity leave transport and occupational health

C Social issues and entitlements social norms and practice, education domestic responsibilities, gender relations

Gender pyramid Based on: Barrientos, Dolan & Tallontire, 2001 Figure 3.1 The gender pyramid (adapted from Barrientos et al., 2001 and Coleman, 2002) Note: Women’s labour rights are also included under various international conventions, platforms for action and declarations relating specifically to women, such as CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women); the Beijing Platform for Action; and the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence Against Women.





employment such as working conditions and wage rates’ and that ‘is important to recognise that broader social norms, including the combined productive and reproductive responsibilities that women assume, have a direct bearing on women’s position within the labour force’ (Barrientos et al., 2001, p. 9). Because of broader social norms, their gender pyramid divides employment issues into three interlinked levels. The tip of the pyramid covers formal issues that both men and women confront in the workplace (freedom of association, collective bargaining, safety and hygiene, living wages, contracts, discrimination and work hours). The next level addresses employment-related issues which are usually more important to women than men due often to household, maternity and childcare responsibilities (provision of housing, training, workplace childcare, reproductive rights, maternity and paternity leave, transport and occupational health). The third level relates to ‘the broader socio-economic circumstances that affect women’s ability to access particular types of employment and the conditions of employment they subsequently experience’ (social norms and practice, education, domestic responsibilities and gender relations). The three levels of the pyramid can be broadly equated with four types of gender intervention as expressed by Coleman (2002): equipping women with new skills (based on the disadvantage of women in the world of work and trade; for example, providing women with knowledge of health and safety); creating equal opportunities (addresses structural or environmental factors; for example, tackling behaviours such as sexual harassment and discrimination, and introducing practices such as flexible working hours and parental leave); valuing difference (changing embedded structures that lead to gender inequalities; for example, recognizing the importance of women’s self-organization and childcare provision); and, finally, making a new reality (opening different conversations between men and women about what is possible, disrupting power relations to bring changes where both women and men flourish, for example, men sharing responsibilities for childcare). In the discussion that follows we show that Codes of Conduct struggle to move beyond the first two types of intervention. Consequently, despite efforts to overcome gendered discrimination, they often fail to advance opportunities for vulnerable women workers.

3.3 Why focus on Chiquita? Until recently, most US and European consumer campaigns have focused on the rights and welfare of textile workers. Central America, which



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supplies many US retailers, has been a focus for these campaigners (Anner, 2003; Traub-Werner and Cravey, 2002). There is a more limited awareness of the conditions in horticulture and agriculture in the region.3 We focus on the highly integrated banana supply chain, discussing Chiquita’s activities within Nicaragua and the role of codes of conduct in protecting vulnerable women banana workers. These women work mainly in the packing houses of the banana plantations with seasonal contracts, meagre salaries and few other formal employment opportunities. We will show that the use of codes has offered some space for positive change for women workers in Central America, including Nicaragua, but not in any extensive or significant way. By 2000 Chiquita had developed a voluntary code of conduct. Since the early 1990s Chiquita has been working with the US-based NGO Rainforest Alliance and developed the ‘Better Bananas’ programme to certify their banana plantations. Today this certification programme has been extended to cover all Nicaraguan plantations (PASE, 2008). Indeed, Chiquita is considered by some commentators to be an advanced example of social responsibility.4 Its CSR virtues are well documented in various business journals (Radin, 2004; Werre, 2003), and the company has won several awards. It also has a good reputation in labour rights, having created an illustrated booklet to educate plantation workers about their code of conduct and to inform workers of issues such as the prohibition of child labour and the right to collective bargaining through trade union involvement. Chiquita is highly unionized, with three trade union federations covering approximately 98 per cent of Nicaraguan banana workers (PASE, 2008). It has also signed agreements with the Latin American Coordination of Food and Agricultural Workers (COLSIBA) and the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers Association. Finally, Chiquita is a member of Social Accountability International (SAI) and the Ethical Trade initiative (ETI). Both of these organizations also have codes of conduct that cover labour rights. In addition to its reputation in the field of CSR, high levels of unionization, and accordance with labour rights frameworks, Chiquita is also one of the few banana companies that claims to be explicitly engaged with gender issues. According to George Jaksch5 senior director of corporate responsibility and public affairs, Chiquita developed a sexual harassment policy in 2004. Jaksch emphasized that sexual harassment is ‘not only inadmissible but also illegal’ but he also acknowledged there is a gap between company policy and the reality of women’s lives, in part stemming from women’s subordinate position in Latin American countries. According to Jaksch, other steps have been taken to benefit women





workers in Chiquita’s plantations including provision of childcare facilities; shorter working hours for women with children; provision of transport for women; promotion of women with professional qualifications to supervisory positions; and gender equality in access to housing. Despite Chiquita’s efforts to use codes of conduct to protect women workers, and these broader company commitments to addressing issues of gender equity, focus groups conducted with women working with Chiquita’s suppliers in Nicaragua revealed widespread sexual harassment, discrimination and violations of labour rights in areas such as health and safety, wages and overtime (Prieto-Carrón, 2006a). These claims are supported by broader evidence that sexual harassment is endemic in Latin America banana plantations (COLSIBA, 2001, p. 34). Why is it that Chiquita’s code of conduct has failed to deliver on its promises of gender equity? Why is the company not able to fully engage with the reality of women banana workers lives? A closer look at the code of conduct, and the practices that surround its implementation, are revealing in this context.

3.4 Chiquita’s code of conduct Chiquita published its first code of conduct in 2000, stating that ‘[we] aspire to conduct ourselves in an ethical, legal and socially responsible manner befitting a world-class company’ (Chiquita, 2000, p. 1). The code expresses four core values – integrity, respect, opportunity and responsibility – and describes what these mean for a range of issues, from compliance with labour laws to insider trading and political donations. The section covering workplace practices incorporates the SA8000 standard almost verbatim. This international standard is the multistakeholder standard produced by SAI which covers both labour and environmental issues. It also commits the company to respecting a range of international principles embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the various ILO conventions. The more detailed expression of discriminatory practices found in the Code of Conduct (Chiquita, 2000, p. 9) explicitly addresses gender, stating that The company [Chiquita] shall not engage in or support discrimination, in hiring, compensation, access to training, promotion, termination or retirement based on race, caste, national origin, religion, disability, gender, sexual orientation, union membership, political affiliation, veteran status, or the age of older employees.



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The Chiquita code thus provides for the two types of gender interventions described by Coleman above: ‘equipping women’ and ‘creating equal opportunities’. However this in itself may not be enough. In terms of the first form of intervention, gender intervention happens only when women learn about what is written in the code. In terms of the second, the code recognizes sexual harassment and the need for intervention to ‘create equal opportunities’ but it does not go further towards ‘valuing difference’ or ‘creating a new reality’. The code does not mention maternity rights, nor does it engage at the level of societal norms that impact on women workers. It does not make a specific commitment to supporting female employees, nor does it address the challenges women face due to family obligations such as childcare or the vulnerability they might experience when leaving work late at night and needing safe transport home. Significantly, there are no examples in the code of more progressive issues, such as proactive measures to advance women’s status in the workplace or to challenge the sexual division of labour in the banana plantations. The opportunities for women to improve their position using codes has diminished rather than improved over time. After 2002 the profile of labour rights in general and gender rights in particular has receded in relevant company documents. These reports are the last to present performance tables or analyses of discrimination. Rather than publish detailed reports from 2003 to 2006 Chiquita simply included a CSR section in their general annual company reports. In 2006 this section was called ‘Chiquita cleans its act’ and was only six pages long. Rather than labour and gender rights, the focus was now on human rights and the use of SA8000 standards. For example, the relevant website section is now called ‘labour and environment’ and focuses only on the environment and health and safety: Chiquita’s commitment to the environment and the people of Latin America comes from a simple but powerful belief – we want to do what is right. For this reason we embrace the Rainforest Alliances’ Better Banana Project, the international standard for environmental protection and for worker health and safety on our banana farms. Chiquita’s strong commitment to the environment is reflected in our having achieved 100 per cent certification of our owned farms to the environmental and social standards of the Rainforest Alliance. In terms of the specific issue of sexual harassment, Chiquita has not mentioned cases of discrimination or sexual harassment in their CSR





reports since 2002 (Chiquita, 2002), nor any actions that the company has taken to tackle this issue. Indeed, in the 2002 report it was claimed that all divisions were compliant with SA8000’s provision against ‘sexually abusive behaviour’ despite ample evidence that sexual harassment and discrimination remain endemic on Nicaraguan banana plantations. These absences were not addressed when Chiquita further updated its code in 2008. The company website now claims, the Code is the fundamental policy that guides our ethics and compliance program. It reflects our Core Values and the key areas of compliance requirements relevant to our business. The Code serves as a guide to making good decisions and conducting business ethically. The only mention of labour rights is in a section called ‘Integrity and Respect for Each Other’ which does not talk about discrimination but rather diversity and inclusion. At Chiquita, we are proud of the diversity of our workforce. Respect – for everyone we come into contact with – is one of our Core Values. We respect and value the diversity reflected in the backgrounds, experiences, and ideas of our employees. We are committed to providing a work environment that fosters respect for all employees, customers, suppliers and contractors and that reflects the diversity of the communities in which we operate. The other issues included in this section cover Fair Treatment of Our Employees, Respect for Basic Human Rights, Child, Forced Labour, Freedom of Association, Safety and Health. While there is also a detailed section on sexual harassment, which is one of the few labour issues that now has legal implications under national law, it is not accompanied by a detailed account or a discussion of specific actions by the company as was found in earlier reports. Chiquita’s code, therefore, no longer explicitly engages with issues of labour and gender rights, rather it has subsumed them within broader conceptions of human and environmental rights. We do not try and explain the shift to ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ herein as this would require us to analyse the changing relationships between the company and various activist groups over time. Our point is simply to stress that because the code does not explicitly engage with issues that would generate equal opportunities, and value the difference between men and



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women workers, it is unlikely to explicitly address the issues of most concern to vulnerable women workers.

It would be naive to believe that what is written within the codes is sufficient to address the problems of vulnerable women workers. A Code of Conduct itself, as a document, does not ensure a commitment to gender sensitivity. It is an instrument that informs a range of allied practices in a complicated process. Moreover, it is not always clear from the code itself how gender issues such as freedom from discrimination, respecting gender needs and forbidding sexual harassment should be understood, monitored and implemented. Relevant practices include training programmes, manuals, forms to be filled in by auditors, drafts of reports and final reports, as well as other systems in place that have an impact on the interpretation of gender issues in Codes of Conduct.6 It is also the case that many women’s issues are included in codes under the freedom from discrimination clause. We need to ask how the codes are inserted into broader processes of audit and evaluation, who is doing the interpretation of gender issues and who develops indicators of compliance or non-compliance. Different actors, such as managers, employers and auditors have a significant impact on how monitoring of Codes of Conduct and implementation do or do not respond to women workers’ issues by upholding and reproducing to a great extent, gender insensitivity. There is an emergent CSR consultancy industry worldwide (see Sadler and Lloyd, 2009 for a UK case study). The monitors/auditors of Chiquita’s codes are normally consultancy firms such as Bureau Veritas – a market leader in certification – which is in turn accredited by SAI. The auditors, the managers of the companies issuing the code, and their suppliers, are all supposed to follow set guidelines in their responses to the criteria contained within the code. Indeed SA8000 requires a comprehensive management system covering policy for social accountability and labour conditions; management review; company representatives; planning and implementation; control of suppliers/subcontractors and sub-suppliers; addressing concerns and taking corrective action; outside communication; access for verification; and records. Even with this comprehensive system, SA8000 certification processes have been accused of corporate bias (O’Rourke, 2006; Rodriguez Garavito, 2006). This is worrying given the vagueness found in the text of the code. For example, ‘the company shall maintain reasonable evidence that the requirements of this standard are being met by suppliers and subcontractors’



3.5 Certification experts


(Chiquita, 2002). The word ‘reasonable’ is open to interpretation. For example, what is the reasonable evidence that, as the code states, there is no discrimination against women, that their gender needs are respected and that no sexual abuse is being practiced? Moreover, it is not simply company representatives and international auditors who are involved in this process. We have already seen that the initial impetus for the code arose from Chiquita’s engagements with the Rainforest Alliance, and this NGO has continued to act as a certifying organization. As its influence has grown, so too has Rainforest Alliance transformed itself from a small grassroots organization to a multimillion dollar certification company that is now working in 56 countries with a staff of over 180. Reflecting its origins in concerns about tropical rainforest destruction, Rainforest Alliance has an environmental focus and is little concerned with workers’ rights beyond the more technical issues of health and safety and a somewhat philanthropic approach to development issues such as health and education. Indeed, campaigners such as the UK-based organization Banana Link claim that there is a very close relationship between the company and the certifying organization, and argue that Chiquita could be doing much more in the area of labour rights (www.bananalink.org.uk/content/view/62/22/lang,en). The Nicaraguan trade union Federación de Trabajadores Bananeros de Chinandega (FETRABACH) is also critical, arguing that despite ongoing compliance and increasingly comprehensive certification processes, the wages of the workers have not improved (PASE, 2008). Initially Chiquita also made use of other local ‘expert’ knowledges. Well-respected trade union and regional human rights monitoring groups were used to legitimate their monitoring of the code in CSR reports. For example in 2001 we find the following statements: To increase the transparency and objectivity of these assessments, we invited independent observers to participate: German Zepeda, president of COSIBAH (Coordinator of Banana and Agroindustrial Unions of Honduras) and former coordinator of COLSIBA (Coordinating Committee of Banana Workers’ Unions), and members of the Guatemalan labour rights monitoring organization COVERCO. (Commission for the Verification of Corporate Codes of Conduct) (Chiquita, 2002) COVERCO’s testimony was included in the report as follows: Undoubtedly, Chiquita is making history by moving to comply with high standards in workers’ rights. Inviting qualified independent 10.1057/9780230289673 - Calculating the Social, Edited by Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner


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observers such as COVERCO, and publicly reporting on its performance, as Chiquita is doing in this report, are major steps forward for the company. (Homero Fuentes, General Coordinator, Commission for the Verification of Corporate Codes of Conduct) (Chiquita, 2002) However since 2002 Chiquita has relied heavily on more encompassing work with the Rainforest Alliance and the SAI based on the whole of Latin America and less on these more specific organizations. In turn this has seen the Rainforest Alliance and SAI emerge as international voices for agricultural sustainability, consolidating their roles as experts in certification and verification processes.

3.6 Enacting the code? The final set of actors who have come together around the code are the women banana workers themselves. Disconcertingly, focus-group discussions suggested that, with the exception of a few workplace leaders, these women had not received any training based on the code of conduct. Indeed, in the early meetings only a few of the women had even heard of corporate Codes of Conduct, and none of them knew what Chiquita’s code contained. When it was first explained to them there was some disquiet. However, after more discussion, some women began to actively consider how the code might be used to improve their situation, despite still being annoyed that their lives were so dramatically different from that described in the documents themselves. Petrona7 suggested: ‘It serves as a guarantee, like a letter of recommendation that they are doing things well’. ‘Chiquita’s code could improve our situation’, said Amparo, while Norma expanded this by suggesting: ‘Knowing the code is going to remind us of the necessity of being organized, in order to begin to claim our rights’. Some women concurred that they should review the code and discuss what it might mean in the specific context of the plantations in which they worked. They felt that Chiquita and the management of the independent plantations should engage with them in this process. A number suggested that the local unions should take the lead in these discussions, arguing this would help dispel the reticence and fear many women have about the codes. For example, they said that a trade union could play a useful role in liaising with management to ensure codes are clearly displayed, distributed, workers are trained, and that complaints can be made safely and then addressed. In particular, they suggested that a permanent commission between Chiquita and the unions could be set 10.1057/9780230289673 - Calculating the Social, Edited by Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner




up to interpret the code, and to agree on implementation activities and monitoring processes. They also suggested that monitors should arrive unannounced and talk directly with the workers and that monitors should approach the workers offsite, perhaps via the trade union. Women discussed their observations of outsiders coming to assess the plantation. Their impression of government labour inspectors was poor; they recounted stories of inspectors coming to have lunch with the management and then leaving without speaking to the workers. They also told of their experience of quality audits from Chiquita’s corporate staff where everything is specially organized before an inspection but ‘the following day after Chiquita’s visit we return to the normal regime’, complained Amparo. They also said that sometimes foreigners visited the plantation, but that it was not possible to talk with them. Julia explained in the same focus group that ‘the problem is that the foreigners that visit the properties aren’t allowed to speak with us, they walk them here and there and they don’t leave us on our own so that we can speak with them. They just take photos of us while we work’. Given these experiences, they recommended that any monitoring should take place without prior warning or coordination with plantation managers. The women believed the most important step would be to make the codes better known to workers and their organizations. Margarita said, ‘We just don’t know our rights’. They suggested training should be provided on the code, as well as specific aspects of particular concern to them, such as health and safety, self-esteem and assertiveness in dealing with discrimination and harassment. They suggested assemblies of workers to discuss the code, both at work and outside it. They also recommended that a copy of the code should be distributed to every worker, and that it be displayed in full view in workplaces. Moreover, they suggested that society in general should be aware of this code. Petrona told the rest that ‘this document could be sent to a newspaper – it will be like a hot potato because no one realized that this document existed’. Rosita proposed using her son’s computer to collect items of interest and send them to Chiquita. It was felt that this would put pressure on managers to comply with the code. For example, Manuela claimed that when she raised the issue of Chiquita’s code with her plantation manager, he said that they were not working with Chiquita even though all Nicaraguanexported bananas were supplied to Chiquita at the time. Angela suggested that foreign clients could help by distributing copies of their codes to workers and their communities. As this final section underlines, while certain organizations and subjects come to be seen as those having expert knowledge, and while workers’



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own testimonies are often not listened to, there is nothing inevitable about this and codes can be used in heterogeneous ways. Moreover, codes can open unexpected ‘points of countervailing political leverage’ in local struggles (Evans, 2000; Rodriguez Garavito, 2006). While they are only one tool, they can work as part of a broader strategy to improve labour rights of both woman and men that includes strong local organizations and actors (O’Rourke, 2006), changing commercial practices and taking seriously embedded social relations (Barrientos and Smith, 2007). They are part of contradictory political processes at work within a variety of political projects (Sadler and Lloyd, 2009).

3.7 Conclusion A feminist sceptic might argue that, given the complexity of gender issues, what is written in Codes of Conduct is not really important. Certainly it would be easy to analyse codes of conduct as calculative practices that are imposed from above, where businesses state their intentions and their espoused values and take actions either on their own or together with other stakeholders in an asymmetrical power relation that hides structurally embedded limitations (Blowfield and Dolan, 2008). In this context, it could be argued that codes have been largely ineffective for women for two reasons: (1) the voices and agency of women workers, together with those of their organizations, while very important, are largely ignored by many actors involved in the codes processes; and, (2) there are structural issues in the ways that certain power structures in processes around codes are reproduced by various actors – such as gender inequalities and North-South relations. However, while codes are largely used by multinationals to protect their reputations and enhance responsible production processes, there is some evidence that they have potential, under certain conditions, to be used by organizations to improve workers’ rights (Hale, 2005; Pearson and Seyfang, 2002; Prieto-Carrón et al., 2002). Codes open ‘an arena for action’ in the contested and contradictory processes of which they are part (Barrientos, 2008; Barrientos and Smith, 2007). For example, in El Salvador the first GAP Inc. factory that stopped pregnancy tests did so after the monitoring of the company code of conduct by a local organization. In the Columbian flower industry changing employer’s behaviour has been attributed to CSR auditing and associated international pressure (Carrillo and Ulloa, 2002). This suggests that while codes of conduct have not featured to any great extent in analyses of the gendering of global supply chains (Dunaway, 2001; Carr et al., 2000;





Palpacuer, 2008; Ramamurthy, 2004), they may form part of a broader strategy to improve women’s lives. In the case of Chiquita we have shown that it is important that forms of discrimination that affect women are included in codes because they can be used as a political tool for workers’ education and advocacy work. If the codes displayed in the workplace and distributed to women provide extra access to knowledge, and if women involved can relate the code to their own realities, then obviously this is better than a simple clause specifying freedom from discrimination. In addition, companies can be asked to respond to gender issues now hidden under such generic clauses. Codes from below, where workers are key participants in processes, can generate guidance for more equitable and just working practices (Hale and Shaw, 2001; Hale, 2005; Prieto-Carrón et al., 2002). Codes can also be used for advocacy purposes; for example, the Women’s Secretariat of COLSIBA now uses codes in their work on behalf of women banana workers in Latin America (http://www.colsiba.org/Paginamarzo2009/img/ declaraionmujer1.jpg). This example further underlines our broader argument about relationships between calculative practices and efforts to improve the experiences of women. Whereas there is a tendency to see these practices as simply involving technical or scientific issues, our argument is that they are also potentially the sites for new forms of gendered politics.

Notes 1. Chiquita buys the total banana production of the five plantations that form PROBANIC (the Nicaraguan Organization of Banana Producers). A sixth plantation sells directly to an importer in the US. There are an estimated 2000 workers in the sector (PASE, 2008). More specific employment data is not available. 2. More of this empirical and conceptual material appears in Prieto-Carrón (2006a; 2006b; 2008). The authors would like to thank the 51 women workers and trade union leaders who participated in the focus groups. The focus groups discussed the labour conditions of the women banana workers and the Code of Conduct of Chiquita. 3. A good example of a relevant campaigning organization is Banana Link (www. bananalink.org.uk). 4. There are also strong criticisms of Chiquita who have had to respond to union and NGO-led campaigns since May 1998 when The Cincinnati Enquirer published a devastating report on the company. In 2000–1 the company almost went bankrupt, and for some observers, this was the reason why Chiquita developed its own Code of Conduct and engaged more fully with the Rainforest Alliance. In recent years, the company has been publically criticized for the use of pesticides, its involvement in the EU trade banana policy and its past support for paramilitary activities in Colombia.



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5. This interview was conducted by telephone on 24 May 2004. 6. It is difficult for academic researchers to access these documents as they are not in the public domain. 7. The names of the women workers are pseudonyms.


Dunaway, W. A. (2001), ‘The Double Register Of History: Situating The Forgotten Woman And Her Household In Capitalist Commodity Chains’, Journal of World-System Research 7(1) (Spring), pp. 2–31. Ferguson, C. (1998), A Review of UK Company Codes of Conduct (London: DFID). Friedberg, S. (2004), ‘The Ethical Complex of Corporate Food Power’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, pp. 513–31. Evans, P. (2000), ‘Fighting Marginalization with Transnational Networks: Counter-Hegemonic Globalization’, Contemporary Sociology 29(1), pp. 230–41. Gibbon, P. and S. Ponte (2008), ‘Global Value Chains: From Governance to Governmentality?’ Economy and Society 37(3), pp. 365–92. Hale, A. and L. M. Shaw (2001), ‘Women Workers and the Promise of Ethical Trade in the Globalised Garment Industry’, Antipode 33(3), pp. 510–30. Hale, A. (2005), ‘Organising and Networking in Support of Garment Workers’, in A. Hale and J. Wills (eds), Threads of Labour: Garment Industry Supply Chains from the Workers’ Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell). Hughes, A. (2001), ‘Global Commodity Networks, Ethical Trade and Governmentality: Organizing Business Responsibility in the Kenyan Cut Flower Industry’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26, pp. 390–406. Hughes, A. (2005), ‘Corporate Strategy and the Management of Ethical Trade: The Case of the UK Food and Clothing Retailers’, Environment and Planning A 37, pp. 1145–63. Jenkins, R. (2001), Corporate Codes of Conduct: Self-Regulation in a Global Economy. UNRISD Technology, Business and Society Programme Paper No. 2, 23–4 (Geneva: UNRISD) Jenkins, R., R. Pearson and G. Seyfang (eds) (2002), Corporate Responsibility and Labour Rights: Codes of Conduct in the Global Economy (London: Earthscan). Larner, W. and R. Le Heron (2004), ‘Global Benchmarking: Participating “at a Distance” in the Global Economy’, in W Larner and W. Walters (eds), Global Governmentality: New Perspectives on International Rule (London and New York: Routledge). Lipschutz, R. (2004), ‘Sweating it Out: NGO Campaigns and Trade Union Empowerment’, Development in Practice 14(1&2), pp. 197–209. Nadvi, K. (2008), ‘Global Standards, Global Governance and the Organization of Global Value Chains’, Journal of Economic Geography 8, pp. 323–43. O’Laughlin, B. (2008), ‘Governing Capital? Corporate Social Responsibility and the Limits of Regulation’, Development and Change 39(6), pp. 945–57. O’Rourke, D. (2006), ‘Multi-stakeholder Regulation: Privatizing or Socializing Global Labor Standards?’ World Development 34(5), pp. 899–918. PASE (2008) Diagnóstico sobre Derechos Laborales en la Agricultura de Nicaragua: Estudio de Casos: Banano, Azúcar y Café. Profesionales para la Auditoria Social y Empresarial (PASE) Managua, Nicaragua, available at: www.proyectocultivar. org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=28& Itemid=50, accessed 9 December 2009. Palpacuer, F. (2008), ‘Bringing the Social Context Back In: Governance and Wealth Distribution in Global Commodity Chains’, Economy and Society 37(3), pp. 393–419. Pearson, R. (2007), ‘Beyond Women Workers: Gendering Corporate Social Responsibility’, Third World Quarterly 28(4), pp. 731–49. Pearson, R. and G. Seyfang (2002), ‘I’ll Tell you What I Want: Women Workers and Codes of Conduct’, in R. Jenkins, R. Pearson and G. Seyfang (eds), Corporate



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Responsibility and Labour Rights: Codes of Conduct in the Global Economy (London: Earthscan). Prieto, M., A. Hadjipateras and J. Turner (2002), ‘The Potential of Codes as Part of Women’s Organisations’ Strategies for Promoting the Rights of Women Workers: A Central America Perspective’, in R. Jenkins, R. Pearson and G. Seyfang (eds), Corporate Responsibility and Labour Rights: Codes of Conduct in the Global Economy (London: Earthscan). Prieto-Carrón, M. (2006a), ‘Central American Banana Production: Women Workers and Chiquita Ethical Sourcing from Plantations’, in S. Barrientos and C. Dolan (eds), Ethical Sourcing in The Global Food System (Earthscan: London). Prieto-Carrón, M. (2006b), ‘Corporate Social Responsibility in Latin America: Chiquita, Women Banana Workers and Structural Inequalities’, Journal of Corporate Citizenship, 21, pp. 85–94 Prieto-Carrón, M. (2008) ‘Gender, Labour Rights and the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI)’ CAWN Briefing, available at: www.cawn.org/assets/CAWN Gender and the ETI Code.pdf, accessed 9 December 2009. Radin, J. T. (2004), ‘The Effectiveness of Global Codes of Conduct: Role Models That Make Sense’, Business and Society Review 109(4), pp. 415–47. Rajak, D. (2006), ‘The Gift of CSR: Power and the Pursuit of Responsibility in the Mining Industry’, in W. Visser, M. McIntosh and C. Middleton (eds), Corporate Citizenship in Africa: Lessons from the Past, Paths to the Future (Sheffield: Greenleaf). Ramamurthy, P. (2004), ‘Why is Buying a “Madras” Cotton Shirt a Political Act? A Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis’, Feminist Studies 30(3), pp. 734–69. Raworth, K. (2004), Trading Away Our Rights: Women Working in Global Supply Chains, Oxfam Campaign Reports (Oxford: Oxfam International). Robinson, F. (2006), ‘Beyond Labour Rights’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 8(3), pp. 321–42. Rodriguez Garavito, C. (2006), ‘Global Governance and Labor Rights: Codes of Conduct and Anti-Sweatshop Struggles in Global Apparel Factories in Mexico and Guatemala’, Politics and Society 33(2), pp. 203–333. Sadler, D. and S. Lloyd (2009), ‘Neo-liberalising Corporate Social Responsibility: A Political Economy of Corporate Citizenship’, Geoforum, 40(4), pp. 613–22. Seyfang, G. (1999), ‘Private Sector Self-Regulation for Social Responsibility: Mapping Codes of Conduct’, Working paper 1, Norwich: University of East Anglia. Smith, G. and D. Feldman (2003), Company Codes of Conduct and International Standards: an Analytical Comparison (Washington, DC: World Bank and International Finance Corporation). Traub-Werner M. and A. J. Cravey (2002), ‘Spatiality, Sweatshops and Solidarity in Guatemala’, Social and Cultural Geography 3(4), pp. 383–401. Vosko, L. F (2004), ‘Confronting the Norm: Gender and the International Regulation of Precarious Work’, Paper prepared for the Law Commission of Canada. Werre, M. (2003), ‘Implementing Corporate Responsibility – The Chiquita Case’, Journal of Business Ethics 44, pp. 247–60. Wright, M. (2006), Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York and London: Routledge).




The Practice of Third-Party Certification: Enhancing Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice in the Global South? Carmen Bain and Maki Hatanaka

4.1 Introduction Third-party certification (TPC) has emerged over the past decade as a key mechanism to govern the agri-food system. Increasingly, both nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and food retailers assert that if standards for food safety and quality are to be credible in the public eye, then they must be accompanied by independent audits conducted by third parties (Bain, 2010; Busch and Bain, 2004; Freidberg, 2004). In particular, a variety of activist NGOs are using TPC in an effort to ensure that food and agricultural production is conducted in a manner that is environmentally sustainable and/or socially just (Barrientos, 2000; Bonanno and Constance, 1995; Klooster, 2005; Renard, 2003). NGOs use TPC to deliver information about the specific quality of products (e.g., fair trade, organic, good labour practices, and animal welfare) to concerned consumers. In this way, NGOs are attempting to link concerned consumers with producers whose method of farming is sustainable and ethical (Barrientos, 2000; Gereffi et al., 2001; Raynolds et al., 2007). At the same time, NGOs are pressuring major food retailers to implement TPC as a means to demonstrate that their globally sourced products are produced in a socially and environmentally responsible manner (Freidberg, 2004; O’Rourke, 2006). Concern about the potential loss of reputation and the need to minimize liability has motivated many of these retailers to develop their own standards that are independently certified to communicate a product’s quality. Third-party certifiers are private, public or hybrids of private and public organizations responsible for assessing, evaluating, and certifying safety and quality claims based on a particular set of standards and compliance methods (Hatanaka et al., 2005). From a business perspective, 56



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TPC is valued because it provides buyers (whether retailers or consumers) with assurances about a product by providing information (e.g., through a label) about the commodity and its production processes. This information is considered desirable as a mechanism to counter situations of uncertainty due to the asymmetric distribution of information (Deaton, 2004). From the perspective of social activists, TPC is valued because it provides (previously hidden) information to concerned actors providing the basis for substantive change by altering consumption patterns and stimulating debate about production practices and their effects (Amariei, 2004; Freidberg, 2004). Proponents often seek to legitimize TPC as a governance strategy by appealing to its presumed techno-scientific values and practices (see Amariei, 2004; Fagan, 2003; Golan et al., 2001; Sanogo and Masters, 2002; Tanner, 2000). For example, a key premise is that impartiality on the part of independent expert certifiers will ensure that standards will be assessed and evaluated in an objective manner (O’Rourke, 2006). Qualities such as independence and value-neutrality ensure that the certification process will be fair, transparent, and accountable thus providing a win-win proposition for all participants within the agri-food system (Amariei, 2004). But to what extent is the practice of TPC compatible with these techno-scientific claims of objectivity, transparency, and accountability? To address this question, we present findings from two case studies that examine the practice of TPC and its implications for workers and farmers at the production end of the supply chain. Our first case examines an NGO-driven organic shrimp certification programme in Indonesia. The NGO, Naturland, is a prominent German organic certification body whose broad aims include promoting sustainable farming practices and alleviating poverty. This study is based on extensive field research conducted in Indonesia in 2004. It includes interviews with 94 actors who were involved with the organic shrimp scheme in Bojokulu, Indonesia.1 Our second case examines the retailer-driven certification programme, GLOBALGAP,2 in the Chilean export fresh fruit sector. Here, our focus is that aspect of the protocol that deals with ‘Worker Health, Safety and Welfare’. The GLOBALGAP analysis is based on field research undertaken in Chile in 2004 and again in 2005. Fifty-two interviews were conducted with stakeholders involved in the Chilean export fruit sector and/or the GLOBALGAP certification programme.3 It also includes content analysis of historical studies and technical literature related to GLOBALGAP and the Chilean export fruit sector. This chapter begins by briefly discussing the rise of TPC as a technoscientific governance strategy and how proponents of TPC, such as



Carmen Bain and Maki Hatanaka 57

The Practice of Third-Party Certification

Naturland and GLOBALGAP, use the universalist language of technoscience (Clark and Murdoch, 1997) to establish authority and legitimacy for their standards and certification systems around the globe. Next, we present our case study findings from first, Naturland certification in Indonesia and second, GLOBALGAP certification in Chile. Based on this research, we argue that because TPC relies on techno-scientific values – which are privileged due to their presumed universalist nature (Clark and Murdoch, 1997) – the knowledge, experiences, and perspectives of other actors, such as workers and farmers, are marginalized. Furthermore, such marginalization tends to be obscured behind an audit process that is not intended to facilitate stakeholder dialogue or debate. Put differently, TPC removes potential debate and action concerning the wellbeing of workers, producers, or the environment away from the realm of political discourse. Instead, it is the responsibility of the experts (e.g., the standard-makers, and the certifiers) and the scientific process (auditing procedures) to determine what should count as socially, economically, or environmentally just practices. The dilemma then is that rather than being transparent and accountable, audits may act to conceal and maintain inequitable and unjust forms of social and political order and systems of power relations within global value chains.

4.2 TPC as techno-scientific governance strategy TPC began to achieve respectability from the late 1980s where, in a context of neoliberal political and economic reform, financial auditing was extended to virtually all other areas of social and economic life. More recently within the agri-food system, TPC for the environment, food safety and quality, worker health and safety, and animal welfare has become commonplace. From the perspective of governments and NGOs, TPC is an important means to ensure that organizations, wherever they might operate around the globe, are transparent and accountable. From the perspective of the business sector, TPC is a cost effective tool to measure outcome-based performance and to manage risk throughout the supply chain (Campbell et al., 2006; Power, 1997). Proponents argue that TPC’s techno-scientific qualities create organizational legitimacy and relationships of trust among stakeholders thereby contributing to transparency and accountability (Courville et al., 2003; Pentland, 2000). Broadly, the TPC process involves a qualified auditor systematically examining and verifying evidence in order to assess and validate whether a producer has indeed achieved the agreed-upon set of standards (Campbell et al., 2006; Tanner, 2000). The standards to



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be abided by (for example, maximum residue levels for pesticides) are considered objective and unbiased because they have been designed by disinterested scientific experts (Busch, 2000; Hatanaka et al., 2006). A key assumption throughout this process is that all aspects of standards for agri-food quality can be – or should be – made measurable (Power, 1997). Central to this process of measurement and validation is the independent expert (Power, 1997). What distinguishes TPC from first-party (food company or producers), second-party (company’s paid consultant), or fourth-party certification (government regulator) is its claimed independence from other participants involved in the production or regulation of food and agricultural production, such as retailers, suppliers, or government (Deaton, 2004; Hatanaka et al., 2005; Tanner, 2000). This independence contributes to the broad appeal and authority of TPC since in contrast to other forms of certification, TPC bodies are perceived as having no particular stake in the outcome of the audit (Hatanaka et al., 2006). The assumption is that the judgements of experts who are independent and objective can be trusted (Power, 1997). In their public discourse, both Naturland and GLOBALGAP appeal to similar techno-scientific values to establish authority and credibility for their certification systems. For example, Naturland explains that to achieve certification its producers ‘have to prove each year that they are conforming to Naturland’s standards’ (Naturland, 2009, no page numbers). However, to help their producers learn how to meet their standards and achieve certification Naturland has a well-developed network of ‘skilled advisory services’ and ‘qualified specialists that provide them with their expertise’ (Naturland, 2009, no page numbers). Naturland explains that its organization is similarly subject to annual inspection ‘by neutral, qualified organisations, thereby proving that Naturland’s certification system fulfil the most stringent internationally recognised standards’ (Naturland, 2009, no page numbers). Similarly, GLOBALGAP explains that members of its Sector Committees (e.g., for fresh fruit and vegetables) who have the appropriate technical ability, together with ‘external experts’, are responsible for developing and reviewing a consistent, universally applicable set of ‘best practices’ and conducting risk assessments (GLOBALGAP, 2008, no page numbers). GLOBALGAP also helps local producers implement its standards by establishing in-country National Technical Working Groups. These groups are made up of ‘national experts’ whose responsibility includes adapting GLOBALGAP’s standards to address local implementation challenges (GLOBALGAP, 2008). Producers who then wish to become certified must





use one of its approved independent Certification Bodies. GLOBALGAP explains that it has developed rules to ensure the independence and objectivity of certifiers, for example, certifiers are not permitted to provide consultation services to those farms that are GLOBALGAP certified (GLOBALGAP, 2009). We now turn to examine the practice of TPC within the context of our two case studies to better understand its implications for farmers and workers on the ground.

4.3 Naturland and organic shrimp farming in Indonesia Naturland is a prominent organic certification body with headquarters in Germany. Its organic certification programme covers a wide variety of products, including food, forestry, textiles, and cosmetics. The primary goal of Naturland’s certification programme is to preserve and maintain the soil, air, and water quality of agricultural sites through the promotion of standards for sustainable farming practices (Naturland, 2008). With respect to the global South, Naturland has the additional objective of working to alleviate poverty. From its perspective, organic farming enables small-scale farmers and their families to increase yields in a less costly manner in the long run, as well as to gain access to higher-paying niche markets ( Johannsen et al., 2005). The credibility of Naturland’s certification programme lies in its high and stringent organic standards, independent and objective audits, and its skilled advisory services that can provide farmers with expert knowledge (Naturland, 2008). Thus far Naturland has certified 46,000 farmers or co-operative organizations globally (Naturland, 2008). An Indonesian company committed to environmental sustainability, Perlindungan Alam (PA), in conjunction with a group of shrimp farmers in Bojokulu, Indonesia, applied and received organic certification from Naturland in 2002.4 Bojokulu, in East Java, is a region with a long history of shrimp farming, and which has undergone significant intensification of shrimp production for export since the late 1980s. Against this backdrop, organic certification has become an attractive alternative for PA, and many shrimp farmers in Bojokulu. First, it would enable shrimp farmers to receive a price premium. This is particularly important as the price for shrimp has stagnated and even fallen in some instances with the expansion and intensification of shrimp aquaculture. Second, it would enable shrimp farmers to continue to practice traditional forms of shrimp aquaculture, despite differences in productivity with the more intensive, industrialized shrimp farmers. This, in turn, would help curb the shift towards intensive shrimp-farming practices in the region



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4.4 Development and implementation of standards Given the stated goals of Naturland’s organic programme, organic certification appeared to have few drawbacks for shrimp farmers in Bojokulu. However, as they began to develop standards and implement them, farmers and officials realized that becoming certified was more complicated than it initially appeared and could be a contentious process at times. Particularly, the process of developing standards in terms of who got to participate and the processes by which the standards were decided was divisive. In developing its organic standards, Naturland is one of the few third-party certifiers who publicly state that collaboration with project stakeholders (i.e., local producers) is important to developing appropriate standards. To accomplish this, in the case of Bojokulu, Naturland used the following procedure in the development of organic standards: first, it shared the core principles of its organic standards with interested stakeholders; second, it proposed that a group of local shrimp farmers develop their own organic standards based on Naturland’s core principles, which Naturland would then approve. Committed to local empowerment, PA asked local shrimp farmers to develop potential standards for the organic project. However, at this point, how to include a large number of interested shrimp farmers in the process of standards development became an issue. As the inclusion of all farmers was unfeasible, a small number of Indonesian actors – one aquaculture expert who has a PhD in aquaculture and four large shrimp farmers who had been practicing sustainable shrimp farming – formed a local committee that would represent the farmers in the organic standards development process. While the process for developing the standards proposed by Naturland appeared to be quite fair, in practice, developing standards that both parties agreed upon ended up being very difficult, according to members of the committee. As both parties soon discovered, what they understood ‘sustainable’ shrimp farming to entail diverged significantly. From the perspective of committee members, Naturland prioritized environmental sustainability over economic sustainability, whereas they tried to find a balance between the two. For example, one of the more contested issues was the degree to which mangroves should be reforested. Naturland strongly pushed mangrove



and consequently would lessen the negative impacts of such intensive farming practices on the region’s environment (cf. Goss et al., 2000; Stonich and Bailey, 2000; Stonich and Vandergeest, 2001).


reforestation, which is one of the major concerns that the international environmental community has with shrimp aquaculture. Specifically, Naturland argued that a shrimp farm should only be certified as organic if the total farm area does not exceed 50 per cent of the former mangrove area. Thus, Naturland’s core principles required that former mangrove areas on farm properties be reforested by at least 50 per cent within five years. From Naturland’s perspective, shrimp ponds on the Bojokulu delta were once mangrove forests, and therefore, reforestation of half of the land on which Bojokulu shrimp ponds are located was necessary. The Indonesian committee viewed this requirement as inappropriate. From their perspective, the majority of shrimp ponds in Bojokulu have been in existence for 200 plus years, often previously being used for milkfish production. Thus, committee members argued that shrimp ponds in Bojokulu have co-existed with the region’s environment for a long time. Given this history, the committee contended that the principles of Naturland, while suitable for regions where mangrove forests had recently been cleared for shrimp production, were inappropriate for Bojokulu. The Indonesian committee members tried to persuade Naturland that its principle on mangrove reforestation needed to be interpreted more flexibly given the history of the shrimp ponds in Bojokulu. However, Naturland was unwilling to accept the committee’s argument, as mangrove reforestation is one of the principal tenets of its organic certification for shrimp farming. Thus, to try to legitimate their position, the Indonesian committee enrolled an official from a European organic consultant company – an ‘expert’. With the aid of the consultant, they were finally able to persuade Naturland to renegotiate its standard on mangrove reforestation. However, the fact that Naturland only agreed to renegotiate the mangrove standard after a European expert supported the committee’s position left members of the committee feeling disempowered.5 As one member of the committee commented, It’s bizarre. We are not allowed to decide what sustainable shrimp farming is by ourselves. It is our ponds. It is our sustainability … Only with the support and persuasion of a European consultant did they listen to our argument. Thus, while the Indonesian committee was able to reach what they viewed as fair compromises with Naturland in some instances, on the whole they tended to feel that their concerns and positions were subordinate to those of Naturland. Committee members argued that it was Naturland officials



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who tended to make the final decisions and consequently, the standards more often than not reflected Naturland’s values and criteria. However, while the committee members were able to still partake in the standards development process, albeit to a limited extent, most farmers had no input with respect to the organic standards. For those farmers who were not on the committee, once the standards were finalized, they were invited to a meeting where the standards were shared. Thus, the majority of the farmers were ‘standards takers’. This means that they tended not to have access to information on how a particular type of standard was established and why those particular standards were required. In other words, for the majority of farmers, the standards and the justifications behind them were largely black-boxed. This marginalization of the farmers has led to problems with the implementation of the standards. As many farmers understood the standards as something that they were required to comply with, regardless of whether they agreed with them or not, this caused problems with compliance. For example, those farmers who disagreed with (parts of) the standards have often found ways to circumvent the standards in ways that allow them to stay in the project, but farm in ways that they believed were appropriate – that is, conducting various forms of fraud. As neither external nor internal inspectors can be at production sites continuously, if farmers decide not to fully comply with standards, there is often little that can be done to detect the various forms of fraud they may be committing. Many of the farmers who were not fully complying with the standards argued that while they were unhappy with the standards, there was little space for them to express their unhappiness. Put differently, as a result of their marginalization in the standards development process, such farmers felt that those who set the standards did not respect their perspectives. This they viewed as particularly problematic, as they believed that they knew how to best farm shrimp, as they had been farming shrimp for a long time. One farmer summed up this position when he stated, They don’t know anything about shrimp farming. What they are talking about is a theory and not actual practice. I have been farming shrimp my whole life. I know shrimp farming. Why do I have to listen to those who have never farmed shrimp? In short, many farmers felt that the standards were imposed on them, and because their knowledge was not respected they did not see any need to respect the standards.





As is often the case with other NGO-led TPC programmes, Naturland is operating with good intentions, in that it is trying to support and empower small-scale farmers in the global South via certification. Ideally, the standards for the organic shrimp project would have been developed in ways that brought together expert and local knowledge. However, while it sought some collaboration with local farmers, Naturland largely emphasized expert knowledge when it set the standards for the organic shrimp project. As our findings indicate, this can be problematic as privileging expert knowledge over local knowledge in the development of standards may undermine the effectiveness of TPC. First, there is the risk that the standards may be inappropriate for local conditions, whether it is with respect to environmental or social conditions. Second, even if expert developed standards potentially bring about environmental improvements and enhance social justice, the standards may not be fully implemented. This is because producers may not understand or trust the standards or those who made them.

4.5 GLOBALGAP in the Chilean export fruit sector GLOBALGAP was established in 2001 by a handful of powerful UK and European food retailers.6 These retailers were concerned with establishing a set of third-party certified standards for Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) for the production of fresh fruit and vegetables.7 GLOBALGAP argues that its members wanted to be able to reassure consumers that their food is being produced in a manner that ‘respects food safety, the environment, workers’ welfare, and the welfare of animals’ (EUREPGAP, 2004a, no page numbers). GLOBALGAP has since become the standard if you want to export fresh produce to Europe, with the number of certified producers growing from just a few thousand in 2002 to over 90,000 at the end of 2008 from some 85 countries. As part of its protocol, GLOBALGAP developed a set of standards for Worker Health, Safety, and Welfare (WHSW). It argues that its expert-developed, risk assessed, and independently verified standards will reduce risks to worker health, safety, and welfare. The protocol has been developed by experts and is heavily risk assessed. By adhering to good agricultural practice we reduce the risk and there are a number of other significant benefits with respect to worker safety and welfare. (EUREPGAP, 2003, no page numbers) The Chilean export fresh fruit sector provides a valuable site to examine GLOBALGAP certification for WHSW. Adherence to a neoliberal export 10.1057/9780230289673 - Calculating the Social, Edited by Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner


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model has constrained the ability – or willingness – of the Chilean state to enhance the regulation of practices that might improve the highly exploitative labour conditions of agricultural workers (Barrientos et al., 1999). Within this context, GLOBALGAP may have the potential to improve worker welfare. The Chilean export fresh fruit sector was one of the first in the world to embrace GLOBALGAP and by the end of 2006 approximately half of all produce sent to Europe was GLOBALGAP certified. To what extent then, does GLOBALGAP certification enhance transparency and accountability regarding the health, safety, and welfare conditions for Chilean farm workers? 4.5.1

Implementing GLOBALGAP

Theoretically, to ensure objectivity, the certification process is independent from the standards themselves. However, this conceptual separation is misleading. In fact, in crafting its standards and the compliance criteria for these standards, GLOBALGAP itself establishes the boundaries of acceptable and non-acceptable levels of verification acted on by auditors. Growers are required to maintain documentation that details how they have met each of GLOBALGAP’s standards or what it calls ‘control points’ for WHSW.8 To verify compliance, GLOBALGAP simply requires that certifiers review this documentation. Subsequently, we found that the verification process for GLOBALGAP’s standards is a rather shallow procedure that relies to a considerable extent on the honesty of growers. Few, if any, measures are taken by certifiers to compare grower practices with the claims made in their paperwork. Instead, the certifier is expected to trust the grower that the documentation is accurate. The manager of an auditing company explained that ‘Documentation is the critical issue … auditors need to go in with a positive attitude and not assume that growers are lying’. A grower supported this, stating, ‘The auditors don’t question anything … they trust the growers and they never talk to my workers … they do a perfunctory tour of the farm and they don’t even question me about my paperwork’. Why is this problematic in relation to standards for WHSW? In Chile, it is broadly acknowledged – including from certifiers – that noncompliance with labour law is widespread among growers. In the absence of a rigorous government system for monitoring and enforcing labour laws, Chilean growers have consistently demonstrated their reluctance to comply with the law (Barrientos et al., 1999; Raworth, 2004). Within this context, it is difficult to conclude that a certifier should trust growers to comply with GLOBALGAP standards. This is complicated by the fact that certifiers and the certification process are 10.1057/9780230289673 - Calculating the Social, Edited by Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner




hardly independent. The ideal of the independent expert is fundamental to the legitimacy of TPC. However, certification bodies are for-profit companies competing within a capitalist marketplace. Certifiers are paid by the grower and they understand that the ability to remain financially viable and competitive depends on sustaining a good relationship with the grower or the grower could choose to go elsewhere. GLOBALGAP has also framed its standards to ensure that it is not the job of certifiers to judge the adequacy or shortcomings of its standards. Thus, while it is often presumed that TPC will lead to higher labour standards and improve worker welfare, it is not inconceivable that in some cases certifiers may verify standards that have limited – if any – value for workers. For example, in the 2001 version of the GLOBALGAP protocol,9 standards were established requiring growers to comply with state regulations concerning employment conditions. Some 14 features (e.g., wages, age, hours of work, and contracts) were listed as individual control points that the auditor was required to verify. In the 2004 version of the protocol these were replaced with a single ‘control point’ stating that ‘a member of management [is] clearly identifiable as responsible … for ensuring compliance with … national and local regulations on worker health, safety and welfare issues’ (EUREPGAP, 2004b, p. 21). Rather than independently confirm that growers are in fact abiding by the law, GLOBALGAP’s standard simply requires that certifiers verify that someone is responsible for complying with the law. They are not required to corroborate that this person is in fact ensuring compliance; whether labour laws are abided by is outside the bounds of the certification procedure. In another example, GLOBALGAP recommends that biannual meetings between management and employees take place where the concerns of workers about health, safety, and welfare issues can be raised. Certifiers verify that records of these meetings exist and that the concerns of workers are recorded. However, GLOBALGAP’s standard states that in verifying this process the ‘auditor is not required to make judgements about the content, accuracy or outcome of such records’ (EUREPGAP, 2004b, p. 21). In other words, the accuracy of the data required to ensure that the standard is complied with is irrelevant! Nor is it necessary to investigate whether the concerns of workers are actually addressed by growers. In a similar example, it is recommended that workers who handle or apply pesticides voluntarily receive an annual medical check-up. Certifiers are required to verify that the standard is complied with; but again they are not required to evaluate the content of the check-up. Put differently, whether a medical examination



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indicates that a worker is being exposed to pesticides or not is irrelevant to meeting the standard. The verification of GLOBALGAP’s standards is also limited due to the exclusion of workers from the process. Without the active participation of workers in the audit process we have no way of knowing what GLOBALGAP’s standards mean for them or even if they are aware of their existence. On the surface, some standards appear straightforward to quantify and physically verify if necessary. For example, a certifier could easily confirm in person whether accident and emergency procedures exist or whether first-aid boxes are present in the vicinity of the work. However, checking off their existence on an audit tells us nothing about their value or meaning from the perspective of workers. For example, do workers understand the accident and emergency procedures? Do workers know that First Aid provisions exist and do they have complete access to them when necessary? Are the First Aid boxes always well provisioned? Are subcontracted workers made aware of these procedures? Moreover, it seems reasonable to expect that any satisfactory verification strategy would seek to understand how workers’ interpretations of qualitative standards compare with those of auditors and growers. For example, do workers view the living quarters as habitable and adequate? Do they consider that they have adequate access to basic services and facilities, such as toilets and potable water? These examples illustrate that GLOBALGAP’s standards prioritize auditability – the convenience of checking off a list – over a more substantive evaluation of the content of standards and their consequences for worker health, safety and welfare. However, any critique is limited not only by the exclusion of workers from the process but also the lack of transparency of the certification process itself and the final report. Transparency here is the extent to which actors, including workers, within the value chain have both an understanding of, and access to, any of the information (Beulens et al., 2005). Transparency of audits is a quality considered critical to ensuring accountability to all participants (Strathern, 2000). But despite claims of transparency, GLOBALGAP insists that the TPC results remain strictly confidential (EUREPGAP, 2007). Unless specifically required by law, no information can be released to outside parties, such as workers, unions, or the government, without the prior written consent of the grower (EUREPGAP, 2004c, p. 47). This remains the case even in those circumstances where growers are breaking laws designed to protect workers. For example, if a grower fails to provide protective clothing for their pesticide applicators or does not provide sufficient toilets for their workers, they are not simply failing to meet GLOBALGAP standards





but are also violating Chilean labour law. However, as the manager of an auditing company explained, ‘All results are confidential, so even if we find that a grower is not abiding by the law [in relation to labour standards] we cannot report it’. At best, such confidentiality clauses and lack of transparency may compromise a worker’s welfare; at worst it may endanger a worker’s life. In sum, GLOBALGAP is neither as objective nor independent as its proponents claim. An analysis of GLOBALGAP’s standards and the implementation process reveals that it is GLOBALGAP itself and not the third-party certifiers who largely determine how compliance with its standards should be measured and audited. Historically, labour standards are one of the most contentious issues within the value chain and in this case many Chilean growers already have a poor track record of compliance with labour regulations. Despite this, GLOBALGAP simply requires that certifiers’ review the grower’s paperwork. Moreover, the ability of certifiers to act in an impartial manner may be constrained by their financial dependence on growers. It is well established that dependent financial relationships pose potential conflicts of interest between doing what is right and what is economically prudent. This financial relationship, together with the constraints imposed by GLOBALGAP, leave certifiers in the position of trusting the grower rather than independently verifying themselves implementation of standards for WHSW.

4.6 Conclusions In contrast to reliance on self-monitoring by producers and companies or government regulatory oversight, TPC is widely valued today as an objective means to create practices within the global agri-food system that are environmentally sustainable and socially just. However, based on insights from our case studies of Naturland and GLOBALGAP, we have identified several important limitations for workers and farmers with regards to TPC’s broad promise of impartiality, transparency, and accountability. We argue that a key limitation of TPC is that its rhetorical appeal to techno-scientific values functions to marginalize the knowledge, experiences, and perspectives of workers and farmers. In our case studies, the voices and concerns of workers and farmers are largely absent. While Naturland makes some modest efforts to engage with farmers, GLOBALGAP entirely excludes any role for workers in the design, monitoring, or evaluation process. From their perspective, this is not problematic since workers and farmers are viewed as inherently biased and lacking in



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objectivity due to their social location (see Haraway, 1995; Star, 1991). Instead, the very point of TPC is to close any potential discussion or analysis by requiring that we put our trust and faith in the experts and the scientific process. The analogies drawn between TPC and scientific practice are a powerful legitimating device, which suggest ‘that while scientists illuminate natural truths’ (Pentland, 2000, p. 311) Naturland and GLOBALGAP reveal ‘truths’ about environmental sustainability, and worker health, safety, and welfare. Through its rhetoric of independence, neutrality, and expertise, we contend that regardless of their intentions, the outcome of Naturland or GLOBALGAP certification is simply to ‘give off’ information and not necessarily to communicate information that could provide the foundation for further debate or action around these issues (Van Maanen and Pentland, 1994, p. 54 cited in Power, 1997, p. 127). Why is it problematic that TPC is not designed to provide a basis for stakeholder dialogue and engagement? We argue that our case studies demonstrate that decisions about what should count as truths and who has the authority to establish these truths is always situated (Haraway, 1995; Star, 1991). In other words, all knowledge claims and ‘representation are inevitably partial, perspectival, and interested’ (Rouse, 1996, p. 209). A person’s social location – whether as a struggling shrimp farmer or temporary, subcontracted farm worker – provides them with their own sense of fairness and justice which includes views about what an appropriate standard for sustainable shrimp farming or a fair labour standard for health, safety, and welfare might look like. Consequently, the lack of equal representation and participation by workers and farmers in determining appropriate standards is problematic because it allows the standards-makers and the certifiers to be more selective about which standards they intend to monitor and less accountable for how they are monitored and enforced. We conclude then that efforts to develop systems of TPC that are less partial and interested (Rouse, 1996) must begin with the active involvement of workers and producers as subjects, not objects. At the same time, we also maintain that participation in, and of, itself is insufficient if the power inequities inherent within the structures and practices of TPC are not simultaneously addressed. The case of Naturland demonstrates that power inequities can be veiled behind the language of participation and democracy. Claims of democratic decision-making are contested by many farmers and several NGOs in Bojokulu. From the perspective of both the Indonesian shrimp farmers and members of the local standards committee, standards for sustainable shrimp farming were mostly developed by





Naturland and the values, interests, and knowledge of Northern actors were privileged and prioritized. As the success of Naturland’s organic programme is market-dependent, prioritizing the needs, interests, and concerns of Northern buyers is understandable. However, as the Indonesian shrimp case study illustrates, the marginalization of farmers may lead to incomplete implementation of the standards. In instances where this occurs, the effectiveness of TPC is eroded. Our findings also suggest that accountability to workers and farmers may be limited because Naturland and GLOBALGAP are private and not public systems of monitoring and oversight. TPC is typically offered as a positive alternative to the lack of transparency and public oversight of self-audits and government regulations (Bendell, 2005; Blowfield and Frynas, 2005; Ranson, 2003; Utting, 2005). Yet we found that the ability of participants to access and evaluate claims made regarding the certification process and its outcomes to be inadequate. Neither Naturland nor GLOBALGAP make this information publicly available. For example, GLOBALGAP’s confidentiality requirement limits rather than enhances transparency and accountability, especially towards those actors for whom these standards are meant to benefit: workers. The data collected by certifiers – information that could be used to advance worker welfare – is now privatized, subject to confidentiality agreements, and unavailable for public review and debate. Therefore, it is difficult for concerned parties to monitor and assess the effectiveness of private-sector standards and third-party audits. As systems of private standards and TPC expand, there is the danger that the data and information that workers, farmers, and communities need in order to understand social, environmental, and economic relations and conditions will become increasingly privatized (Tallontire and Vorley, 2005). Without access to this information, the ability to think, debate, and act on this knowledge may be severely constrained. Our concern is that by removing potential debate and action concerning worker or farmer welfare away from the realm of political discourse, together with the uncritical acceptance of technocratic audits, TPC may function to create and maintain inequitable and unjust forms of social and political order and systems of power relations both within the workplace and within global value chains. However, we also believe that acknowledging the limits of TPC could facilitate an atmosphere that encourages greater debate about what measures are necessary to make TPC more meaningful and that would provide greater accountability not only to stakeholders in the global North but also to workers, producers, and communities in the global South.



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1. Research participants included certified and non-certified shrimp pond owners, shrimp pond managers, and warehouse owners, hatchery owners, officials from social and environmental NGOs and the Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture and the Department of Environment, aquaculture specialists, and local shrimp company officers. 2. At the time of this study, GLOBALGAP was known as EUREPGAP. The name change came in September 2007. 3. Research participants included growers, exporters, industry association representatives, third-party certifiers, government officials, trainers in GAP, and European retailers. It also included interviews with actors who may affect, and are affected by, GLOBALGAP standards, including agricultural workers, labour advocates, and government officials (e.g., Ministry of Health’s Occupational Health Unit). 4. We are using pseudonyms for the company and the organic shrimp project location to protect their identities. 5. As a compromise, the organic standards required that shrimp farmers plant mangrove trees at a maximum distance of seven meters around the ponds and dikes. 6. Including Tesco, Safeway, Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer, and Royal Ahold. 7. GLOBALGAP has since developed global reference standards in other areas of the agricultural sector, including crops; tea and coffee; cereal and livestock production; and aquaculture. 8. These standards include, for example, the provision of protective clothing (for pesticide applicators), First Aid provisions, and habitable living quarters with access to basic services and facilities. 9. GLOBALGAP updates its protocol every three years.

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Notes


Bonanno, A. and D. Constance (1995), Caught in the Net: The Global Tuna Industry, Environmentalism, and the State (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas). Busch, L. (2000), ‘The Moral Economy of Grades and Standards’, Journal of Rural Studies 16, pp. 273–83. Busch, L. and C. Bain (2004), ‘New! Improved? The Transformation of the Global Agrifood System’, Rural Sociology 69(3), pp. 321–46. Campbell, H., G. Lawrence, and K. Smith (2006), ‘Audit Cultures and the Antipodes: The Implications of EUREPGAP for New Zealand and Australian Agri-Food Industries’, in T. Marsden and J. Murdoch (eds), Between the Local and the Global: Confronting Complexity in the Contemporary Food Sector (Oxford: Elsevier). Clark, J. and J. Murdoch (1997), ‘Local Knowledge and the Precarious Extension of Scientific Networks: A Reflection on Three Case Studies’, Sociologia Ruralis 27(1), pp. 38–60. Courville, S., C. Parker, and H. Watchirs (2003), ‘Introduction: Auditing in Regulatory Perspective’, Law & Policy 25(3), pp. 179–84. Deaton, B. J. (2004), ‘A Theoretical Framework for Examining the Role of ThirdParty Certifiers’, Food Control, pp. 615–19. EUREPGAP (2003), ‘History – “EUREPGAP Fruits and Vegetables”’, http://www. eurep.org/sites/index_e.html, date accessed 1 November 2003. EUREPGAP (2004a), About EUREPGAP, http://www.eurep.org/Languages/English/ about.html, date accessed 9 November 2004. EUREPGAP (2004b), ‘EUREPGAP Control Points and Compliance Criteria. Fruit and Vegetables’, Version 2.1-Oct. 04, http://www.eurepgap.org/documents/ webdocs/EUREPGAP_CPCC_FP_V2-1_Oct04_update_01July05.pdf, date accessed 7 January 2006. EUREPGAP (2004c), ‘EUREPGAP General Regulations Fruit and Vegetables. Version 2.1-Oct.04’, http://www.eurepgap.org/documents/webdocs/EUREPGAP_GR_ FP_V2-1Oct04_update_25Sept06.pdf, date accessed 19 October 2006. EUREPGAP (2007), ‘Welcome to the Global Partnership for Safe and Sustainable Agriculture’, http://www.eurepgap.org/Languages/English/index_html, accessed 13 February 2007. Fagan, J. (2003), Cert ID, A Successful Example of an Independent, Thirdparty, Private Certification System. Symposium: Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation in Grains and Oilseeds: Implications for Industry in Transition, Washington, DC, Economic Research Service, USDA and The Farm Foundation. Freidberg, S. (2004), ‘The Ethical Complex of Corporate Food Power’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, pp. 513–31. Gereffi, G., R. Garcia-Johnson, and E. Sasser (2001), ‘The NGO-Industrial Complex’, Foreign Policy July/August, pp. 56–65. GLOBALGAP (2008), ‘Terms of Reference GLOBALGAP Board’, http://www. globalgap.org/cms/upload/About_Us/Governance/Board/081016-GLOBALGAP_ Board_ToR.pdf, date accessed 13 August 2009. GLOBALGAP (2009), ‘System Integrity via Certification Body Administration’, http://www.globalgap.org/cms/front_content.php?idcat=30, date accessed 13 August 2009. Golan, E. F., F. Kuchler, L. Mitchell, C. Greene, and A. Jessup (2001), ‘Economics of Food Labeling’, Journal of Consumer Policy 24, pp. 117–84.



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Goss, J., D. Burch, and R. E. Rickson (2000), ‘Agri-Food Restructuring and Third World Transnationals: Thailand, the CP Group and the Global Shrimp Industry’, World Development 28(3), pp. 513–30. Haraway, D. (1995), ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, in A. Feenberg and A. Hannay (eds), Technology and the Politics of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Hatanaka, M., C. Bain, and L. Busch (2006), ‘Differentiated Standardization, Standardized Differentiation: The Limits to Agrifood Standards’, in T. Marsden and J. Murdoch (eds), Between the Local and the Global. Confronting Complexity in the Contemporary Food Sector (Oxford, Elsevier). Hatanaka, M., C. Bain, and L. Busch (2005), ‘Third-Party Certification in the Global Agrifood System’, Food Policy 30, pp. 354–69. Johannsen, J., B. Wilhelm, and F. Schöne (2005), ‘Organic Farming: A Contribution to Sustainable Poverty Alleviation in Developing Countries?’ http://www. naturland.de/fileadmin/MDB/documents/International/English/organic_ agriculture_in_developing_countries.pdf, date accessed 12 December 2008. Klooster, D. (2005), ‘Environmental Certification of Forests: The Evolution of Environmental Governance in a Commodity Network’, Journal of Rural Studies 21, pp. 403–17. Naturland (2008), ‘Welcome! Naturland International’, http://naturland.com, date accessed 8 February 2008. Naturland (2009), ‘Our Distinguishing Features’, http://www.naturland.de/ ourdistinguishingfeatures.html, date accessed 13 August 2009. O’Rourke, D. (2006), ‘Multi-Stakeholder Regulation: Privatizing or Socializing Global Labor Standards?’ World Development 34(5), pp. 899–918. Pentland, B. T. (2000), ‘Will Auditors Take Over the World? Program, Technique and the Verification of Everything’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 25, pp. 307–12. Power, M. (1997), The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Ranson, S. (2003), ‘Public Accountability in the Age of Neo-Liberal Governance’, Journal of Education Policy 18(5), pp. 459–80. Raworth, K. (2004), Trading Away Our Rights: Women Working in Global Supply Chains (Oxfam: Oxfam GB). Raynolds, L., D. Murray, and J. Wilkinson (eds) (2007), Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization (New York: Routledge). Renard, M. (2003), ‘Fair Trade: Quality, Market and Conventions’, Journal of Rural Studies 19, pp. 87–96. Rouse, J. (1996), Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Sanogo, D. and W. A. Masters (2002), ‘A Market-Based Approach to Child Nutrition: Mothers’ Demand for Quality Certification of Infant Foods in Bamako, Mali’, Food Policy 27, pp. 251–68. Star, S. L. (1991), ‘Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions’, in J. Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination (New York: Routledge). Stonich, S. C. and C. Bailey (2000), ‘Resisting the Blue Revolution: Contending Coalitions Surrounding Industrial Shrimp Farming’, Human Organization 59(1), pp. 23–36.





Stonich, S. C. and P. Vandergeest (2001), ‘Violence, Environment, and Industrial Shrimp Farming’, in N. L. Peluso and M. Watts (eds), Violent Environments (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Strathern, M. (2000), ‘Introduction: New Accountabilities’, in M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (London: Routledge). Tallontire, A. and B. Vorley (2005), Achieving Fairness in Trading Between Supermarkets and Their Agrifood Supply Chains (London: UK Food Group). Tanner, B. (2000), ‘Independent Assessment by Third-Party Certification Bodies’, Food Control 11(5), pp. 415–17. Utting, P. (2005), ‘Corporate Responsibility and the Movement of Business’, Development in Practice 15(3&4), pp. 375–88.



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Part II Technologies of Governing and the Standardizing of the Social




E-Government and the Production of Standardized Individuality Paul Henman and Mitchell Dean

5.1 Introduction The history and evolution of governing and the state is inextricably entwined with the history and evolution of what we might retrospectively call ‘information and communications technologies’ (ICTs). From the invention of writing in ancient Sumeria, to the deployment of surveys, paper files and filing cabinets in Victorian bureaucracies, to globally available interactive internet websites, ICTs provide the information infrastructure that both supports and precipitates government innovation. They have a role, along with military, transportation and economic technologies, in the history of those regimes of practices that constitute the state (Mann, 1986–8). The trajectory of ICTs is also enmeshed with processes of standardization, from the codification of Morse Code in the 1840s, to the progressive standardization of time, to the recent battle between HDVD and Blu-ray over a standard format for high-definition digital video. This chapter examines the role of current electronic ICTs in reconfiguring contemporary government of and by state agencies through processes of standardization. With reference to the deployment of electronic ICTs by government – known variously as e-government, electronic government and digital government – the chapter demonstrates how such technologies standardize both information and processes. Standardization practices entail relations of power, in the sense of the word pioneered by Michel Foucault (1982, pp. 220–1), in that they attempt to ‘structure the possible field of action of others’. They thus have consequences for how administrators govern, as Foucault put it, the ‘conduct’ of those considered their customers, how administrators perform their routines and how these customers are required to conduct 77



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E-Government and Standardized Individuality

themselves. Yet standardization practices can be regarded as one singular trajectory of what Max Weber called rationalization, that process of achieving maximum calculability which, as one commentator observes, is not an end in itself ‘but a generalized means that indiscriminately facilitates the purposeful pursuit of all ends’ (Brubaker, 1984, p. 37). Accordingly, standardization through ICTs involves a line of modification in contemporary government, which is a further, intensive rationalization of the conduct of individuals.1 There are two broad approaches, which can be derived from different aspects of the works of Max Weber and Foucault, to the ways in which aspects of humans’ everyday life are regulated by the state or other agencies. Both are concerned with what Weber called the ‘different forms of ethical “rationalization” of life conduct’ or Lebensführung (Weber, 1970, pp. 270–71). The first emphasizes the way humans act upon their own conduct under the aegis of various religious, pastoral, therapeutic and secular authorities; Weber emphasizes religious forms of asceticism, particularly Protestantism and salvation religions (1985; 1970, pp. 323–59), and Foucault discusses ancient ascetic practices and contemporary ‘self-technologies’ (1988). The second approach discusses the process by which conduct is subject to detailed regulation by state, administrative, bureaucratic, military, educational and industrial agencies. The metathemes here are of discipline, bureaucracy and rationalization for Weber (1970, pp. 253–64, pp. 196–244), and of discipline, surveillance and normalization for Foucault (1977). The influential literature on governmentality has argued for the salience of forms of self-government to contemporary, liberal, styles of rule (Dean, 2010; Rose, 1999), and in this sense mirrored many of Foucault’s concerns in his analysis of post-war German and American neoliberalism (Foucault, 2008). Government works through what Weber calls ‘the ability and disposition of men to adopt certain types of rational conduct’ (1985, p. 26). More recently, partially to correct a possibly one-sided account of the government of human beings, critical analysis has raised concerns with sovereignty, violence and coercion (Agamben, 1998; 2005; Dean, 2007). Here we argue, however, that a fruitful vein of research can be opened up which concerns neither the way in which governing acts upon the constructed choices and freedom of human actors, nor the exercise of the decisions of sovereign authority, but through the routine and mundane ways in which forms of life are regularized, homogenized and normalized though the embedding of standards, systems of classifications and norms in the informational



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and communication infrastructure of the everyday government of and by contemporary states. By reference to historical practices, this chapter begins with a conceptual account of standardization and its relation to technology and government and related ideas of norms and classification. It then turns to the particular ways in which digital ICTs and their use by state agencies embody and mobilize standardized forms of information and practices. In conclusion, the implications of the computerization of standards for the conduct of government and the constitution of citizens are outlined.

5.2 Standardization, classification and communication François Ewald (1990) allows us to understand standardization by locating it as a singular species of modern systems of normalization. In fact the original use of the French word, normalisation, appears as an equivalent and sometimes in preference to the English term, ‘standardization’ (Canguilhem, 1991, p. 247). Standardization is also closely related to processes of classification and categorization. In any case standardization corresponds neither to the ‘panoptic’ logic of utility and docility (Foucault, 1977), nor to the probabilistic logics of risk (Ewald, 1991), but to the communicative logic of the technical norm. ‘Standard’ was first defined in the early twentieth century. For Norman F. Harriman (quoted by Ewald, 1990, p. 148) a ‘standard may be concisely defined as a criterion, measure or example, of procedure, process, dimension, extent, quantity, quality, or time, which is established by an authority, custom, or general consent, as a definite basis of reference or comparison’. A standard is something selected as a model by which objects or actions can be compared and which provides a common language on technical and commercial problems for technicians, scientists, industrialists and others. Ewald observes that standardization is thus a process of technical normalization first facilitated by mechanical and electrical engineers and their associations (1990, pp. 149–51). It arose in the context of the scientific and technical demands of industrial transformation of the early decades of the twentieth century, of the needs of wartime mobilization during the First World War and the requirement of post-war economic production and exchange. Its functions are those of simplification, by reducing the number of models; unification, by making objects interchangeable and compatible; and specification, by developing precise understanding for the quality of products. Its techniques seek the



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purification of language and representation, including an exact vocabulary, precision systems of notation and writing, the freeing of syntax of all ambiguity and the exact use of numbers and drawings. It is the ‘institution of the perfect common language of pure communication required by industrial society’ (Ewald, 1990, p. 151). Standards are, first of all, a means of communication; this is our first point. Standardization thus both enables and constrains. It enables because it constrains. By simplification, unification and specification, by rendering procedures routine and ‘inter-operable’, standardization necessarily truncates the range of possibilities. Yet that limitation of possibilities simultaneously enhances interaction with others and extends the networks of interaction. Standardization thus operates as a ‘communication infrastructure’, and in doing so enables larger structures to be built upon that architecture. If standardization answers to a communicative logic, it depends on the regulation and ordering of both knowledge and practices. It is through this regulation of knowledge and practices that standardization is capable of indefinite extension. This is our second point. It is imbricated with other forms of normalization in a common system and occasions the production of new forms of knowledge and enables new practices. Through the example of insurance against work accidents, Ewald (1991, p. 153) demonstrates how ‘indefinite extension’ involves the linkage of standards with other norms contemporary to them and to future bodies of knowledge. Thus social insurance against workplace accidents gives rise to ‘ergonomics’, the science of workplace safety, which in turn contributes to modern scientific management through which occupational health and safety becomes subject to disciplinary norms of performance, and to new technical standards of construction, itself subject to insurance. In this respect, following Foucault, and in contrast to longstanding conceptions of power as primarily coercive and involving a zero-sum game, the operation of standards involves a productive form of power. As George Canguilhem put it (1991, pp. 249–50), ‘[n]orms are relative to each other in a system … The correlativity of social norms … tends to make their virtual unity an organization’. Processes of standardization are intrinsic to the normative orders of our societies. A norm establishes equivalences but also creates differences and inequalities insofar as it enables each occurrence to be individualized and ordered in relation to it. The norm is post-metaphysical. It is no longer a matter of applying absolute values, but of deriving a value from the intrinsic characteristics of the group and applying it to that group. Hence Adolophe Quételet postulated the ‘average man’ (e.g., of average height) as a fictional entity by which all real men can



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be grouped in relation to the characteristics of the collective, and as simply the way ‘society’ is reflected by statistics and probability (Ewald, 1990, pp. 145–6). Norms and standards produce objectivity because they allow for communication that is independent of all religious and philosophical values. The values they derive are relative to the group and thus revisable rather than absolute. Therefore, there is no fundamental opposition between normal and abnormal. The normal does not stand in relation to the abnormal ‘in a relationship of externality and contradiction’, as madness and reason once did in relation to one another (Canguilhem, 1991, p. 239). They exist along a continuum or spectrum of possibilities that defines different poles. Even the groups of the tallest men and the smallest men can be defined in relation to the norm of the average height and hence in relation to one another. Further, the norm is a relationship of ‘inversion and polarity’ (Canguilhem, 1991, p. 240). If you invert a norm you arrive at another norm. One could prefer the norm of imprecision over precision, but one no longer has a technical norm but an aesthetic or intellectual norm. Our third point is that standardization exists within a system of norms defined by possibilities of continuity, inversion and polarity, of the normal and the abnormal. Fourth, standardization processes are often governmental and moral, in that they involve a ‘calculated direction of conduct’ in the services of ethical norms or vital norms of the good life (Dean, 2010, pp. 17–24). Standardization defines a standard, a norm or a benchmark to which other things are compared. This might be a poverty line, or a statistical measure of full employment, which embodies the political aspirations of governments and parties. It might be state-imposed deposit-lending ratio which banks should maintain to ensure solvency, liquidity and financial stability, or a performance target that organizations, managers and workers must work to meet. The logic of poverty or social inclusion as a principle of social and public policy is a normalizing one and as such deploys a view of what constitutes a normal life. If a government seeks to include ‘marginal’ categories (e.g., unemployed youth) in the opportunities of mainstream society, then it proposes a norm (e.g., of participation in the workforce or education), defines all individuals in relation to that norm (e.g., youth who drop out of school, take drugs, turn to crime) and initiates practices of normalization (e.g., counselling, life-planning, retraining, apprenticeships, compulsory education). While some standards, norms or benchmarks operate to govern through aspirations and moral valuations (e.g., business self-regulatory standards), others entail relatively benign and invisible constraint (such as the shape of electrical





sockets, and the size of railway gauges), and others require state, legal and regulatory compulsion (such as building codes and banks’ liquidity requirements). Standardization postulates a norm or point of reference by which activities and individuals can be compared and grouped and, in this respect, is a practice that entails classification and categorization. This is our fifth point. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star define a classification as ‘a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world’ (1999, p. 10). Classification systems involve consistent and unique processes of categorizing, whereby categories are mutually exclusive and the system is complete, meaning that all elements of the world under consideration are able to be categorized (1999, pp. 10–13). They involve ‘agreed-upon rules for the production of (textual or material) objects [that] span more than one community of practice [and] persists over time’. Classification systems are also ‘deployed in making things work together over distance and heterogeneous metrics’ and are normally mandated and enforceable (1999, pp. 13–14). Reflecting on earlier observations on standardization, Suchman says, systems of categorization are ordering devices, used to organize the persons, settings, events or activities by whom they are employed or to which they refer … categorization devices are devices of social control. (Suchman, 1994, pp. 182 and 188)2 To summarize, standardization answers to the logic of communication, is capable of indefinite extension, entails a particular conception of the normal and the abnormal, is often governmental and moral and entails systems of classification. Now let us consider the specific case of e-government and how these observations are played out in this domain.

5.3 E-government and the standardization of informational processes Computer databases are a central component in the operation of contemporary state administration. They are the heart of the information and communication infrastructure supporting organizational processes and decision-making in government agencies. Accordingly, the structure and content of an organization’s databases – the nature of data that is stored, the way that data can be accessed and the operations available to act on that data – give shape to its organizational practices



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and routines. The use of computer databases puts into play several standardization processes resulting from the nature of digital ICTs in general. These include the data which databases record and circulate, and the organizational operations that the database both enables and constrains. In short, databases standardize and regulate both organizational information and processes. Due to the fundamental operation of digital ICTs, information databases construct a particular way of looking at the world (Kent, 1978; Roszak, 1986; Weizenbaum, 1976), described elsewhere as the ‘worldview embodied in computers’ (Henman, 1995). At a general level computer databases require data items to be discrete and well defined, and operations on that data must be clearly specified functions. Computers do not deal well with ambiguity and fuzziness. Database knowledge is a clear example of the simplification, unification and specification of information and informational processes (cf., Ewald, 1990). Such standardization of communication – as a transmission or communication of digital data as well-defined discrete units – limits and standardizes the ways in which we might think about and act on the world, and has been criticized for installing an instrumental logic (Roszak, 1986; Weizenbaum, 1976). Yet this reconfiguration and standardization of organizational information and processes provide a powerful infrastructure to enhance human communication and knowledge. They provide the basis for what we call ‘indefinite extension’ by linking into wider networks of data circulation and operation. In addition to the standardization of information and informational processes as a result of generic computer database technology, specific computer databases define specific standardized information and informational processes. Records and data items encoded by a particular database denote what information is important and actionable and what is not. The database constitutes a particular knowledge base and information framework that determines which aspects and activities of agency and citizens are knowable (Whitelaw et al., 1992). Whether we consider a record of a client, customer or citizen (Clarke et al., 2007),3 or a transaction or an item, that record is highly charged with politics, if by this we mean a domain of contestability traversed by power relations and effects. Furthermore, the units of data, the characteristics and information about that record, define specific systems of categorization and classification, which themselves have politics (Suchman, 1994; Bowker and Star, 1999). Thus the ways that knowledge is classified and made actionable are standardized. Their embedding within an organizational database mobilizes such standards throughout the organization and





makes them mandatory within it with consequences for the government of the organization and its customers. To demonstrate this argument further, consider a possible customer record for the delivery of government social services. A typical record would contain data items similar to the following: unique customer identification number; full name; sex (male/female); date of birth; address; marital status; details of children (if any); geographical location (metropolitan, regional, rural); ethnicity (e.g., non-English speaking background, indigenous); household income; and history of organizational services provided. These items may appear mundane and noncontroversial, but there is much more to them when examined closely. Each of these items appears well defined and complete, as noted above.4 However, populating a simple computer record with these personal identifiers only seems unproblematic. Such classification and categorization systems often fail to reflect the complexity of the world, and the meaning of some terms can be ambiguous. In translation to computer databases much information is lost, and some are excluded. For example, (near) universally agreed notions of male and female do not deal with hermaphrodites or ‘intersex’ persons. Rather than a mere world of facts, such notions already imply a set of norms, for example, one in which individuals’ gender and sexuality is assigned biologically at birth. What is the address of a homeless person? What categories define marital status: is partnering defined by legal marriage or does it also include de facto relationships, and are same-sex partnerships recognized? When is one deemed ‘partnered’, and should widows, widowers and divorcees be separately listed to ‘single’? How does one categorize geographical location, and where are the imaginary lines drawn on the map to distinguish the metropolitan from the regional, the regional from the rural and the rural from the remote? What exactly constitutes ‘income’? Clearly categorizations have power effects. Welfare benefits are awarded or withheld on the basis of one’s marital status (Tranter et al., 2008). The inclusion of ethnicity is especially politically charged, with many Anglophone countries collecting this as a matter of administrative course for various kinds of statistical purposes, whereas France traditionally regards such social classification as a breach of the constitutional principle of equality under solidarity. Identity cards, such as those issued to all citizens of Israel, can specify citizenship (Israeli) and ethnic-nationality (‘Arab, Jew or other’) (Zureik, 2001, pp. 214–15). The legal-administrative definition of ‘an Aboriginal person’ is far from self-evident in Australia and is particularly fraught; current legal resolutions are based on the combination of community membership, genealogy and self-identification



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(de Plevitz and Croft, 2003). Social categorization is thus closely associated with the politics of inclusion/exclusion and social differentiation (see also Star, 1991). Just as the computer database defines the type and structure of information to be held on individual customers, so too does it define what information is not of importance and to be forgotten. For instance, detailed and historical knowledge of customers traditionally used by welfare and health professionals in providing services is significantly truncated (Dearman, 2005; Parton, 2008). As a result, the personal stories that offer a way in which to make sense of a customer’s circumstances and to respond to them sensitively and individually are glossed over or lost, with a likely consequence that professional service delivery becomes more standardized, less personalized and determined by computer codes. William Kent’s old but insightful analysis of computer database’s ways of knowing gets to the heart of the differences: ‘Data structures are artificial formalisms. They differ from information in the same sense that grammars don’t describe the language we really use, and formal logical systems don’t describe the way we think’ (1978, v). We have been careful to note, however, that while such formalisms involve the closing down of possibilities, they simultaneously open up others (e.g., analyses that generate comparisons, averages and linkages with other datasets). Most of the above observations are not new. Classification and categorization, and their formalization into standards have long been noted to exhibit these components (Bowker and Star, 1999). What is not yet recognized, however, is the way in which embedding standardization within computer databases reconfigures governance. First, there is the reduction of informational complexity or depth. Rich data is lost. The increasing computerization of record systems has progressively displaced paper files and paper records. As a result, unstructured and semi-structured record keeping, including the recording of information that does not fit regular categorization, including complex case information, has become marginalized if not eliminated completely. As a result, work around practices that front-line administrators and professionals previously utilized to enable people to fit rigid organizational categorization systems and thus make such systems work have been significantly curtailed. This indicates a second departure resulting from computer databases: the regularization and formalization of knowledge as information and the concomitant reduction of discretionary judgement. While organizational information processes have long been centrally designed, there have





been elements of discretion and informal operations at the front-line of organizational service and decision-making – what Michael Lipsky famously denoted as ‘street level bureaucracy’ (1980). In contrast, computer databases represent the material embodiment of official standardized organizational information processes. Mobilized throughout the organization by computer systems, computer databases denote a rigid, authoritative and standardized approach to categorizing and operating on data. The space for informal informational activities and human intervention declines as organizations progressively computerize greater aspects of their information infrastructure. This was first observed in the reduction of administrative and professional discretion in front-line decision-making (Alexander, 1987; Braverman, 1974; Garson, 1989). As computer systems have developed to embody more organizational processes, this dynamic of constraining employee practice has become systemic. Indeed, Bovens and Zouridis (2002) argue that there has been a shift from street-level bureaucracies to screen- and system-level bureaucracies. In the former, front-line public servants make administrative decisions within a legislative framework and with the support of ICT. In screenlevel bureaucracies, ICT leads the activity of government officials whose administrative discretion is reduced as it becomes codified. In systemlevel bureaucracies, front-line government officials become superseded by an integrated and all-encompassing, automated IT system. Aneesh (2006) similarly refers to ‘algocracy’ as the operation of authority embedded in computer algorithms. In short, computer databases more successfully embed a standardized approach to information within an organization (Parton, 2008). Third, there is the technical displacement of expertise which is also the elevation of a new kind of expertise. The organization-wide mobilization of a standardized approach to information and its processing, raises the question of who designs and designates that approach? IT professionals are typically at the heart of designing computer databases. While bound by legal requirements and building on previous organizational procedures, IT professionals retain considerable scope for how they construct a computer database and the available actions on the dataset. There can be discretion about which data items are compulsory and which are optional for administrators to complete. Pre-existing organizational data items often require greater clarity, consistency and formalism to be computerized. In those cases decisions need to be made about how that item is to be formalized, and classified (such as ‘marital status’ discussed above). As Garson (1989) observed, computerization and standardization



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are complementary processes. Some new data items may be added to a record’s architecture because IT professionals think they might be useful. These are all important questions in the way information and knowledge is structured and standardized within an organization. Because classification is often a mundane, ‘common sense’ and invisible process (see Bowker and Star, 1999, p. 3), it is often left for computer system designers to determine the database design, without reference to policymakers or front-line administrators. As a result, the moral and governmental activity of classification and standardization become less a matter of public scrutiny and deliberation and more embedded within and mobilized by computer codes and subject to a particular form of expertise. In their operation, the ethics and politics of data is both displaced by and embedded within the technical exigencies of administrative information gathering. Fourth, computer databases affect how organizations are governed. In installing standardized data structures and modes of operating on those structures throughout an organization, computer databases constitute qualitatively different modes of organizational governance. Because computer databases consist largely of well-defined categorical or quantitative data that can be centrally accessed, electronically analysed and collated, they have enabled and precipitated the proliferation of data and its analysis. Such data analysis – be it of organizational performance or profiles of customers – constitute the organization in a new field of visibility. Computer databases define what can be known about organizational performance and customers. Instead of localized, in-depth and largely qualitative knowledge of customers, staff, organizational processes and community context, organizational knowledge becomes primarily centralized, universal, formal, quantitative and comparative. Such data, in turn, brings to light, makes real and literally defines the dynamics of the organization, thus giving rise to an entirely new quantitative, reflexive and governmental relationship between management and the organization. It should therefore not be surprising that standardization through databases often arises out of, and simultaneously defines, the conditions for the emergence of New Public Management which is, at least in part, defined by a shift in organizational governance ‘towards measurement and quantification, especially through the development of performance indicators and performance targets’ (Pollitt, 2003, pp. 27–8). As part of this dynamic, it is perhaps unsurprising that there has been both a simultaneous centralization and decentralization of organizational power and governance. By governing through the numbers of performance indicators and performance targets defined by central





management, the previous bureaucratic approach of dictating standard operating procedures can give way (to some extent) to localized governance, in which local managers determine the local organizational processes that best work in their spaces to achieve the centrally dictated targets. A standardization of targets and outcomes can thus be associated with the proliferation of non-standard strategies to achieving these standardized targets and outcomes. It is through the use of the data from databases to govern organizational staff and customers that the effects of information standardization (and the inherent moralities and politics of such standardization) become manifest, even if their source is not clear. Computer databases also make customer knowledge available throughout an organization, which necessarily disembeds customer service from geography. This dynamic has underpinned the dramatic evolution of telephone call centres. At the same time, the ready circulation of customer information makes possible what Latour calls ‘centres of calculation’ (1987), whereby customer data can be aggregated and analysed to better ‘know’ and govern customer populations. Fifth, computer databases promote targeted government. One notable development out of this capacity has been the proliferation of targeted forms of governing sub-populations (Henman, 2004; 2009). The database way of knowing may curtail certain ways of knowing customers, but it also opens up new ways of knowing them. By aggregating, comparing and contrasting customers according to their database-defined characteristics, new insights about customers can be learnt. The customer population can be segmented according to different behavioural profiles – such as types of products and services used or purchased, and incidence of fraudulent activity or other undesirable traits. Customer profiles of those most ‘at risk’ of certain undesirable outcomes can be generated using this data. Such knowledge of sub-population dynamics generates new organizational operations that differentially target subpopulation groups, be it to offer ‘personalized’ services or to increase surveillance activities. In the private sector, such Customer Relationship Management is gathering apace, and it is leading companies that make intelligent use of customer data to better leverage customer loyalty (Elmer, 2004). Similar activities occur in the public sector. Governments classify unemployed persons into differential levels of risk of long-term unemployment, instituting higher level services and obligations for those designated as high risk (McDonald et al., 2003). Differential screening of airline passengers and border control is undertaken according to calculated levels of risk (Amoore, 2006; TSA, 2003). David Lyon (2003)



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refers to such activities as ‘surveillance sorting’. What is particularly distinctive about this accelerating mode of operation is its automated and largely invisible character. Certain groups of the population will be targeted to receive greater opportunities and benefits, while others receive greater coercive control and surveillance (Henman and Marston, 2008). Thus, in advanced liberal societies, the government through classification often translates to freedom for some, coercion for others, and obligation for many (cf., Dean, 2002). As a result social citizenship has become increasingly conditional for particular sub-populations (Dwyer, 2008; Henman, 2009). The standardization of organizational information mobilized through electronic ICTs readily involves categorization processes that segment the population for their differential treatment. With computer-based standardization, sub-populations are differentially, but not individually, governed. What results is standardized individuality rather than the much mooted individualized service delivery (Henman, 2007). We take up this point in the conclusion. This section has argued that the effects of standardization noted in the previous section are intensified and multiplied with the embedding of standards, codes and classification within computer databases, interfaces and programmes in the domain of government of and by the state. We have pointed to the reduction of complexity and depth in instruments such as the case file, the regularization of knowledge as information and the reduction of street-level discretion, the displacement of substantive forms of knowledge by the technical expertise of information technology, the reconfiguring of how organizations are governed and, finally, the emergence of a targeted government with its standardized forms of individuality. It is the latter that takes us back to the heart of our argument.

5.4 Conclusion It has become commonplace in discussions of social policy to note a shift from a uniform, ‘one-size fits all’, approach to the provision of social, health and educational services to one which is more customer or client-focused and tailored to his or her needs. This usually goes under the rubric of ‘individualized service delivery’ (Yeatman et al., 2009). The correlate of this in social theory is the observation that in the current phase of (late or second) modernity, greater processes of individualization are at work in which people are less determined by the class, gender, ethnic and national ascriptions of tradition and early





modernity and are increasingly obliged to construct their own identities out of their life projects, narratives and plans (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Giddens, 1991). In post-Foucauldian studies of governmentality and biopolitics, similar themes appear, whether in the advanced liberal project of governing through freedom and its technologies of contract, empowerment and self-narrative or the emergence of a ‘etho-politics’ in which individuals make and plan their own and their offspring’s vital existence in relation to biomedical, pharmaceutical, genetic, and somatic techniques (Rose, 2007). It seems to us that in general terms, this focus on individualization, individualized service delivery and its articulation with contemporary social and medical technologies identifies a key strain of our contemporary experience. These governmental and intellectual developments are heirs to the Weberian and Foucauldian themes of asceticism, lifeconduct and practices of self-government we alluded to at the beginning of the chapter. What we have suggested here is that there is another component of our contemporary experience which works against the emergence of an individualized existence and individualized consumption of services. In the domain of standardization and its embedding in informational and computer technologies, a far more basic style of individuality emerges. Here individuals are subject to standard, and more or less fine-grained, processes and interactions with officialdom from the unemployment office to the immigration official which are structured by standardized approaches found in computer systems, programmes and databases. Here responses to key questions, biometric data, detectable symptoms, family history, income, occupation, age, gender, ethnicity and nationality, etc. lead to elementary forms of ‘social sorting’, often along continuums from the trustworthy to the suspicious, the secure to the risky, the low to the high risk, the wanted to the undesirable, the contaminated to the safe, the fraudster to the honest taxpayer and so on. Often these continuums are divided into segments (low, medium and high) and sometimes resolve into polarities (the safe and the dangerous). In these cases, power relations take more surreptitious and pervasive forms in which individuals are divided by classificatory systems and are treated and governed according to standardized procedures following particular trajectories. This kind of standardized individuality is not the result of the creative self-making of the individual, but of the more quotidian and often drab set of responses to standardized forms and entries into data fields and the linkage of these responses with electronic databases. Our individuality is encoded and enacted by algorithms embedded in computers.



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All of this indicates a line of governmental innovation which continues, intensifies and interweaves those processes that Foucault described in terms of surveillance and disciplinarity, and Weber discussed in terms of rationalization. Like these other processes and practices, it is possible for individuals and groups to attempt to resist and evade the processes of computer standardization. However, because much of what constitutes the latter occurs below the threshold of public visibility and scrutiny, and comes to be embedded into the everyday regimes in which we seek social support, pay our taxes, use health services, go on holidays or business trips or emigrate in search of a better life for ourselves and our families, then it becomes ever harder to avoid or evade. It is significant too that in this ‘individualized’ world, the government of and by the state is busy embedding old and new social divisions in its classificatory systems and differential treatment of human populations.

Notes 1. See Henman (2009) for an extended argument of the role of ICTs in the reconfiguration of government and power. 2. We know from Foucault (1970, 1977, 1982) that classification appears in different contexts and serves different purposes, whether the rendering of nature in the form of a table in the Classical Age, in the service of hierarchical observation and normalizing judgement in disciplinary forms of education or as a fundamental component of ‘dividing practices’ in relations of power. 3. Hereafter we use the term ‘customer’. 4. While it is now commonplace for databases to include data cells for unstructured text for notes and links to scanned documents, these items are not routinely analysed nor referred to and may take on a residual character.

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New Modes of Governance and the Standardization of Nursing Competencies: An Australian Case Study Anni Dugdale and Laurie Grealish

6.1 A competency assessment Tom, a newly qualified registered nurse recently graduated from the Nursing Faculty of Kosiosko University, is working in the orthopaedic unit in Buller Hospital (names of people and places have been changed). He is preparing for a competency assessment on removing a drain from a knee wound. Tom is part of the Transition to Practice Programme, a 12-month programme in which he will be required to be assessed on a myriad competencies over the year. These assessments, ranging from technical procedures to paper and pencil calculations will be accumulated to assess Tom as a competent nurse according to the 28 pages of the ANCI (Australian Nursing Council Incorporated) Competency Standards 3e released in 2000 and since embedded across the many social worlds of nursing. Tom knows from his orientation three months ago that the drain removal skill should be completed and signed off in his Clinical Skills Assessment Book in his first three months. Tom takes the procedure competencies manual off the shelf in the central desk area and reads over the competency for removing a wound drain. He takes the manual with him to the clean utility room, where he uses the lists provided in the competency to set up the dressing trolley. He wants to appear organized when the CDN (Clinical Development Nurse) arrives. Once this is done, Tom gets out his copy of the Clinical Skills Assessment Book, circulated to all newly qualified nurses in the Transition to Practice orientation; it is ready for signing once the procedure is completed. Then Tom calls Selina, the area CDN to assess his aseptic technique. When Selina arrives, Tom moves the dressing trolley towards the patient’s room. Together, Tom, Selina and I (Laurie Grealish) go to the 94



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patient’s room. On arrival, Tom proceeds to introduce Selina and me to the patient and then describes what the procedure will involve. Selina stands on the opposite side of the bed to Tom and observes. She comments only when Tom looks at her. During the procedure, Selina speaks in a soft voice, providing some directions when Tom pauses, such as ‘move the scissors to the corner of the sterile field’ and ‘you are going well’. Selina also speaks with the patient, engaging him in a conversation about his property west of the city. At the end of the procedure, Tom wraps up the bloodied drain in the dressing pack, places it on the dressing trolley and leaves the room. Selina settles the patient by returning to the bedside table and making sure the overhead lifting device is working, placing the call bell and patient-controlled analgesia administration device within reach of his hand. While we are leaving the room, Selina comments to me that Tom had left the patient in an unsettled state, and because he rushed away, she was unable to assess how he discarded the blood-filled drainage bag and tube. When Tom emerged from the utility room, Selina provides feedback to Tom as shared with me. Selina tells Tom that she is concerned about his attention to patient comfort and the safe disposal of hazardous waste. Tom’s shoulders visibly slump, while he tries to maintain an even facial expression.

6.2 Governing competency One of us, Laurie Grealish, spent 70 hours in two hospitals in 2005 observing situations where competency was being assessed, like this one involving Tom and Selina. Competence, competency standards and tools and techniques for competency measurement emerged in the 1980s as the central organizing regime of nursing professional practice in Australia. This marked a break with earlier modes of ordering: the hard-won production of the nurse as good woman or ‘God’s Police’ that Ann Summers (1975) characterized as dominating the nineteenth century, and the struggle from 1910, with the Flexner Report in the United States (Beck, 2004; Starr, 1982), to the 1970s to recreate nursing as an arena of scientific knowledge and technical expertise examined by state regulatory authorities. The past two decades have seen a change in the regime of nursing governance, a change in the way that nursing and the state, as a major supplier of Australian health and hospital services, are interconnected. This chapter explores this shift away from the direct control of nursing exercised by the governments of the Australian States, established in



Anni Dugdale and Laurie Grealish 95

New Modes of Governance

the early twentieth century through regulatory systems that mandated study programmes. State authority for the regulation of nursing has become more dispersed over the last 20 years. New forms of nursing governance are enacted by a range of quasi-autonomous governmental and non-governmental actors, including nursing professional bodies. Competency standards stand as the keystone of coordination and coagulation of this network of actors. This shift from direct rule exercised by governments to new forms of governance enacted through networks of state and non-state agencies has been identified and analysed by scholars of government and of the professions and other occupations across a range of areas (Cheshire et al., 2007; Dean, 1999; Pierre and Peters, 2005; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004; Rose, 1999). At one level, shifts in nursing governance can be seen as part of this more general pattern. However, precisely how such shifts occur and with what effects is not something that can be predicted at the outset. The securing of occupational control is up for grabs as the ground shifts to new forms of governance but is by no means guaranteed. For nursing in Australia, this shift to more dispersed forms of governance meant that government resources were made available to refabricate nursing as a profession with greater occupational control and autonomy in defining its knowledge base. Competency systems are designed by the nursing profession and operated by a core of registered nurses known as Clinical Development Nurses who work with new graduates and the Registered Nurses with whom they are buddied for the conduct of dayto-day nursing duties. Power that once lay directly with state authorities has been devolved to the nursing profession which operates with greater autonomy and has taken on the role of self-governance. Individual nurses too have been remade as self-managers responsible for their own expertise, performance and risk management. This shift to competence and competency standards was not confined to Australia. To produce the first list of nationally agreed competencies in 1988, Australian nursing organizations were able to draw on the work done by international nursing organizations to investigate competence as a framework for categorizing nursing work. Private health care organizations in the US use the competence of nursing staff to promote their services in a competitive health delivery environment. Industrial nursing unions are also interested in competence and competency standards to advance claims for increased rewards based upon more complex work or higher order competencies. Internationally, the



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concept of competency became privileged by a range of social groups from different health social worlds – hospital managers, government regulators, nurse educators and health researchers became interested in competence as an organizing framework to address their various concerns. Competence became a ‘key’ to solving many nursing workforce problems (Alspach, 1992; Gonczi et al., 1990; Williams, 1998). However, precisely how different countries have reorganized nursing governance around competency and whether this has led to a strengthening or weakening of the nursing profession is not a matter for generalization. It is sometimes assumed that there are global driving forces at work when policy initiatives such as the reorganization of nursing governance around the performance measures of the competency movement cross national boundaries. But this can be a way of letting the researcher off the hook rather than seeing as our research task the investigation of the specificities of how the global is played out in the local. We hope that the Australian case study we present here will stimulate crossnational comparisons and attention to their particularities. Cheek et al. (1995) argued that competence became promoted in Australian nursing to address two political agendas: workforce reform and professional reform. Workforce reform brings together government, employers and unions to attain improved productivity and efficiency, whereas professional reform provides nurses with a means to maintain integrity and control of their work. However, as Cheek et al. (1995) point out, there is an essential, and unresolved, struggle for competence as a defining concept between these two reform agendas. The workforce reform agenda, as part of a much larger economic reform agenda, has the potential to dismantle existing professions and create a much freer movement of labour. This would directly challenge nurses’ autonomy and control over nursing work. Krause (1996) argues that the economic reform agendas of the 1980s and 1990s directly challenged the autonomy of professionals. At once, the nursing profession is presented with a paradox, it needs to align with government to maintain professional standing in the community through statutory regulation and it needs to defend professional autonomy, including the control of nursing work, from government economic reforms to social policy. This chapter sets out to investigate how power operates, the mechanisms for its negotiation and contestation and the sites and spaces where nursing is governed. Who are the actors and what are the new configurations constitutive of nursing and its practitioners?




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For Foucault modernity is characterized by the rise of the discipline society, a term used by Foucault to recognize a break, to evoke a new way of governing. The discipline society is where discipline is fine-grained and pervasive, working on the body of every citizen. Foucault’s story of the drilling of soldiers on the parade ground is familiar here. The discipline society is the society where power is dispersed from the sovereign to experts. The disciplines of medicine, criminology, psychiatry and sexology emerge and generate the knowledges, the measures and the professionals to categorize and intervene therapeutically to normalize behaviour, to conduct the conduct of every individualized segment of the population. The modern, contractual, juridical state masquerading as founded on formal liberties and fixed limits to the exercise of power is unmasked by Foucault: [I]ts universally widespread panopticism, enables it to operate, on the underside of the law a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetries of power and undermines the limits that are traced around the law. (Foucault, 1979, p. 223) Foucault’s story of the Panopticon is emblematic. The discipline society becomes visible with the emergence of the Benthamite prison plan with its central tower from which the unseen guard can see into the cells of each prisoner arranged around the tower in a hub and spokes design. Unable to see when the guard is in the tower, the prisoners must assume the guard is constantly observing them. It is worth remembering in this story that the surveillance of the prisoners yields detailed notes and observations about their everyday lives by the guards; these are accumulated and sorted giving rise to the discipline of criminology as well as a fine-grained understanding of how to intervene with each prisoner so that they may be released as model citizens. Foucault’s insight, now widely accepted, is that the authority of expertise is constitutive of the power of the state and its legitimacy; indeed the rise of state power is co-extensive with the amplification and ramification of expert power throughout the body of civil society and all its interstices. The discipline society is traversed by the capillary functioning of power, in Foucault’s words, ‘with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 198). One of the elements of the Panopticon society, not much elaborated but pointed to in Discipline and Punish, is the disciplining of the disciplines,



6.3 Let’s start with Foucault


provides an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms. In the central tower, the director may spy on all the employees he has under his order: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, warders; he will be able to judge them continuously, alter their behaviour, impose on them the methods he thinks best; and it will even be possible to judge the director himself. An inspector arriving unexpectedly at the Panopticon will be able to judge at a glance, without anything being concealed from him, how the entire establishment is functioning. (Foucault, 1979, p. 204) Weber (1918/1946) provides the respected account of the shift under modernity from systems of state authority grounded in tradition or charisma to the predication of the legitimacy of national authority in legality, that is in the enactment of ‘rules rationally established’. Foucault added to this characterization of modernity the ‘authority of expertise’. As Dean (2007) rightly argues this is not, for Foucault, authority legitimated through unquestioned specialist knowledge and training. Rather its legitimacy comes from its promise to free the individual as author of their own life and to empower them to lead a happy and fulfilled life. Paradoxically, governing in the name of freedom entails the production of self-disciplined citizens who conduct themselves and their interactions with others with civility, who have been coerced to be virtuous, healthy and to make wise choices for themselves and their families. ‘The conduct of conduct’ is this work of governing enacted by experts, the underbelly of the modern state (Dean, 2007, p. 37; Foucault, 1982; Rose, 1999). Building on this genealogical approach of Foucault, Rose turned his attention to analysing contemporary modes of governing. Rose (1999) differentiates the advanced liberal regime of governing that characterizes the present from the governmental regimes of earlier periods of modernity and calls for detailed mapping of the contemporary mechanics of government. In the twenty-first century, he asks, what are the techniques and transformations of surveillance constitutive of the dense interlinkages between the conduct of individual citizens and the interests of the state and operating to manufacture docile bodies and a peaceful and civil society? Rose contrasts contemporary advanced liberal governance with



the professions. The Panopticon might be a machine for ‘disassociating the seeing/being seen dyad’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 202) but while the body of each prisoner is rendered visible, so too are the prison warders. Foucault reminds us that the Panopticon


the modern forms of governance analysed by Foucault that extended well past the middle of the twentieth century. The contemporary state, claims Rose, emerged in response to perceptions that the rising costs of service provision, the costs of expert governance of individual conduct through social security, schools, health and welfare services was unsustainable and that governments needed to transform, to down-size, to develop alternative ways of governing where governments were ‘exercising power by steering (setting policy) rather than rowing (delivering services)’ (Rose, 1999, p. 16). Governments alone could not provide the number of professionals and the infrastructure they required to satisfy society’s needs for order, security, health and productivity. Rose characterizes the ‘enabling state’ with its modes of advanced liberal governance as the state where ‘Individuals, firms, organisations, localities, schools, parents, hospitals, housing estates must take on themselves – as “partners” – a portion of the responsibility for their own well-being’ (Rose, 1999, p. 142). Analysing the reforms of the Thatcher government in Britain and the new ways that subsequent governments of the Left and Right conceived and carried out the tasks of government, Rose shows how the division between the market and the social was reconfigured along market lines. Advanced liberal governance is characterized by the takeover of the social spaces of health, welfare, education and social insurance with the rationality of an economics which conceives of human beings as calculative machines, atomized individuals who make choices to further their interests. Government is refabricated as the empowerment of a population of entrepreneurs. Markets are seen as providing the ideal, with previously provided government services now hived off through privatization, purchaser-provider arrangements and outsourcing to a range of agencies both for-profits and not-for-profits. Standards and targets are set to hold suppliers of services accountable. Advanced liberal strategies of governing sought to impose the disciplines of the market on the bureaucracy and on the professionals previously directly employed by the state and responsible for government services (Rose, 1999, pp. 151–3). Audit becomes the central technique for governing at a distance – that is for ensuring that the targets and performance standards of governments are met by suppliers. This is done not by direct surveillance of performance but by surveillance of the control systems in place in the service providing organizations. Trust in professional expertise is replaced by practices of account keeping and paper trails always available to be followed-up (Power, 1997; Rose, 1999). The following section shows how competence and competency standards have worked to



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introduce the tools and techniques of advanced liberal governance into nursing.

During the latter part of the twentieth century competence and competency standards emerged as the mode of organizing and regulating nursing practice. The Royal Australian Nursing Federation (RANF), the largest professional nursing group in Australia, actively worked to advance classification and standardization of nursing, through the publication of the RANF Standards for Nursing Practice (1983), RANF Standards for Nursing Divisions (1983), RANF Nursing Standards for Patient Care (1985) and RANF Nursing Quality Assurance (1985). Soon after, nurses working in state and territory regulatory authorities came together to develop a national standard for the registered and enrolled nurse. To do this, they adopted ‘competence’ as a framework. Since the publication of the first list of nationally agreed competencies in 1988 (ANRAC, 1988), these competency standards have been used to develop nursing education programmes, assess nursing students’ and newly qualified nurses’ clinical performance, assess the practices of nurses who are under investigation for negligent or substandard practice and for self-monitoring by nurses through the regulatory authorities. Today, nursing education programmes that prepare registered nurses, enrolled nurses, nurse practitioners and midwives are reviewed and approved by regulatory authorities controlled by the nursing profession. Educational institutions are required to demonstrate how the programme of study prepares the students to be competent according to the regulatory standards. Within these programmes, competencies are used to teach and assess a range of clinical skills from teeth brushing to removing a wound drain. Classroom theory is targeted at competencies related to law, ethics, professional practice, the nursing process and communication. On graduation from their programmes of study, newly qualified nurses are subjected to further competency assessments. Assessments include medication administration, aseptic dressing technique, manual handling, cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, central line dressing technique, tracheostomy change technique and the list goes on. Nurse educators in the hospitals and community agencies produce competency lists for information and assessment of newly qualified nurses. For nurses viewed as under-performing, competency standards are used to provide feedback on their competence and identify areas for improvement. Teachers and managers use the competencies to provide



6.4 Competency standards: A new mode of governance


feedback to under-performing nurses. If performance does not improve, the competencies are used to provide a fail grade for nursing students, with no progression in the course. The standards are used to provide evidence to the regulatory authority of the need for a review and possible disciplinary action of a nurse licensed by the authority. The national competency standards are used to compile written reports and are promoted as a tool for self-reflection and collection of evidence to support claims of competence against each competency standard. In Australia, reissuing of the license to practice is now dependent upon self-claims of competence and a random audit of a five per cent sample of nurses each year. In this way the central tenets of the discipline society, autonomy and accountability are played out in a network of agencies, individuals and artefacts, coordinated by the nurse regulatory authority. Autonomous bodies controlled by nursing academics, nurse leaders and representatives of nursing professional organization are continuously reviewing competency standards. Through professional nursing journals, a forum is provided for researchers, clinical managers and educators, and academics to share their work in developing and revising instruments to measure competence. Researchers internationally are working to identify an assessment technology that is both reliable and valid across a range of practice settings (Fisher et al., 2005; Meretoja and Leino-Kilpi, 2001; Norman et al., 2002). This shift to competency standards and the measurement standards for defining the competent nurse is distinguishable from the professional mode of organizing and negotiating nursing work that dominated the state in the first six to seven decades of the last century. The international competency movement that came to the forefront in the 1980s, and has now become ubiquitous, provided a new strategy for negotiating professional status and re-engaging with the state over control of nursing practice and the resources to carry it out. Through competencies nursing education shifted from being a matter of passing state-board controlled examinations after a discrete period of training, at the end of which nurses were examined on their technical expertise and specialized scientific knowledge. The adoption of national competencies envisaged nursing education as life-long learning. If the new profession was to be more autonomous and to exert greater control over the profession, so too each individual nurse was to be trained as a manager of the self, prepared for a life of reskilling, retraining, maintaining and upgrading competencies. The audit of competence in Australia requires individual nurses to produce a professional portfolio, which includes a collection of their



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work that can be presented as evidence of competence (McCready, 2007). The preparation of the portfolio requires the nurse to reflect upon practice in order to decide what pieces to include in the portfolio (Byrne et al., 2007). Reflection, as it is used in nurse regulation, epitomizes the new Panopticon of the audit machine. Nurses self-regulate according to an externally set standard of practice. The external examination has been abandoned in favour of continuous self-regulation and auditing processes. Tom in his position as a new graduate nurse is positioned as a self-manager. It is Tom who calls Selina and invites the competency assessment.

6.5 Understanding the forces for change The shift to competency standards as a mode of organizing was underpinned by a number of conditions surfacing in the late twentieth century. A small group of nurse leaders pursued the transfer of nursing education to the tertiary sector and with this the transfer of the control of nursing from state regulatory authorities to a national agency dominated not by government department-based regulators but by the profession. As nursing education moved into Colleges of Advanced Education and Universities, new arrangements were being sought to examine ‘the practical component’ and ensure that the new nurse graduates could apply their knowledge ‘in the delivery of safe and effective nursing’ (ANRAC, 1980, p. 23). At the same time the Federal Government became interested in matters related to assessment of nurse performance. By 1983, Australia was experiencing a shortage of nurses, with active recruitment of nurses from other countries and provision of refresher and migrant skills courses for people who were living in Australia and already qualified but not licensed to practise in Australia. The Australian Government’s interest in competency standards as a means for workforce expansion coincided with the introduction of the new public managerialism into public sector organizations. The new public management emphasized quality assurance, and other methods drawn from the enterprise culture of the private sector. The new managerialism had global reach and promoted performance measurement, continuous improvement of customer satisfaction, accountability and ongoing entrepreneurship to deliver efficiency and effectiveness gains (Exworthy and Halford, 1999; Pierre and Peters, 2005; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004). Nurse leaders found opportunities to model themselves on the new management movement’s calls for a policy entrepreneurial approach, a move away from the exercise of control through




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6.6 Back to the ward: Some complexities of competency standards as modes of governance In order to understand how the field of nursing has become knowable and governable through a specific regime of competency let us return to the ward and reflect on how the ANCI Competency Standards 3e has become embedded into the day-to-day work of assessing nurses. For Tom, working as a newly qualified nurse, the competency standards are a passage point to a license to practice in hospitals and other health care settings. Similar competency standards regimes will be an ongoing part of his life as he undertakes annual review or decides to train as a specialist nurse. Tom’s world as a newly qualified graduate nurse is a world governed by and saturated with competency standards. So too is Selina’s. Tom’s Clinical Skills Assessment Book is his constant companion. Selina is constantly adding to the ‘progress notes’ kept on new graduate nurses like Tom, entering them into the password-protected database on the office computer. Incidents and rationales for signing and not signing off competencies are meticulously recorded. An interrelated system of monitoring performance of standards is enacted at multiple levels, with Tom engaged in this work through keeping entries in the Clinical Skills Assessment Book up to date, Selina filling in the purpose-built computer database records and Tom and Selina working together to share the evidence from their records to develop a final competency report to be submitted to Tom’s managers and to the regulatory authority as the evidence base that Tom is competent to continue practising as a nurse. ‘Competencies’ are found in many forms in the ward. For example, Tom found the techniques for removing a wound drain in the ward binder that outlines this competency. However, Selina was working with a broader idea of competence, incorporating other ‘competencies’ related to safe disposal of bloodied tubing and making sure the patient was comfortable and settled before leaving the room. The ‘competency’ for removing a wound drain, found in the procedure manual, is a partial account of competence. It must be performed with other ‘competencies’ for comfort and safety. Competency assessment is a mechanics of condensing and amplifying nursing practice in very specific ways. We can point to some of its



the implementation of highly bureaucratized norms and rules to the dissemination of shared values to underpin the empowerment of staff to make their own decisions and entrepreneurial contributions.

characteristics, some of which resonate with Rose’s more generalized mapping of advanced liberal modes of governing. This is not to say that there are broad social forces propelling nursing along a particular trajectory, nor that there is a single form of nursing governance to be found in comparable post-industrial societies facing similar challenges to the capacity of governments to pay for the health of the population at a time of demographic transition to an ageing population. Competency standards have been adopted in many countries but the precise form they take and the work that they achieve in each case is an empirical matter and likely to vary depending on a host of contextual factors. With that caveat, it is possible to draw together our discussion of competency standards as the new mode of governance for nursing in Australia, to point to the following: 1. The development of competency standards and related assessment systems has provided for new relationships between the nursing profession, the state and medicine. 2. The competency standards regime enacts accountability, risk and trust in new ways. 3. The practices of competency assessment are complex, time consuming, and resource intensive and consume valuable health resources but cannot satisfy the desire for certainty. It is to these three points that we now turn. First, there has been a shift in alignments between the nursing profession, the medical profession and the state. Nursing governs the competency standards and their embedding in the world of hospital practice. The nursing profession is responsible for the governance of nursing practice through the devolution to autonomous nursing professional bodies of the control of competency standards. Medical dominance of hospital practice has become more diffuse and governance of nursing is an area, along with the rise of hospital and health service managers, where power is being reconfigured. The arrangements that saw vertical relays of power, from states to the medical profession as managers of hospital practice to dominance of the nursing workforce, has changed towards a more horizontal structure where power is shared across selfgoverning units. This parallels the strategies of advanced liberal governance observed by Rose where the state exercises its rule at a distance rather than directly (Rose, 1999), and resonates with observations on the reconfiguration of state power in other sectors such as agriculture (Higgins and Lawrence, 2005). Our argument here is not that states are





becoming disempowered or hollowed out as their functions are redistributed. The state remains a significant player. But we might read the emergence of competency standards as the mode of governance in nursing as contributing to the thesis that there is a realignment being enacted between the state, markets and civil society (Cheshire et al., 2007). As more networked modes of governance emerged between government departments of health, public and private hospitals, the health insurance sector and professional bodies, we see that nursing professional bodies were able to take on new roles in the regulation of nursing practice exerting greater control through taking over nursing governance via the competency standards system. There is some virtue, at least from the point of view for nursing, in this arrangement. The crafting of the nursing competency standards and the tools and techniques for their measurement were developed collaboratively by the profession. There was wide deliberation with opportunities for more grass-roots bottom-up design. The practitioners subject to the regulatory regime defined by competency standards have local opportunities to participate in its design. To what extent this is a move that empowers nurses and their patients is arguable. Patients and their organizations play no part in the highly political negotiation of nursing competency standards. Perhaps it is merely a mechanism that enables governments to achieve perceptions of quality control among citizens concerned about falling standards of hospital care while achieving central ministry economic goals involving reduction of government expenditures. There are limits to the empowerment of the nursing profession. Some nursing organizations are better placed than others to position themselves as leaders in the nursing competencies standardization project. They are perceived by governments as more credible partners, or they have the resources to negotiate and develop consensus among the many actors involved in the world of nursing. There are winners and losers even though power is more diffused. Against the argument that the rise of neoliberal economic and political ideologies over the last 25 years serves a trajectory that works against the logic of professionalization, we have demonstrated how the case of nursing in Australia provides a different kind of response to the crisis of confidence in accountability that is often said to lead to the replacement of professional trust with new governance arrangements. By becoming part of the new governance and the advocates, guardians and embedders of a competency standards regime, the Australian nursing profession has optimized its position and provided opportunities for participatory democratic professionalism in the design of competency standards.



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Second, competency is a mode of reorganizing risk, trust and accountability. Detailed records on Tom’s performance are meticulously kept, locating the responsibility for the quality of practice in the hospital through its implementation of a system of competency standards and their assessment. This is interesting in the light of the movement of nursing education from hospital to university. Drawing on Power’s analysis of the audit society, which he argues has replaced the direct surveillance of Foucault’s Panopticon society (Power, 1997) but we would suggest is a different but equally intensive mechanics of surveillance, we see that competency standards and their translation into the worlds of new nurse graduates and nursing staff place the emphasis on the audit process and the competency management system. The idea is to have an auditable trail that can be opened up to scrutiny by external stakeholders (Power, 1997). The knowledge gained at the university is not trusted to provide the discipline to maximize performance of nurses. Competency standards and the technologies of writing and record-keeping that accompany them act like audits; they provide an added level of assurance that goes beyond the direct surveillance of an examination system. Like the risk assessment agencies that rate financial institutions and have so spectacularly failed us in the recent global financial crisis, this added level of assurance produces an endless regress where assurance is always a disappearing horizon – it provides the illusion of control in complex systems. Competency provides a new settlement between a number of agencies and organizations that are no longer ordered along a hierarchical continuum. This networked governance includes the hospital, State Governments, the Australian Government, nursing professional organizations and university-based nurse educators. It is a settlement designed to ‘push control further into organisational structures inscribing it within systems that can then be audited’ (Power, 1997, p. 42). Risk management is performed in the organization as implementation of and compliance with a national competency assessment regime. This regime is about regulating relationships in ways that are more indirect and that allow for more freedom and entrepreneurialism than in traditional supervisor/supervised relations. However, this is an intensive regime where everyone is individually monitored and their attitudes, comportment and technique are corrected in highly specific ways; this is not a system for detecting outliers, those who underperform, who lie outside the norm and require therapeutic intervention. Moreover, risk is performed in a very specific manner. Risk is located as a personal characteristic – is Tom’s practice safe? The emphasis here is on Tom and his individual responsibility to manage the pressures on the busy ward





without compromising patient safety or dignity. There is an individualization of risk. Tom’s slumped shoulders are indicative of this highly individualized micropolitics of power where he is required to endlessly enact his self-management of responsibility. It is Tom’s capacity for self-management that is produced and on display in the competency assessment. The final observation comes by way of a warning. The governance of nursing practice through a rigorous regime of competency assessment requires resources. It is an intensive process to enact the competency assessment practices that govern Tom’s practice. The state has provided some resources for this, for instance the salaries for people like Selina to be employed as Clinical Development Nurses. The state contributes too to ongoing research and development into competency standards. The ANCI Competency Standards for the registered nurse 3rd edition (2000) and earlier versions were developed with research and training funding from the government agency NOOSR (National Office of Overseas Skills Recognition) provided to the Nurse Competencies Assessment Project at the University of Queensland which worked closely with the ANRAC Competencies Steering Committee and the Australian Nursing Council Inc. Furthermore, the ANCI Competency Standards do not translate in any simple way into the local social worlds of hospitals and practical settings. How the ANCI Competency Standards come to be used in the clinical setting with newly qualified nurses requires a great deal of invisible articulation work (Lampland and Star, 2009). This is the shadow work (Illich, 1981) that has to be done to get things going, to translate the ANCI Competency Standards into routines of practice for new nurse graduates and their preceptors and Clinical Development Nurses. What comes to count as competence in the assessment of new nurse graduates is performed into existence through embedding the ANCI Competency Standards in particular practices and assessment technologies. These nurse assessors are bricoleurs. Their work is that of creation, translation, assemblage, coordination and articulation to make the ANCI Competency Standards work in practice. Artefacts are produced – the Clinical Skills Assessment Book that Tom wants Selina to sign and the New Graduate Database where Selina enters her reasons for the not yet competent. But there are many, many more artefacts. Watching the assessment work undertaken by these nurses, it is clear that the taken-for-granted nature of the ANCI Competency Standards is achieved through the work of nurse assessors in crafting assessment technologies that enact the standards. Through the localized crafting



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and recrafting of competencies, competency standards assemblages and a final report of competence the nurse assessors render their craftwork invisible. Artefacts are produced and then Nurse assessors translate what they witness in practice to ‘fit’ the artefacts. The focus on the individual, Tom, as the managerial framework, takes resources such as expert clinical development nurses away from direct care to not only monitor newly qualified nurse performance, but also to produce the technologies and artefacts, and for the routines and the habits of writing that stabilize standards in the day-to-day practices of the ward. There are costs to the nursing professionalization strategy that has seen nursing become more self-managing through the setting and implementing of competency standards, for instance the time taken in competency development as well as monitoring, rather than delivery of patient services. The themes introduced by Rose as characterizing advanced liberal governance have provided a valuable lens for exploring the restructuring of nursing around competency. The techniques of governance enacted through competency standards have translated the mechanics of the panoptic machine for coordinating the relationships between the state, the nursing profession and the population. The enactment of competency standards transformed the direct panoptic surveillance architecture that linked the state and nursing for the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Techniques of governance were introduced involving the decentring of government and coordination using indirect means. These techniques brought with them new powers and autonomy for the nursing profession, the shift to a system of surveillance of professionals that relies on audit, the reorganization of risk and the emergence of the ideal nurse as an entrepreneurial self-manager. We are not arguing that new panoptic mechanisms have emerged as governments have come to distrust the professions, or to subject them to calls for greater accountability or efficiency. Nor is our argument that advanced liberal modes of governance have weakened the panoptic society and allowed for greater freedom. Our detour through Foucault acted as a reminder that trust between the state and the professions is not the prerequisite but rather the outcome of the spatial mechanics of the Panopticon, with its machinery for observation without limit and the construction of endless files that are ‘never closed’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 227). Our move to the contemporary modes of governance through Rose’s work set the scene in terms of the rearticulation of the relationship between the state and nursing in the contemporary modes of governance of advanced liberalism. Nursing has become embedded in expert systems of monitoring and





evaluating with competency assessment at the core. While the nursing profession has repositioned itself as a lead agency in the governance of nursing, nurses are recreated as entrepreneurs of the self, responsible for balancing standards with the whirl of the day-to-day work of understaffed wards. Risk management has become equated with audit trails rather than the management of the routines of work, the pace of tasks, the alignments of collective action. These shifts bring with them new pathways and frameworks for action and resistance, one of which revolves around calls by the profession for more and more standardized techniques for assuring the objectivity of competency measurement. It will be interesting to watch how the tensions built up around this problematic of professional self-governance are resolved as the costs of mechanisms of indirect governance become an increasingly significant drag on the costs of providing health care to an ageing population.

Bibliography Alspach, G. (1992), ‘Concern and Confusion over Competence’, Critical Care Nurse 12(4), pp. 9–11. ANRAC Nursing Competencies Project (1988), Requirements for Registration or Enrolment of Nurses in Australia (Adelaide: South Australia Nurses Board). Australasian Nurse Regulatory Authorities Conference (ANRAC) (1980), Report of the Meeting in Sydney Australia (Unpublished). Australian Nursing Council Incorporated (2000), ANCI Competency Standards for the Registered Nurse (3rd edition) (Canberra: ANCI). Beck, A. H. (2004), ‘The Flexner Report and the Standardisation of American Medical Education’, JAMA 291(17), 2139–40. Byrne, M., T. Delarose, C. King, J. Leske, K. Sapnas and K. Schroeter (2007), ‘Continued Professional Competence and Portfolios’, Journal of Trauma Nursing 14(1), pp. 24–31. Cheek, J., T. Gibson and J. Gilbertson (1995), ‘Competencies: Really or Merely Useful?’ in G. Gray and R. Pratt (eds), Issues in Australian Nursing (4th edition) (Melbourne: Churchill Livingstone). Cheshire, L., V. Higgins and G. Lawrence (eds) (2007), Rural Governance: International Perspectives (London: Routledge). Dean, M. (2007), Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and International Rule (Maidenhead: Open University Press). Dean, M. (1999), Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage). Exworthy, M. and S. Halford (eds) (1999), Professionals and the New Managerialism in the Public Sector (Buckingham: Open University Press). Fisher, M., A. Marshall and T. Kendrick (2005), ‘Competency Standards for Critical Care Nurses: Do They Measure Up?’ Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing 22(4), pp. 32–9. Foucault, M. (1979), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, trans) (New York: Vintage Books).



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Foucault, M. (1982), ‘The Subject and Power’, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Gonczi, A., P. Hager and L. Oliver (1990), Establishing Competency-Based Standards in the Professions. National Office of Overseas Skills Research Paper No 1 (Canberra: DEET). Higgins, V. and G. Lawrence (eds) (2005), Agricultural Governance: Globalization and the New Politics of Regulation (London: Routledge). Illich, I. (1981), Shadow Work (Boston and London: M. Boyars). Krause, E. A., (1996), Death of the Guilds: Professions, States and the Advance of Capitalism, 1930 to Present (Ann Arbor: Yale University). Lampland, M. and S. L. Star (eds) (2009), Standards and their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). McCready, T. (2007), ‘Portfolios and the Assessment of Competence in Nursing: A Literature Review’, International Journal of Nursing Studies 44(1), pp.143–51. Meretoja, R. and H. Leino-Kilpi (2001), ‘Instruments for Evaluating Nurse Competence’, Journal of Nurse Administration 31(7/8), pp. 346–52. Norman, I. J., R. Watson, T. Murrells, L. Calman and S. Redfern (2002), ‘The Validity and Reliability of Methods to Assess the Competence to Practise of Pre-Registration Nursing and Midwifery Students’, International Journal of Nursing Studies 39(2), pp. 133–45. Pierre, J. and B. G. Peters (2005), Governing Complex Societies: Trajectories and Scenarios (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Power, M. (1997), The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pollitt, C. and G. Bouckaert (2004), Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Rose, N. (1999), Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Royal Australian Nursing Federation (1983), Standards for Nursing Divisions (Melbourne: RANF). Royal Australian Nursing Federation (1983), Standards for Nursing Practice (Melbourne: RANF). Royal Australian Nursing Federation (1985), Nursing Quality Assurance (Melbourne: RANF). Royal Australian Nursing Federation (1985), Nursing Standards for Patient Care (Melbourne: RANF). Starr, P. (1982), The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books). Summers, A. (1975), Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia (Ringwood: Penguin). Weber, M. (1918/1946), ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press). Williams, R. R. (1998), ‘Nurse Leaders’ Perceptions of Quality Nursing: An Analysis from Academe’, Nursing Outlook 46(6), pp. 262–7.




Industry Analysts and the Labour of Comparison Neil Pollock

7.1 Introduction This chapter considers how incommensurable artefacts and actors are brought together, the relationships between them standardized, so that they can be compared in the same space. This issue – described here as the labour of comparison – is beginning to attract attention from scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS), Economic Sociology, Organization Studies and beyond. Some have gone as far as to conceptualize the economy in a way that comparison is central to its organization (Callon et al., 2002). Within this view, what has been termed as an ‘economy of qualities’ (Callon et al., 2002), the experts that measure and classify the properties of technologies and products are key. When lacking the devices to establish equivalence, how can different objects be brought together and compared? Without the practices to produce differences how can similar commodities be sorted out? The labour of comparison is not without politics or complexities (Barry, 2006; Mol, 2002; Porter, 1995) particularly concerning the status and detachment of experts who perform this work, the devices used in their craft, the identification of the properties to be measured and the calculations and actions that stem from these practices (Callon and Muniesa, 2005). The labour of comparison and its related politics and complexities, should be of wider interest to scholars interested in objects and the economy, technologies and standardization. This chapter investigates the expertise and tools of a body of professionals whose work is centrally concerned with comparison – that is, those specialized forms of consultants known as ‘industry analysts’. I discuss one particular set of industry analysts (the Gartner Group) and their attempt to analyse and compare software vendors through the production of the ‘Magic Quadrant’. 112



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Gartner are primus inter pares among industry analysts and have been particularly successful in mobilizing belief and expectations among both supplier and user communities.1 In particular, they produce a decisionmaking tool known as the Magic Quadrant (MQ). This attempts to compare and rank software vendors according to a number of predefined measures. It comes in the form of a box with an X and Y axis (labelled as ‘completeness of vision’ and ‘ability to execute’) dimensioning a two-by-two matrix, with four segments into which one can see placed the names of several vendors. Vendors are not randomly placed; each of the segments is individually labelled (niche player, challenger, visionary and leader). The position of a vendor in a particular segment signifies something regarding its current and future performance as well as its behaviour within the particular markets it is targeting (Burton and Aston, 2004). Decision makers are said to draw on and be influenced by these tools when making procurement choices (it has been argued that the MQ is the most referenced research tool in the IT sector [Violino and Levin, 1997]). Some argue that a high ranking on a MQ guarantees a vendor more attention than its rivals (Hind, 2004), with others suggesting that it even has the power to ‘make or break’ a technology (Violino and Levin, 1997), the result being that software vendors are keen to influence the shaping of these objects. This device however turns out to be potentially difficult to study (and its influence therefore hard to assess). This is because it is a ‘dividing object’: as well as enjoying extensive diffusion, the MQ has been denounced in the practitioner press as devoid of ‘intrinsic value’ and as a mere ‘marketing tool’ (Howard, 2004). It is said to be overly ‘subjective’ in the way it is compiled, and despite claims by Gartner that they are ‘objective’ with no particular ‘axe to grind’, the tool is widely seen to be ‘partial’ and embodying ‘bias’ (Cant, 2002). Intriguingly, these contrasting accounts are not always the opinions of different communities but of the same groups. The people who use them are also seemingly among their biggest critics. How are we to make sense of this form of market analysis that is seen as problematic but still widely used? Which is controversial but also said to be highly effective in comparing the performance of vendors? There are three possible ways of analysing the tool, only one of which helps in our task. A first strategy, perhaps the one favoured by critical social scientists, would be to debunk the tool. It is after all a version of the classic two-by-two matrix, much loved by European and American



7.1.1 The magic in the Magic Quadrant

Industry Analysts and the Labour of Comparison

Business Schools. In this respect it would be relatively easy to reveal its limitations and imperfections (not least that it ‘flattens the world’ through hiding its complexity). However, I do not take this particular line here. A second strategy might be to treat the tool as a ‘convention’. This would be to explain its success through the fact that it enjoys widespread take-up and use. Indeed, social scientists have used these arguments to good effect in the domain of Science and Technology Policy, for instance, where Arie Rip (2006) has described the extension of similar kinds of objects in these terms. However, while agreeing that the MQ is a convention, I cannot accept the implication that all conventions are completely ‘arbitrary’ and without ‘content’, which is the reading one finds in Rip’s article. An alternative strategy – the one pursued here – would be to open up this ‘black box’ to study the production of the tool to see how vendor comparisons emerge from this contested socio-technical arrangement. In doing this I set in train a specific line of enquiry. I show how the MQ is ‘performative’. That is, it does not merely describe a state of affairs that already exists in the marketplace, but nor does it simply offer a new means of representing and positioning vendors, rather it is also interacting with and modifying its object of study. Indeed the principal contention pursued here is that the MQ has become ‘successful’ because it is (re)shaping the technological field.

7.2 Where is the sociology of market analysis tools? While tools like the MQ have been a feature of business settings for several decades, they still attract relatively little attention from scholars interested in the social analysis of technology. There is still nowhere near an adequate sociological language to describe their success or failure. The few studies discussing them seemingly only do so to demonstrate their flaws (see Lissack and Richardson [2003] who go as far as to suggest that such tools are ‘unethical’). Whatever the reason for this, it is clear that there are too few fine-grained accounts of the genesis and influence of market analysis tools. There are exceptions, of course, as exemplified by recent work in the domain of Business History (see particularly Ghemawhat [2002] and his lengthy discussion of the ‘Boston Matrix’) and Strategy (see Jarzabkowski and Wilson’s [2006] description of strategy tools in action). My own field of STS appears, at first glance, well equipped to understand their nature and influence, given its longstanding interest in the models produced by scientists and engineers (see Morgan and Morrison, 1999). Yet the small amount of research conducted so far on industry analysts does not adequately reflect their complexity,



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7.2.1 The performativity of market analysis These portrayals of intermediary groups like industry analysts and IT research firms, current within much of the social sciences, are unsatisfactory, particularly when it seems that industry analysts produce their assessments through systematic, albeit complicated, forms of research and that their tools do exert powerful albeit complex forms of influence. The approach in this chapter is influenced by scholars sensitive to the role that theories play in constituting economic markets. Recent work from Economic Sociology (Callon, 2007) and the Sociology of Finance (MacKenzie, 2003), for instance, argues that economic theories and financial tools are ‘performative’, that is, they not only describe but can help produce the settings in which they are applied. Through their application, theories and their related tools change how people think about markets and go on to enact the ‘framing’ processes that serve to allow their operation. This is an important insight, which, if it can be used to illuminate the study of economic and financial transactions in general, can also aid our understanding of the workings of industry analysts and their role in the labour of comparison. The actual notion of ‘performativity’ stems from the work of the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin (1962) who wrote that a statement was performative when it did more than just describe a reality but was actively engaged in the constitution of that reality (cf., Barnes, 1983). This begs the question as to whether any kind of assessment is possible. Could industry analysts make whatever judgement they choose? In Austin’s original discussion, he was careful to avoid discussing the ‘veracity’ of performatives. What was important was not whether statements were true or false but how, in actually making them, the speaker was ‘setting something in motion’ (Callon, 2007, p. 320). Callon has built on this argument in two ways: through replacing the concept of truth and falsity with ‘success’ and ‘failure’; and setting out a partial framework to study whether performatives have ‘successfully’ brought about that which they previously set in motion. This first point is relatively straightforward, especially for those familiar with the pragmatism of Actor Network Theory, but the second less so. What Callon intends is that performatives do not exist in isolation; they have meaning and effect in the ‘world’ they create for themselves.



but overwhelmingly tends to focus on the intrinsically flawed, simplistic assumptions embedded in their assessments, and the often contested nature of analysts’ research (see Bloomfield and Vurdubakis, 2002). As a result, the work of such organizations is not adequately explained.


Callon describes theories and their world as a socio-technical agencement.2 In what follows, I analyse the MQ as a socio-technical agencement to show how it implies and gradually enacts a new world. This includes how Gartner set out an alternative way to describe vendors as well as a research process they construct to enable their comparison and ranking. Using Callon’s argument, it can be said that the MQ is successful (i.e., performative) when it is able to bring about the world that it points to (i.e., actors come to think of others and themselves according to its terms). I conclude by showing how the MQ becomes part of the ‘equipment’ (MacKenzie, 2009) allowing people to act in the IT market.

7.3 A new comparative machinery? Study of the MQ was approached in the first instance using conventional forms of analysis. The tool was thus conceived initially as a ‘convention’ that was mostly ‘arbitrary’, that was successful through its widespread diffusion and take-up, all of which was bolstered by Gartner’s standing in the IT marketplace. Thus, I was genuinely surprised to find myself sitting and listening to a talk that pointed to a rather different story. To give some indication of this I present extracts from a presentation given by one Gartner analyst to a large audience of IT practitioners. In the presentation he talks about the history of decision making within information systems procurement. He begins by discussing how, previously, technology adopters had assessed systems prior to purchase: [W]e put together [in the 1990s] an outline of how you should evaluate administrative applications … [A]nd what we said was that in a stable environment you would look at ‘functionality’ … That was pretty much what we were looking at. Why? Well a mainframe is a mainframe so technology wasn’t that different from one to another, it was basically a vendor’s box that you were buying but it was built around a common architecture. When you looked in terms of cost, that was the driving factor for us; And service and ‘support’. We really didn’t think much about vision of the company or their ability to execute; we just bought what they had to offer … So, we had some need but it was kind of focusing on functionality and cost. What we said in ‘97 was change. You need to look at functionality but most vendor packages are mature enough to where there is at least common functionality, so it is a matter of goodness of fit that you are looking at (emphasis added).



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Here the traditional means by which people assess information systems is problematized. His critique focuses on the assessment criteria people currently use (‘functionality’, ‘cost’, ‘service’, etc.) which he suggests are no longer effective in sorting vendors out. How can you select between vendors using criteria of ‘technology’ when systems are no longer significantly ‘different from one another’? How effective is ‘functionality’ when vendors increasingly offer ‘common functionality’? He goes on to suggest, And we started seeing that trend in the early 80s … that said we had ageing of systems, people were using these systems … whether they were proprietary or home-grown for 15, 20, 25 years … And, the point is that you had to look at buying software as being a partnership with a vendor, and that’s a long-term relationship. It’s not something short term. The analyst also thinks it has now become necessary to replace current assessment measures, as adopters tend to use the same solution for longer and as a result have ‘partnerships’ with suppliers. The implications of this is that organizational consumers need to assess not only systems but also increasingly vendors themselves. And so, the vision of the company – do they understand the business of [specific sector]? Do they know where you were going? – and the ability to execute, those are still crucial. We still say it is about half of what your criteria should be. Now, if I am a … Chief Financial Officer … I am probably going to look at functionality as being crucial. That’s fine. But somebody better look out for the good of the [institution] as a whole. Because your institutional perspective is the one that we’re responsible to look out for in IT (emphasis added). The analyst is suggesting a shift in decision making from the evaluation of functional and local concerns to more ‘strategic’ ones. In order to do this, he mentions how a consumer might apply Gartner’s own evaluation criteria from the MQ, which they term as ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’, when evaluating vendors. In other words, Gartner are proposing to reframe decision making through bringing into being new kinds of actors. In so doing, the tool prioritizes comparative forms of assessment over local accuracy. That is, they give form to ‘ordinal’ characteristics as opposed to those that establish commensurability with local sites.3 The new frame renders vendors commensurable with



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each other (Burton and Aston, 2004). Thus, it could be said that MQs generate comparisons not existing elsewhere. Through bringing vendors together in the same space, and through producing and standardizing relationships between them (Callon and Muniesa, 2005), the MQ might therefore be described as a technology of comparison as opposed to one of accuracy. In summary, I argue that the MQ is transformative and that in producing the tool Gartner are also reconstituting the technical field from one where people are concerned with local and functional issues to more comparatives ones. However, the world that Gartner are attempting to set out also requires a research process – a method by which information about vendors can be collected. This turns out to be one of the most controversial aspects of the tool and it is to this that the chapter now turns.

7.4 Constructing a research process Gartner do not entirely calculate MQs within the boundaries of their own organization. They are partially the product of interactions analysts have with the vendors themselves and a geographically dispersed network of vendor customers. While conducting fieldwork, a number of vendors were interviewed that had been subject to Gartner’s assessment, and I also talked to vendor customers as well as observing Gartner’s interactions with these people. 7.4.1 Vendors are on the move Several vendors were interviewed about their relationship with Gartner. SoleSys (a pseudonym) is a US-based software package vendor that had been consistently well placed on the MQ. This year they were again identified as a ‘Leader’, and they made every effort to publicize this. After contacting the Marketing Director of SoleSys to arrange an interview, initially about a different issue, for instance, he sent me a recently published MQ to show how they had maintained their position. When I met with him, I took the opportunity to ask him about their continuous positive ranking. I broached the subject rather simply enquiring whether they ‘marketed themselves to Gartner’. He responded, It takes a lot of work, actually [laughing]. And, you don’t really market yourself to Gartner as they are very focused on the communications they have with corporations. So what they do, if you want to be considered for coverage on the Magic Quadrant, they send out a



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questionnaire in advance of the Quadrant. And it ends up being like a 50-page response that is required from a vendor, from, you know, the high-level product strategy down to the feature and functionality and architecture. So we make an investment to respond to that as thoroughly as possible. And that’s, how, where our placement in the Quadrant comes from. (Author interview with Marketing Director, SoleSys) While polite enough to laugh at the question, he did, however, chastise me for the suggestion that they ‘marketed themselves’ to Gartner. This exchange was instructive. My reading of this: to be well positioned was far from a simple marketing exercise. The respondent from SoleSys was replying to a tacit derogatory definition of marketing as ‘selling’ something irrespective of its quality. Instead, he made the point that responding to Gartner required much internal ‘investment’ and ‘work’. He went on to insist that there needed to be substance behind the claim (even though his description did look like straightforward self-promotion and positioning). I thus imagine a dual process whereby a vendor has to first disentangle itself from the existing (functional) ways it currently conceives of itself and then to reframe these according to more strategic measures. This suggests that the subjects of Gartner’s research were ‘on the move’, so to speak; the vendors were remaking themselves in terms of the new world Gartner was attempting to set out.4 7.4.2

Community knowledge

The second group from which MQs are derived are vendor customers. Gartner’s relationship with this group is particularly interesting. I observed how one particular analyst had built up and was managing a large network of people with whom he interacted on a regular basis. These people would continuously feed back ‘judgements’ to him on the particular vendors they were working with. Based on fieldwork I observed how a vendor ranking is enacted within these interactions – which constitute what might be thought of as a ‘calculative network’ (Callon and Muniesa, 2005). This calculative network and how it works is described more fully below, but for now I simply sketch some of its features. It is ‘selective’ in that analysts keep themselves close to certain people and exclude others. It is ‘tactical’ in that people recognize the importance of these interactions and may use them to further goals. Moreover, finally, interactions in the network are often highly ‘informal’ – being typically based on telephone calls or quick chats conferences, etc. These users who continuously feed back information



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to the analysts might be called ‘satellites’ and Gartner, who, in turn, translate these judgements into positions on the MQ, as a ‘centre of calculation’ (Latour, 1987). Further, the information within these networks might be characterized as ‘community knowledge’ to emphasize both its informal and distributed status. When pressed, for instance, Gartner will often deny that it is in fact them acting but that they are merely representing, within the tool, knowledge originated by others elsewhere.

7.5 The objectification of community knowledge What I am arguing is that Gartner is shaping the world so that ‘community knowledge’ is no longer a highly particular and local form of knowledge but one that can travel the world. This is to say that this informal knowledge can be commodified. However, these kind of ‘judgements’ are not easily objectified (as Porter [1995] argues, judgements do not fit straightforwardly into quantification). For instance, during fieldwork it was noted how Gartner often struggled to account for the provenance of community knowledge and how there was a certain amount of ambiguity surrounding the methodological status of the tool. For instance, in its early life I found the more ‘quantitative’ aspects of the MQ were highlighted; and only some years later was it described as resulting from ‘qualitative research’. Today it is typically described as having a mix of both these aspects: Gartner analysts use a combination of objective and subjective criteria to evaluate individual vendors. (Soejarto and Karamouzis, 2005, p. 5) When Gartner say the tool includes ‘subjective criteria’, I take it to mean it is shaped through analyst interactions with clients. Indeed one might think that incorporating this kind of knowledge increases the tool’s credibility, for instance, giving weight to the argument that Gartner are ‘close to the action’, so to speak. It is this community knowledge that Gartner are attempting to objectify, to bring into the calculation these customer judgements (seen as important but having until now remained outside the frame). Yet, this is also seen as one of the weaknesses of the tool (leading to accusations of ‘partiality’ and ‘bias’). 7.5.1 Partiality and bias One issue appears to be the obfuscation that exists around these calculative networks and community knowledge. The fact that Gartner refuse to



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make the names of their sources public, for instance, is a cause of much concern. There is also little information on how specific customers are chosen as well as with the weight given to their views. During fieldwork, for instance, I spoke to one IT manager who was critical of how, despite the claim that Gartner advertise and consult widely when conducting their research, they had never solicited his views. He described how he thought the particular Gartner analyst responsible, for his sector had not been completely even-handed when assessing SoftCo’s solutions: [H]e has been very negative to [Campus, the SoftCo module discussed earlier]. He has never called. He has never visited our site. [SoftCo] wants me to be on a conference call with him, but I really don’t want that. He just knows everything; he never listens … There are just some people you know that, I took an immediate dislike to him and that is because of that arrogance. But he does know a lot and Gartner is important … He is not against [SoftCo] he just thinks that they are a bit player and they are not serious. That is what I gather. (Author interview) Despite the fact he is well informed about SoftCo, and that he is someone who might have been expected to be contacted, this IT manager is not part of Gartner’s calculative network. It seems that in the labour of comparison Gartner actively differentiate between customers when gathering information: that access to calculative networks is ‘unevenly distributed’ (Callon and Muniesa, 2005).

7.6 Extending the world of the Magic Quadrant into the market The chapter has thus far focused on the process by which Gartner gathers information for its MQs. In this section, I consider how the tool is extending into the market and with how it begins to ‘interact’ with the very things it is attempting to describe. I do so through discussing how Gartner’s assessments were taken up by one particular vendor customer and how they become part of the ‘equipment’ that condition his activities (such that he becomes involved in a complex set of strategic manoeuvres).5 7.6.1 The Magic Quadrant at UserOrg ‘Sergio’ is an IT Manager at a user organization (described as ‘UserOrg’). Sent the latest version of the MQ by an executive from a large software



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See attached an e-mail from [SoftCo] with some positive news that Gartner have improved their rating of [SoftCo’s] products within the [specific] sector. The diagrams are worth looking at because they show that [SoftCo] have improved since 2004 but also that they have a long way to go before they overtake their competitors. (Email from Sergio to colleagues) Although the vendor was keen to highlight a change in position, Sergio qualified the improvement through highlighting the ordinal nature of the tool and the fact that even though SoftCo had moved position, so too had all the others, and thus SoftCo still lagged behind its rivals. In a further series of emails, Sergio discussed with a Senior Executive at the vendor what he thought were the specific problems that Gartner found with SoftCo. He received a reply to his email in which the vendor appeared to accept the assessment: Yes, we need to move ‘North’ in the execution axis and ‘East’ in the vision section. We really need to push across the line into the ‘Leadership’ Quadrant. Implementation (speed, cost – same thing, to some extent) remains a challenge. (Email from SoftCo to Sergio) Here, the properties of this vendor appeared to be settled and adjusted to those of the MQ. The various actors present seemed to accept the alternative comparative machinery set out and agree that Gartner had ‘correctly’ identified that SoftCo had a poor ‘ability to execute’. However, this was not the end of the matter. What then developed was a fascinating and quite unexpected series of events. Rather than simply accepting the assessment, Sergio discussed with the vendor how he might be able to improve SoftCo’s position: I think that the [CRM] final result will help move things much further. If we can then exploit BW [Business Warehouse] to include financial and other information, then we should help to move the [SoftCo] position further in the right direction. I think that it is important for



vendor (described as ‘SoftCo’) keen to report some good news that their rating was finally improving, Sergio, in turn, circulated it among his colleagues, careful to add his own interpretation of what he thought the MQ was saying:

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The ‘CRM’ project was a customer relationship management system being built by SoftCo and implemented within Sergio’s organization. It was seen as a significant flagship venture since it brought together and integrated several previously unrelated enterprise resource planning (ERP) modules. What Sergio was suggesting was that, once the CRM project was successfully implemented, news of this could be fed back to Gartner to provide evidence to improve SoftCo’s standing. 7.6.2 UserOrg becomes a ‘Test Case’ At this stage of the fieldwork I was intrigued with how this might happen; how could the CRM project be linked to the MQ in this way? I watched with interest as the IT manager attempted to court Gartner’s attention. Having recently become a Gartner client, Sergio had access to their analysts and his main point of contact was someone whom we describe as ‘Bob’. I observed as Sergio deepened this relationship with Bob: they began to conduct regular telephone conversations; to participate in lengthy email exchanges (which I had access to); and Sergio would engineer meetings with Bob in various places around the world (some of which I was able to observe). Sergio discussed this blossoming relationship with one of his colleagues: He [Bob] is coming to [UserOrg] in early November to a … conference. I tend to speak to him approximately every two weeks. He is really interested in seeing what we have done in UserOrg. He is also watching [KentOrg] and [PurseOrg] at the moment. I think that he will also watch [WestOrg] in the UK as well to see whether [SoftCo] can hit implementation dates. I am sure that we can generate some really good publicity from our CRM project. (Email from Sergio to colleague) According to the email, Gartner were watching a number of sites around the world from which it would gather evidence about SoftCo’s ability to execute. Moreover, UserOrg had become part of this calculative network. This raised a number of issues, not least, as to why Sergio might go to such effort to improve SoftCo’s rating.



Gartner to realize that [SoftCo] are building up momentum as they move across the MQ. (Email from Sergio to SoftCo)


7.6.3

Calculating actors

During the same period, Sergio was also in regular contact with a number of SoftCo executives, continuously reminding them of the influence Gartner was developing among decision makers. Sergio outlines the specific interest Gartner had taken in his project, as well as the work he was doing to encourage this attention: Gartner ([Bob] especially) are following every twist with great interest. He wants to spend much time with me in [the US] before and during [a forthcoming conference] (he’s invited me on to a User Panel on the Sunday [sector specific] Symposium to discuss the question ‘What message would I like to give to my ERP vendor?’!!). He also intends to visit [UserOrg] during his trip to [UK conference] (being held in the [UserOrg] area at the beginning of November). I am giving him very positive messages – he is very interested in the timescales of the project – possibly, because he is looking for evidence that [SoftCo] can implement good/solid implementations in a short time-scale. He is looking for similar evidence from [KentOrg] and some other critical US implementations. (Email from Sergio to SoftCo) Sergio outlined to the vendor how their position on the MQ was now becoming directly linked to their performance at UserOrg. What Sergio hoped to achieve was to exert pressure on SoftCo to continue to devote further resources to his CRM project (the development had started well but had been floundering in recent months). In turn, SoftCo needed to improve (not worsen) their ranking. Sergio thus anticipated that Gartner’s interest would have a positive effect on the vendor. In another email to a colleague, Sergio described the success this strategy appeared to be having: Things are getting ever more interesting for me and the [SoftCo] relationship. They are really moving in to a ‘partnership’ role – throwing in highly competent resources to ensure that we go live on 10th October. Though I guess it helps that they realize that [a senior Gartner analyst] has told them that Gartner are watching [SoftCo’s] ability to implement at each of three [organizations] in the world ([UserOrg], [KentOrg] and [PurseOrg]) and that their results will materially affect whether [SoftCo] move from the lower left quadrant to the top-right! (Email from Sergio to colleague)



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To summarize this section, the MQ had two principal effects. Firstly, it framed the setting so that the means by which vendor rankings can be improved has been defined. No longer an abstract or difficult-to-measure notion, vendor performance was translated into the most tangible of things: to repeat Sergio’s words, the implementation of its systems in the three organizations ‘will materially affect whether SoftCo move from the lower left quadrant to the top-right’. Second, the fact it tied in vendor rankings with the success of these projects opened up the possibility of new kinds of action. In particular, the MQ equipped actors to calculate and act in different ways (Miller, 2001).

7.7 How Gartner defends its assessments I have argued that, in compiling these tools, Gartner hand the discretion over to others (i.e., this ability to comment on the capacities of vendors): they were keen to publicly emphasize it was not Gartner but the wider ‘user community’ that was providing judgements. In effect, these others had the power to say whether a vendor could execute or had vision. I describe this process through analysing how one satellite reported back to Gartner (and in so doing how he forced Gartner to defend its position). The particular episode took place in the US where Gartner was organizing a Symposium to coincide with a major IT conference. The IT manager from UserOrg, Sergio, travels to the conference, one of his aims being to update Gartner on progress of his CRM project. At the conference, the author of the chapter was sitting conducting an informal interview with Sergio when Bob from Gartner approached. Sergio straightaway began to force Bob to explain and defend his assessment of SoftCo, which he appeared able to do – in a robust manner. This confrontation continued and eventually Bob had to be less guarded in telling Sergio what he thought were the real problems with SoftCo: I told them [SoftCo] seven or eight years ago that they needed to start investing in the [specific] sector. We have a saying: ‘do something or get off the pot’. Have you ever heard that? (Sergio: yeah). In essence what I told them, it’s like ‘You put your toe in [specific sector] but you really haven’t committed’. They said, ‘We just hired! We got 10 people writing the [sector] system’ [Sergio: Gosh]. I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I said ‘how can you? I mean, that’s embarrassing!’ I said, ‘The smallest software companies in the US … would have 50 or 60’. I mean, [DataSys] have got 50, 60 people. [GenteSys] have 100, 150. [BigVendor] have 150. You know 10 people is just nothing! They are



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up to, I don’t know, 20, 25 now but still it is not what I would call for the size of the company, I mean they have the resources to be a global leader in [specific sector] if they want to be. It is just that they have just never made the commitment. And that is what you are saying? In this situation there are two actors opposing each other through offering contrasting accounts of the qualities of a vendor. Sergio openly challenged Gartner’s assessment of SoftCo and Bob was forced to defend their position. While Sergio stated that SoftCo was improving, it was clear to Bob that they were not sufficiently committed to the particular sector. As he saw it, they were being opportunistic in this market (‘they could be the global leader in [specific sector] if only they wanted to be’). This particular thread of conversation ended when Sergio was forced to fall into line with Gartner’s assessment. Despite all his previous efforts, Sergio has to concede the territory to Gartner and accept their assessment.

7.8 Conclusions Callon and colleagues (2002) suggest the economy can be understood in terms of the regimes of expertise, devices and practices that measure, classify and draw boundaries around the properties of products and technologies. In this view, ‘comparison’ is both central to the organization of the economy and the ranking of products like software, but also, at times, highly controversial. The suggestion in the work of Callon and others, and what I have attempted to build on here, is that to understand the ‘economy of qualities’ we must analyse how equivalences between vendors are made and resultant controversies dealt with – what I have described as the labour of comparison. This chapter has focused on the Magic Quadrant (MQ) which is a contested but highly influential object, my aim being to understand both the appeal and controversy it has generated. I have done this through treating the MQ not according to a representational idiom but a ‘performative’ one, deploying recent ideas developed by Callon (2007) and MacKenzie (2003) where they suggest that theories and models play a crucial role in the doing of the economy. Adapting this argument to the case of industry analysts, I asked: to what extent is the advice of industry analysts ‘performative’? Callon (2007) has described economic and financial theories as putting in motion a socio-technical agencement. Theories are successful (i.e., performative), he argues, when they create their corresponding socio-technical agencement (the ‘context’ or ‘world’ they point to). This chapter has



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analysed the MQ describing four particular moments. First, in enacting this world, the industry analysts potentially reshaped how people made decisions while choosing between vendors. The device offered an alternative comparative machinery through putting previously incommensurable technologies on a scale. It defined the two dimensions of this scale and created the possibility of ordinal assessment and ranking of vendors. Second, I have described the actualization of this world through the construction of a research process whereby industry analysts could speak ‘authoritatively’ about the competence and performance of software vendors. The analysts have established an extensive ‘calculative network’ through which they could draw on the views and opinions of those implementing and using the technologies of the vendors under scrutiny. This knowledge has an unusual quality (being informal, contingent and potentially subjective). Through the activities of the analysts this ‘community knowledge’ is no longer the highly situated form of knowledge it once was but can be turned into a form of more robust commodified knowledge that could ‘travel the world’. Third, this particular socio-technical agencement has begun to constitute the marketplace in various ways. It has established a number of new realities – or, to use the language from the start of the chapter, it has become ‘successful’. Actors increasingly act according to the tool. Vendors, for instance, increasingly describe themselves according to this new comparative machinery, as well as being characterized in these terms by many of their customers. ‘Ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’ have come to be treated as unproblematic (as well as ‘researchable’ and ‘assessable’) measures of vendor performance. Moreover, the device conditions the activities of not only vendors but increasingly of users. I observed one IT manager attempt to provide evidence of a vendor’s improving performance (to ensure continued vendor investment in the technology he had adopted). Even though his intervention did not yield the outcome he intended, the episode demonstrates how the IT market is increasingly ‘framed’ and this actor ‘equipped’. This suggests people are increasingly able to see the effects of their actions in relation to these kinds of tools – and to act accordingly. Finally, and to return to the place where this chapter began, all of this builds towards the argument that these tools are not arbitrary but contain defensible forms of knowledge (as could be seen by Bob’s strong rebuttal of Sergio’s attempt to influence them). This is not to say that the tools are viewed uncritically. As I have shown, the tool inhabits an interesting ‘grey space’. They are critiqued (mostly in the practitioner press) because among other things analysts are not always independent



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of those they assess. In Callon’s terms, these criticisms might be seen as ‘competing’ socio-technical agencements attempting to problematize the world set out by the MQ. Imposing new worlds, argues Callon, always causes alternative ones to ‘strike back’. In summary, these kinds of devices generate comparisons that do not exist elsewhere: they bring actors together in the same space through producing and standardizing relationships between them. In this respect, the MQ might therefore be described as a technology of comparison. Moreover, in writing this chapter I hope to give impetus to social scientists in understanding how highly simple devices like these have virtues in ‘qualifying’ and ‘performing’ marketplaces. The labour of comparison is not a narrow, academic affair; there has been an enormous growth in dedicated experts and professionals, organizations and bodies, and various socio-technical devices all of which observe, analyse and produce equivalences in some form (Barry and Slater, 2005). Industry analysts are one such body of experts who are not simply describing markets, not solely reporting on the qualities of vendors, but are creating those comparisons.

Notes 1. It is widely acknowledged that organizations today find it difficult to critically assess and evaluate large information technology (IT) solutions prior to purchase (Pollock and Williams, 2007, 2009). The difficulties adopters face is that they are assessing not just technical properties but also intangible issues regarding the future performance of a technology vendor (will it survive?), its behaviour (will it continue to invest in the particular market in coming years?) and particularly, the differences between technologies (Callon et al., 2002). At the same time, however, the institutional frameworks for promoting and assessing complex IT solutions are becoming better established as can be seen by analysing the changes in the processes of assessment of technologies in the course of procurement. In the 1980s, for instance, consultancy organizations were beginning to collate information about supplier offerings and the new kinds of IT available, followed in the 1990s by the growth in popularity of specialist industry analysts and IT research firms (the Gartner Group, Forrester Research, the Meta Group, the Giga Group, International Data Corporation and so on) which gathered information on competing vendors in the IT marketplace (Firth and Swanson, 2005). Founded by Gideon Gartner in 1979, the Gartner Group has its headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut and offices in over 80 places around the world. It has 4,300 associates of which 1,400 are described as ‘expert analysts’ and ‘consultants’. 2. The term (derived from the work of Deleuze and Guattari) is used to depict a heterogeneous collection of material and textual elements that act on and modify each other. As Callon notes there is nothing ‘outside’ a socio-technical agencement – theories or descriptions of the agencement, for instance, are not



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‘external’ but part of the configuration, acting and bringing it into being. Callon argues that a theory is successful (performative) when it can create its corresponding socio-technical agencement. One other important aspect is the assertion that no one element (human or nonhuman) is assumed a priori to be more important than any other; they all, methodologically at least, have equal status, and in this sense they all can act. It is because of the implied symmetry here that Callon can argue that theories also set worlds in motion. 3. For instance, in the earlier decision-making frame, vendors were assessed on measures that were effective in detailing how a potential system related to the needs and shape of a specific user (i.e., they were ‘accurate’) but provided little purchase on how vendors compared in catering for such requirements (i.e., they were not ordinal measures). Theodore Porter has argued that there are strong incentives in both the sciences and the economy for precise and standardizable measures rather than highly ‘accurate’ ones. He writes, ‘[f]or most purposes, accuracy is meaningless if the same operations and measurements cannot be performed at other sites’ (1995, p. 29). 4. This resonates with Ian Hacking’s (1999) observation of how new classification schemes rarely simply stabilize settings but encourage newly sorted actors to act in different ways (often either conforming to, or rebelling from, the newly introduced classification). 5. For MacKenzie (2009), an ‘equipment’ is the physical or cognitive things (like theories, models, technology and so on) that give actors within markets new abilities but also, importantly, modifies the nature and activity of these actors.

Bibliography Austin, J. L. (1962), How to Do Things With Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Barnes, B. (1983), ‘Social Life as Bootstrapped Induction’, Sociology 17, pp. 524–45. Barry, A. (2006), ‘Technological Zones’, European Journal of Social Theory 9(2), pp. 239–53. Barry, A. and D. Slater (eds) (2005), The Technological Economy (London: Routledge). Bloomfield, B. and T. Vurdubakis (2002), ‘The Vision Thing: Constructing Technology and the Future in Management Advice’, in T. Clark and R. Fincham (eds), Critical Consulting (Oxford: Blackwell). Burton, B. and T. Aston (2004), ‘How Gartner Evaluates Vendors in a Market’, Document ID Number: G00123716. Callon, M. (2007), ‘What Does it Mean to Say that Economics is Performative?’ in D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa and L. Siu (eds), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Callon, M., C. Meadel and V. Rabeharisoa (2002), ‘The Economy of Qualities’, Economy and Society 32, pp. 194–217. Callon, M. and F. Muniesa (2005), ‘Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices’, Organization Studies 26(8), pp. 1229–50. Cant, S. (2002), ‘Analyze This’, Sydney Morning Herald, 16th April, http://www.smh. com.au/articles/2002/04/16/101833475874.html, accessed 29 March 2006.



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Firth, D. and E. Swanson (2005), ‘How Useful are IT Research and Analysis Services?’ Business Horizons 48(2), pp. 151–9. Ghemawat, P. (2002), ‘Competition and Business Strategy in Historical Perspective’, Business History Review 76, pp. 37–74. Hacking, I. (1999), The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Hind, P. (2004), ‘Self-Fulfilling Prophecies?’ CIO, 12 July, http://www.cio.au/pp. php?id⫽885195886andfp⫽4&fpid⫽1854618785, accessed 29 March 2006. Howard, P. (2004), ‘Let’s Play the Magic Quadrant Game’, The Register, 24 December, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/24/magic_quadrant/print. html, accessed 22 February 2006. Jarzabkowski, P. and D. Wilson (2006), ‘Actionable Strategy Knowledge: A Practice Perspective’, European Management Journal 24(5), pp. 348–67. Latour, B. (1987), Science in Action, How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Lissack, M. and K. Richardson (2003), ‘Models Without Morals: Toward the Ethical Use of Business Models’, Emergence 5(2), pp. 72–102. MacKenzie, D. (2003), ‘An Equation and its Worlds: Bricolage, Exemplars, Disunity and Performativity in Financial Economics’, Social Studies of Science 33(6), pp. 831–68. MacKenzie, D. (2009), Material Markets: How Economics Agents are Constructed (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Miller, P. (2001), ‘Governing by Numbers: Why Calculative Practices Matter’, Social Research 68(2), pp. 379–96. Mol, A. (2002), ‘Cutting Surgeons, Walking Patients: Some Complexities Involved in Comparing’, in J. Law and A. Mol (eds), Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Morgan, M. and M. Morrison (1999), Models as Mediators: Perspectives on Natural and Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pollock, N. and R. Williams (2007), ‘Technology Choice and its Performance: Towards a Sociology of Software Package Procurement’, Information and Organisation 17, pp. 131–61. Pollock, N. and R. Williams (2009), Software and Organizations: The Biography of the Enterprise-wide System or How SAP Conquered the World (London: Routledge). Porter, T. (1995), Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (New Jersey: Princeton University Press). Rip, A. (2006), ‘Folk Theories of Nanotechnologists’, Science as Culture 15(4), pp. 349–65. Soejarto, A. and F. Karamouzis (2005), ‘Magic Quadrants for North American ERP Service Providers’, Gartner Document, ID Number: G00127206. Violino, B. and R. Levin (1997), ‘Analyzing the Analysts’, Information Week, 17 November, http://informationweek.com/657/57iuana.htm, accessed 29 March 2006.



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Sticking Plasters and the Standardizations of Everyday Life Mike Michael

8.1 Introduction This chapter addresses some of the forms of standardization that are associated with the everyday medical object of the ‘sticking plaster’ (also known under the genericized brand names of Band-Aid in the United States, and Elastoplast in the United Kingdom). As is well-known, standardization is routinely linked to the maintenance of quality – whether that be the quality of measures (such as the volt or the second), the quality of services (such as nursing or risk assessment), or the quality of artefacts (from everyday technologies like TVs and cookers through to scientific ‘objects’ such as genetically modified mice and gravitational wave detectors). Of course, these interdigitate in complex ways: for a TV to be standardized, so too must the services (manufacturing processes) that served in putting it together, and the measures that enable its components to fit and work together; the standardized volt rests on standardized technologies and technical practices for measuring and transporting it. Rolled into the notion of standardization are a series of basic parameters, for instance, the technologies that measure standards are ‘calibrateable’ and comparable; that measurements display accuracy and precision; that measurements be uniform, in the sense that they apply consistently across instances of the measuring process; that they be transferable, in the sense that they apply consistently across instances of the ‘thing’ being measured; that procedures by which measurements are implemented are transparent and can be fully articulated; that standards and their implementation are properly distributed and disseminated. However, as is equally well known, the development and application of standards and the enactment of comparability, precision, accuracy, uniformity, transferability, transparency and distribute-ability rests on a 131



8

Sticking Plasters and Standardizations

nexus of assumptions, relations, practices and materials that are characterized by tacitness, embodiment, relationality, processuality and heterogeneity. Further, standardization serves in the government of people (as well as things): it embodies and mediates particular forms and routines of practice which must be adhered to if standards are to be maintained and made accountable; it imparts modes of self-surveillance through which to check that routines are followed (or, at least, ensure actions can be recounted in terms of relevant standards); it mediates relations of power between those who set standards and the procedures of standardization, and those who implement and sustain those standards. The present chapter touches on several of these dimensions of standardization. However, its main focus is rather different. The aim is to consider how a mundane artefact which, as a consumer good, has proliferated into numerous versions, nevertheless serves in the tacit standardization of a variety features of society in everyday life. Taking the everyday medical object of the ‘Elastoplast’ or ‘Band-Aid’ as a case study, I explore how use (and non-use) of the sticking plaster rests upon, and mediates, not only tacit standardizations of bodies and comportments and related relations of power, but also ‘broader’ interactions between, for instance, the domestic and the professional. In other words, the chapter seeks to examine, through the vehicle of the ‘sticking plaster’, some of the ways in which mundane standardization serves in the everyday enactment of ‘society’. In what follows, I begin with an outline of the theoretical literature which informs the analysis of the sticking plaster. There then follows a very brief historical account of the emergence and general technical standardization of the sticking plaster. The next section addresses the variety of plasters currently commercially available, paying attention to how their multiple standards mediate practical and expressive functions. After this, I place the plaster within a broader cultural context, unpicking some of its key significations and then go on to see how these inflect with the sorts of judgements entailed in applying a plaster. The aim here is to begin to shed light on the way that a mundane medical technology like a plaster can occasion the reordering of social categories and relations, not least those entailed in the enacting the boundaries between the domestic and the professional.

8.2 Standardizing standardization Standardization, in one way or another, is a theme that features across many areas in science and technology studies. Thus the standardization



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of units of measurements, of experimental systems and their components (both mechanical and biological), of technologies and their users, of practices and practitioners across many fields (e.g., biomedical and health care research, environmental policy) has been studied in relation to its function in the rhetorics of expertise, its mediation of relations of power and its role in the processes of ordering and disordering. Out of the various perspectives that might be drawn upon to think ‘standardization’, the present chapter will consider standardization in relation to the use of mundane technologies in everyday life.1 In science and technology studies, actor-network theory in particular has been focused upon the ways in which technologies inevitably have built into them what have been called ‘programmes’ of use (Akrich, 1992). Classically, these programmes require certain corporeal capacities or skills on the part of the user for that technology to work. A standard example is that of Latour’s (1992) door closer. Accordingly, this technological artefact (which sits at the top of a door, ensuring that it closes slowly rather than slamming), depending on the strength of its spring, necessitates certain capacities and skills on the part of its human users: strength, quick reflexes, ease of movement and so on. Though the qualities of the groom require certain standard capacities in the user’s body, these requirements are never absolute. Indeed, they can occasion other sorts of activities. Those who find difficulty with the groom might call upon on passers-by for help, or find other routes. But even those who do not find great difficulty must nevertheless adapt themselves to the door groom: they must push harder than usual, set their bodies in particular postures, rearrange whatever it is they might be carrying. These ‘standards of comportment’ are of course body techniques (Mauss, 1985) that are deeply embroiled in local cultural conditions that entail distributions of social networks, relations of power, enactments of identity and so on (see Michael, 2000). In many cases, these everyday bodily techniques that enable a standardized technology to ‘work’ remain hidden or unarticulated. It is simply what has to be done in order to get on with everyday life, as it were. For instance, Velcro, despite the maker’s claims that this is a ‘universal’ technology that requires no special skills, only ‘works’ because of the minute practical adaptations that users must perform (Michael, 2006). On occasion, these tacit skills or necessary body techniques are thrown into relief. For instance, Wynne (1989) shows how the authorities, by neglecting (the limits of) the tacit skills necessary to use pesticides, could put down farmers’ symptoms to their failure to follow standardized instructions. This generates a controversy in which the behind-the-scenes work



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of putting the instructions into operation became articulated as a part of a political intervention. In a similar way, the tacit skills necessary for using a door groom are made explicit by those who might not have ready access to them. One dimension of disability politics is precisely the articulation of such assumed bodily capacities and skills in order to shift standards. Now, technological artefacts are not singularities but emerge out of complex socio-technical assemblages (e.g., Michael, 2006) that include the material-semiotic processes of standardization and much more besides. In the cases of Wynne’s farmers and the disability movement what is being contested is the operation of particular assemblages that include (among other things) assumptions about appropriate forms of comportment and practice that make standardized technologies workable. What is being juxtaposed to these is assemblages characterized by other forms of comportment and practice that deal with different sorts of exigencies (the British weather and the messiness of farms; the capacities of disabled bodies). Another way of looking at this is in terms of standardized ordering. The door groom mediates a material-semiotic ordering of bodies as they move through a door. However, for some users, this ordering is in fact disordering: it means that their intended trajectories cannot be realized. In Michel Serres’s (1982a, 1982b) terms, these artefacts act as ‘parasites’, introducing ‘noise’ into the orderings of particular actors. But, such disruption, as Serres argues, is not wholly destructive. It can precipitate more complex orderings – something exemplified by the accomplishments of the disability movement. Now, such an analytic can tell us much about the microprocesses by which bodies are standardized, how comportment is adapted to realize those standards and about how such standardization can end up being both disruptive and productive. What this chapter proposes to do is use this analytic to examine how these microprocesses also serve in the standardization (and the disruptions this engenders) not only of bodies and comportments, but also of ‘society’ as it is enacted in the practices of everyday life. That is to say, such mundane technologies, standardized as they are, serve in the ‘doing’ (of the limits) of ‘broader’ social distinctions. In particular, and this is where the present chapter engages with the concerns of the sociology of everyday life, we consider how the use of the mundane medical technologies of the ‘Elastoplast’, the ‘BandAid’ or, for short (and henceforth), the plaster, serve as occasions for the complex enactment of such distinctions as the private and the public, or the lawful and the criminal or the domestic and the professional.



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Obviously enough there is a plethora of ways in which the skin can be broken to make an open wound.2 Cuts, grazes, punctures, sores, ulcers, burns – all these expose the tissue underlying the skin to a range of risks. Pain, infection, loss of blood are the simplest consequences of breaking the skin, and ‘medicine’ (in the broadest sense) has been concerned with relieving pain, stemming blood loss and removing infections while also enabling and promoting the healing of wounds. On this score, there has been a great diversity of treatments, historically speaking. Forrest (1982; see also, Ovington, 2002) usefully lists a range of ways in which such wounds were topically treated in ancient and ‘primitive’ societies that included animal products such as bile, butter, cobwebs, faeces and meat; vegetable preparations made from bark, dyes, fruit, honey, resins, wine or vinegar; and mineral derivatives such as alum, arsenic, clay, various salts (copper, lead, mercury, potassium and zinc), tar. Sometimes these were applied to exposed wounds, in other cases wounds were bandaged – though ‘Hippocratic teaching warned against the over-indulgent use of bandages’ (p. 200). Clearly the use of such treatments reflected and mediated theories of the body, but these were also intertwined with broader social dynamics, as instanced in the abhorrence that medieval physicians felt for the sick (hence the popularity of cauterization in the Middle Ages). Also common during this period, was, Forrest (1982) suggests, a belief that suppuration (the production of pus) was a necessary part of the healing process. As such, part of the treatment was the application of irritants, and a ‘lack’ of debridement (the removal of damaged or rotten tissue), to promote suppuration. It was not until the Renaissance when surgery started to become more widespread, that the suturing of wounds re-emerged and with it a more ‘rational’ approach to the treatment of wounds. This latter argument suggests that, for all its complexity, Forrest’s history is still a rationalist one in which ‘sound’ ancient treatments were derailed by the rise of ritual or superstition, only to be rationally ‘relearnt’ later (in the Renaissance). In any case, ‘it is only in the last two or three decades that the processes occurring in the wound and the factors influencing have come to be understood’ (Forrest, 1982, p. 198). Key to the reimagining of wounds is, of course, germ theory and Joseph Lister’s ‘operationalization’ of this to combat infection in postoperative wounds by covering them in lint or calico soaked in carbolic acid. It was report of these procedures around 1876 that led Robert Wood Johnson in the US to set about developing ‘a new type of surgical



8.3 A precarious pre-history of plasters


dressing, ready-made, sterile, wrapped and sealed in individual packages and suitable for instant use without the risk of contamination’ (European Tissue Repair Society, 2002, no page numbers). By 1888, the Johnson and Johnson Company had designed a cotton and gauze dressing that could be mass produced and widely distributed. By 1890, these dressings were not only antiseptic, but also sterile. In 1899, Johnson and Johnson began marketing an adhesive plaster containing zinc oxide. In this origin story, we see the birth of the basic components of the sticking plaster. However, it was not until 1920 that these were combined to produce what would become Johnson and Johnson’s BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages. An employee, Earle Dickson, in response to his wife’s frequent domestic accidents in which she would cut or burn her fingers, had the idea of putting gauze and adhesive tape together. The idea was accepted by then president Robert Wood Johnson and put into production, coming to market in 1921. Initially, these took the form of strips 18 inches long, 2½ inches wide that had to be cut to size. It was not until 1924 that mechanically pre-sized plasters became available in the US. Predictably, consumers, while possibly familiar with the individual components, needed to be taught how to use this new artefact composed of an adhesive tape with a strip of gauze down the middle and covered in protective crinoline fabric. Johnson and Johnson salesmen (sic) demonstrated its use to pharmacists, doctors and butchers (Kilmer House, 2008). Not wholly unexpectedly, there is another origin story for the sticking plaster, though this time the invention takes place in Germany and the product is the Beiersdorf company’s Hansaplast: a combination of a gauze patch and its adhesive tape, Leukoplast. This arrived in 1922, though it was only in 1931 that Hansaplasts could be applied without expert assistance. In the UK and many parts of the Commonwealth, Smith and Nephew supplied Elastoplasts from the early 1930s (Beiersdorf acquired the brand name Elastoplast in 2000). Interestingly, the invention of the Hansaplast was not, by this account, born out of everyday initiative as in the case of the Band-Aid, but was developed drawing on the dermatological expertise of a Professor Unna (Beiersdorf, 2008). These contrasting origin stories neatly capture the ambiguity of the sticking plaster as its straddles the domestic and the professional. Nevertheless, in both cases, it is the domestic sphere that is represented as the main setting or space into which the new sticking plaster is to be introduced. However, the plaster is no innocent intermediary, transparently providing a ‘solution’ to mundane minor wounding, or unproblematically bringing medical order to domestic disorder. Rather, it is a mediator



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(Latour, 2005) in that it changes that domestic setting – it warps its spatiality in particular ways. This is most obvious in the fact that the standardized design of gauze attached to adhesive tape and protected by another material such as crinoline required standardized skills that had to be imparted by salespeople to medical professionals, and presumably by medical professionals to patients. This is a reordering of a domestic space that includes corporealities, technologies and expectations. Thus it demarcates the ‘domestic’ as a place of self-sufficiency – no longer does one need to call upon the physician, nor indeed upon others in the household, in the application of cumbersome dressings to minor wounds; one can now dress wounds ‘independently’.3 We can further note that this seemingly trivial development served in the mediation of what is sometimes known as ‘individualization’: collective or distributed work becomes distilled, through the mundane technological artefact of a sticking plaster, into a skilled individual performance. Of course, to echo previous remarks, the plaster itself is not a singularity, but emerges through a socio-technical assemblage (partly comprising Johnson and Johnson) which also entails practices of skilling that make the plaster workable: individualization is a materially-socially collective process (e.g., Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001) and such mundane artefacts as sticking plasters and their assemblages contribute to its complex manifestation.4,5 In the next section, I situate the contemporary plaster in the medico-cultural context of the multiplicity of wounds.

8.4 A plenitude of plasters and the matter of multiplicity So far we have focused upon the development of the sticking plaster which is now a mundane fixture in most households. However, the sticking plaster as a technical artefact has undergone many innovations. There is now an enormous variety of plasters of one sort or another, treating different types of wounds, and claiming to provide solutions to a number of different problems and issues – problems that are not only ‘strictly’ medical, but also social, cultural and aesthetic.6 As noted above, there are a range of wounds that can afflict bodies. A brief list might read as follows: burns (chemical, heat), ulcers (bedsores, diabetic), punctures (needles, nails), lacerations (irregular tears), abrasions (grazes), incisions (cuts), penetrations (deep cuts) and bullet wounds. Some of these might seem to fall within the ambit of professionalized medicine while others are more obviously ‘domestic’. However, we might also expect the borders between the ‘medical’ and the ‘domestic’ (or the professional and the everyday) to be negotiable.



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For instance, Boots (the leading Pharmacy in the UK) markets its own brand ‘Advanced Healing Skin Closures Kit’ that ‘includes six flexible skin closures and two waterproof film dressings to hold together edges of deeper cuts’ (Boots, 2008a, no page numbers). At stake here is the vagueness embodied in the comparative term ‘deeper’: what is deep enough to require professional medical intervention? We shall have more to say on this border between the medical and the domestic below. To reiterate, the ‘medical’ is thoroughly intertwined with other aspects of everyday life (for a classic statement see Canguilhem, 1994, on social and organic norms; cf., Greco, 1998). Here is a very brief list of variations on the theme of a sticking plaster.7 Plasters that are ‘skin-coloured’ or transparent presuppose, and mediate, particular sorts of aesthetic (or selfpresentational) desires: namely, to have skin unblemished by a plaster patch. And, of course, skin colour becomes highly politically contentious as soon as one poses the question ‘whose skin colour?’, hence Band-Aid’s invention of ‘Perfect Blend Clear Bandages’ – plasters with a clear plastic tape and a gauze coloured in one of three skin tones (light, medium and deep (see Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University, 2008). Children’s plasters with well-known cartoon characters printed onto the tape – ‘to ensure that small misfortunes are quickly forgotten’ – enact a particular sort of child psychology along with a particular sort of cultural potency associated with cartoon characters (Brand Republic, 2008, no page numbers). Hydrocolloidal plasters, such as Boots’ Advanced Healing Hydrocolloid Dressings, are recommended for weeping or bleeding cuts. In addition to promoting faster healing, they also reduce scarring (Boots, 2008b). Along the latter lines, there are dressings designed exclusively for reduction of scarring such as Elastoplast’s Scar Reducer strips (Elastoplast, 2008). As a final example, there is the spray plaster ‘that delivers a transparent, breathable film that seals the wound to block out water, dirt and germs’ (Brand Republic, 2008, no page numbers) which has the dual advantages of allowing wounds on joints to be better protected and wounds to be observed while they heal. Each of these plasters enacts particular users or user identities.8 Taken together, this array of plasters furnishes a set of complex and contrasting identities. If ‘Perfect Blend Clear Bandages’ serve in the enactments of people concerned not to display marks of minor injury upon their bodies (possibly for cosmetic reasons), the spray plaster serves in the performance of people intent on subjecting their wounds to routine scrutiny. The plaster that ‘points’ to the wound can act as a marker of clumsiness (see TextMex, 2008), or an indicator of risk-taking and courage. A similar point applies to the matter of scarring and its reduction.



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Scars can serve to resource biographical narratives and facilitate their sharing. However, as blemishes that need to be removed, anti-scarring technology folds into a different version of self-hood, one arguably associated with physical perfection.9 The ‘child-friendly’ cartoon-laden plaster can suggest both a responsible parent concerned with calming children as swiftly as possible, but also a parent who ‘gives in’ to the consumer preferences of their children.10 In sum, each of these plasters, in contrast to, or consonance with, others, though embodying particular standardized ‘technical’ uses (e.g., reducing scarring, hiding cuts, facilitating mobility) also has a series of ‘cultural uses’, not least in reflecting, and resourcing the enactment of identity. Further, if each of these plasters functions simultaneously in practical (e.g., medical) and expressive (e.g., evoke identity) ways, they also occasion the reordering of the boundaries between the expressive and the practical. For example, the use of ‘invisible’ or scar-reduction plasters need not express ‘vanity’, but can be said to imply a practical concern not to ‘upset’ others. There is a final facet of variety that I want to address here, namely, the matter of multitude or multiplicity.11 When we enter a pharmacy, we are confronted with shelves – indeed, entire sections – devoted to variants of the sticking plaster. Taken individually, each type of sticking plaster embodies particular standards and fulfils particular configurations of ‘technical’ functions but also, as we have seen, mediates complex cultural categories and social identities. Doubtless, this can be reframed in terms of post-Fordism: niche products individually ‘speak’ to particular consumer identities.12 However, taken en masse, plasters can be said to be embroiled in what we might tentatively call ‘metastandardization’. The individual faced with a choice becomes situated as a ‘choice-maker’. Even the sticking plaster that on one level (that of the ostensibly medical) is apparently a matter of necessity becomes on another level a matter of choice. Ironically, then, the destandardization of the sticking plaster – or rather the multiplication of standards manifested in the proliferation of types of sticking plasters – yields a metastandardized choice-maker. As medical consumers, we are ‘obliged’ to make particular sorts of choices, and deploy particular sorts of calculative skills which in one way or another become accountable, when perhaps this is the last thing we want.13

8.5 On the perception of plasters So far, we have focused upon the plaster as a material artefact that signifies in a range of ways. Yet, it is also a representation readily available in



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popular culture. Here, I will, rather too peremptorily, deal with only two complementary facets of the popular signification of the plaster which will subsequently inform the analysis of one standardized feature of the plaster, namely, size. Let us consider violence in children’s cartoons. From the Bash Street Kids (a longstanding cartoon in the UK’s popular Beano comic) to Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry, violence is key to the action. Injury as a by-product of such violence is rarely allowed to get in the way of the action (except by way of closing the story). While it signifies a temporary triumph, it is also trivial in that the injured character will quickly revive and return to the serious business of indulging in more violence. A signifier of the triviality of the injury or of imminent recovery is the plaster (often in the form of two plasters arranged as a cross). In this context, the plaster’s signified is something like the idea ‘it’s only a scratch’. Perhaps the apotheosis of this comes in the form of Sin City’s Marv14 – the huge, sometimes kindly yet supremely vicious character who after yet another enormously violent encounter is covered in plasters. Here, the triviality of the wounds is forcefully signified by the way the many little plasters stand out against Marv’s muscular bulk: this is a multitude of ‘it’s only a scratch-es’ whose triviality is underlined by Marv’s continued energetic brutality. Typing ‘sticking plaster’ into Google UK yields many entries that play on its metaphorical meaning as a solution that is inadequate to the immensity of the problem to which it is applied. Thus, the seventh entry heading on the Google search reads ‘Alliance “not a sticking plaster” ’ and in the linked BBC article we find: ‘David Ford told his party’s annual conference in Bangor that the party would “not be used to apply a sticking plaster over a serious fault-line in the executive”’(BBC, 2008, no page numbers). Another example: the ninth entry heading reads, ‘Housing plan is little more than sticking plaster’ (Socialist Worker, 2008, no page numbers). And the same applies to the terms Band-Aid (‘The trillion dollar band-aid: Solving climate change will be the most expensive public policy decision ever. Half-baked thinking won’t fix it now’ – The Guardian, 2008) and Elastoplast (‘Judicial review is a mere Elastoplast’ – Independent, 2008). All this suggests a popular meaning associated with sticking plasters which complements its signification of ‘it’s only a scratch’: the plaster is of limited healing value (in a general sense) and should not be applied inappropriately. Of course, in these examples, it is the appropriateness of the intervention that is being contested, and reference to the sticking plaster is a rhetorical move meant to establish inappropriateness.



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What we see here is the plaster evoking, in two different ways, ‘trivial’ injury. In the first case, this is done positively – the plaster dresses injuries from which recovery is almost immediate. In the second case, this is done negatively – the plaster is represented as unable to cope with more substantial problems. In the next section we see how these connotations, serve in complicating judgements about the character of wounds.

8.6 Sizing up seriousness15 Boots Fabric Plasters, 40-pack size contains the following: 20 – 20 mm ⫻ 72 mm 12 – 20 mm ⫻ 40 mm 4 – 40 mm ⫻ 40 mm 2 – 53 mm ⫻ 72 mm 2 – fingertip plasters Elastoplast water resistant packet of 40 comprises: 2 – 50 mm ⫻ 72 mm 10 – 30 mm ⫻ 72 mm 8 – 23 mm diameter 20 – 19 mm ⫻ 72 mm Obviously these packets are not standardized in comparison to one another. Nevertheless, there are certain standardized features to which we can point. First, there are the limits to the sizes, with the largest around 50 mm wide, 70 mm long. The second is the variety. There are far fewer larger and smaller plasters than medium-sized ones. The third is the shape. By far the greater number are rectangular. This pattern of plasters suggests a particular statistical distribution of wounds: by far the most frequent will be ‘medium’ size, quite long and on parts of the body that do not require special taping configurations (most obviously the fingers). However, judging the applicability of a plaster requires a complex practical sensibility to the ‘factoriality’ of the wound. In assessing whether a wound can be dealt with simply by applying a plaster (rather than more expert or laborious treatment), one might take into account, for example (needless to say, these are hardly distinct in practice), • the quality of the wound (e.g., depth, raggedness of tear, amount of bleeding);16



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• position of the wound on the body (head, torso, fingers and difficulty of access, proximity to other wounds, or to joints, or to orifices); • physical circumstances of wounding (falling, cutting, stabbing, biting, crushing, hitting and apparent severity of foregoing); • social circumstances of wound (time of day, context of activities in which wound arose such as sport, play, fighting or animal attack; presence of witnesses, respective social status of victim or perpetrator); • moral circumstances (relative responsibilities of relevant persons; consequences of acting or failing to act; the prima facie moral status of the wound such as ‘criminal’, ‘accidental’ or ‘altruistic’). The key issue I want to raise concerns the material-cultural impact of standard-sized plasters on the practical sensibility to the ‘factoriality’ of minor wounds. Specifically, as noted above, plasters connote the wound’s triviality (‘it’s just a scratch’) and its belonging to the sphere of the ‘domestic’ (a belonging marked from the very moment of the sticking plaster’s inception). This connotation is underlined by their pre-cut sizes: it is on relatively little cuts that plasters belong. And yet, as the preceding bullet points suggest, wounds are characterized across a range of complex parameters. The ‘meaning’17 of a wound emerges in relation to such complexity that can render it, variously and in combination, the focus for the public display of concern or a matter of criminal justice or the object of professional care, for instance. The application of the standard pre-cut plaster contributes to this meaningfulness. As an instantiation of Serres’s parasite, the plaster can introduce interference: is the cut ‘serious’ enough to travel beyond the domestic? Even though this cut was made through violence, is it small enough to be domesticated by the plaster and perhaps dissipate the option of calling upon the law? Even though this small cut seems deep, can the plaster help it heal and remove it from the purview of the professional? Here, the plaster-as-parasite imports meanings (e.g., from some perspectives, it disorders through ‘trivialization’) that serve to complexify the meanings of (or reorders) local practices concerned with the treatment of wounds. That is to say, wounds which, from one point of view evoke professional medical help, or the criminal justice system, from another (that are partly mediated by the plaster), evoke a complex set of practices that serve in the practical boundary work demarcating the borders between the domestic and the professional, the trivial and the serious, the private and the public or the ordinary and the criminal. Put another way, the ‘simple’ or standard application of a ‘simple’ or standard plaster is also the complex enactment of a complex society.



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In this chapter I have attempted to explore how the standardization embodied in sticking plasters orders, disorders and reorders ‘the social’. As a medical consumer good, the standards that structure the plaster’s physical design (and the skills necessary to use it), also occasion the enactment of a variety of social boundaries, notably between the domestic and the professional, though also the expressive and the practical, the trivial and the serious, the private and the public or the lawful and the criminal. On this score, there is nothing special about the plaster. The same sort of pattern applies to a multitude of everyday artefacts. Perhaps the sticking plaster pales in comparison to the putative impacts of advanced contemporary medical technologies. In biomedicine, stem cells or genomics, for instance, are linked to radically new therapies and major social transformation. Even medical consumer technologies such as home (do-it-yourself) kits that can test for bowel cancer, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s or prostate cancer might be seen as contributing to the ‘geneticization’ of society (e.g., Lippmann, 1998). However, to study an un-exotic medical technology like the plaster reminds us that, however imminent major changes to society might appear, we should not forget the resilience of mundane society as it is made and remade in complex everyday practices informed by the most seemingly ordinary of standards. Now, what also makes these advanced technologies noteworthy is that in the process of their emergence, standardization is contested. What are the standards of safety, efficacy, efficiency, etc that ‘best’ apply to this or that novel technology, and how are these standards best developed, applied, monitored, calibrated, etc? Numerous case studies have shown how differing versions of relevant standards entail divergent assumptions about society, disciplinary knowledge, expert practice, professional accreditation, institutional relations and so forth. In the present case of sticking plasters, this chapter’s albeit brief foray into their developmental history suggests that they have not been characterized by such contestation, possibly because the original components were themselves well established. However, as we have also seen, such relatively low-key, seemingly incontrovertibly standardized artefacts do generate problematizations around the conduct of everyday life (indeed, what counts as everyday as opposed to criminal, or medical). This raises the not altogether surprising issue that standards that in one domain seem settled can, through their embodiment in artefacts or procedures, and through the circulation of those artefacts or procedures, generate



8.7 Concluding remarks


‘problems’ in a different domain – or rather, as in the case of sticking plasters in everyday life, begin to trouble the very parameters of that domain. In other words, in terms of the vocabulary adopted here, standards can parasitize their new settings. A broader research orientation (or, perhaps even, ‘general rule of method’) can be phrased as follows: When standards seem settled, seek out the problematizations that these apparently unproblematic standards tacitly generate. This will often entail close observation of the local and subtle practices through which the disruptions visited by standardization are managed. This can be further elaborated. As noted above, standards can proliferate from a single artefact as it begins to evolve into several types. These standards do not directly compete with one another. Rather, they sit in parallel as they are not strictly comparable. We have seen this in relation to the expanding range of sticking plasters, but such proliferation is likely found in relation to many consumer goods and services. With such proliferation, standardization is, hypothetically at least, liable to become ‘meta’ – standardization comes to be applied to the process of choosing among artefacts and services, and their respective standardizations. A rule of method here might read, Wherever there seems to be a miasma of standards, look for a (meta-)standardization that brings, or attempts to bring, order. Needless to say, these are rather generic rules of method. However, in keeping with the ethos of this chapter, the aim in these brief concluding remarks is not to standardize methodological strategies but rather to enable analytic tactics18 that are emergent in relation to the specificities of the case in question.

Notes 1. Of the many texts that could have been cited I mention only the following that have particularly inspired the present analysis: Bowker and Star (1999), Barry (2001) and O’Connell, (1993). Further removed substantively, but equally relevant is Power (1999). 2. The most basic of classifications of wounds is between open and closed – the latter include contusions or bruises, haematomas and crushing injuries, and will not be addressed in this chapter. 3. In Serres’s terms, we might say that the plaster as disruptive parasite was chaperoned by the Hermes of instruction, where Hermes is Serres’s figure for the heterogeneous ways in which messages pass across disparate domains, notably the ‘material’ and the ‘semiotic’. 4. One could also say that part and parcel of this individualization is a demedicalization where the treatment of wounds shifts from medical professionals to lay persons themselves. However, this should not be seen as a



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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

necessarily ‘good move’ as Foucauldian commentators have noted: such shifts can mean that everyday life is increasingly permeated by the clinical gaze, now mediated by lay people themselves (see, for example, Lupton, 1997). Though this chapter focuses mainly on the spatial shifts enacted by the introduction of the plaster (for example, between domestic and professional ‘spheres’), these are of course folded into changes in temporalization. For instance, the plaster introduces an immediacy previously absent: where once a small wound might be ignored, or its treatment deferred until help arrived, the plaster opens up the possibility that the wound can receive immediate self-administered attention. While these dimensions of the functionality of plasters have been listed here as if they were separate and distinct, it is assumed that this listing disambiguates, for the purposes of ease of exposition, functions that are simultaneously medical, social, cultural and aesthetic. In place of the plasters on this list, we might have considered waterproof plasters, hypo-allergenic plasters, stop-bleeding fast, padded plasters or sliver-impregnated plasters. One could say ‘subject positions’ instead of users here, but we would want to emphasize the heterogeneity of such users – if on one level they are subjects, this subjecthood (or quasi-subjecthood) cannot be divorced from the materialities of the assemblages which mediate it (for example, Latour, 1993). Moreover, we would not want to imply that these artefacts ‘interpellate’ their users – as consumer goods they engage in complex relations with their users which entail ‘resourcing’ as well as ‘making’ (see, for example, Lury, 1996). This contrast can be glossed in numerous ways, perhaps most obviously in terms of stigma (Goffman, 1963). However, it could be seen as mediating divergent temporalizations of the self: scarring as a marker of experience and means of rooting self in the past; anti-scarring as an enactment of self as a present unblemished image. Personal experience suggests that children might well want to ‘wear’ such plasters simply for the cartoons, irrespective of whether they have a wound ‘worthy’ of a plaster. Of course, this precipitates a negotiation over what counts as ‘worthy’ which incorporates arguments not only over the severity of the wound itself, but also over the waste of expensive plasters, and the confusion between a ‘toy’ and a ‘medical technology’. This issue concerns the ‘performativity’ not of individual technologies or artefacts, but of the multiplicity of such artefacts that confronts users. For an exploration of the role of such multiplicity in text, namely, the rhetorical utility of multiple and contradictory explanations or representations of, respectively, ‘road rage’ and the prospective ‘user’ of information and communication technologies, see Michael (2001) and Wilkie and Michael (2009). Such consumer identities are, of course, also routinely standardized through marketing and design techniques. In design, for example, this can take the form of personas that are used to think through the parameters of a product (for example, Don and Patrick, 2003). Needless to say, this dynamic is hardly confined to sticking plasters, or to medical artefacts at all. Equally obviously, there is a range of practices that



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14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

Sticking Plasters and Standardizations try to model, and make accountable, this choice-maker ranging from classical economics to contemporary bioethics. See, for example, the 2005 film Frank Miller’s Sin City directed (in the main) by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller. It should be noted that in this section I focus solely on packets of pre-cut plasters rather than self-cut strips, not least because, judging by the variety of the former, these are considerably more popular. In any case, the latter do not detract in any serious way from the key points raised. It can be noted that there are formal classifications of wounds, notably the Red Cross classification of war wounds (Coupland, 1992). Here, ‘meaning’ is understood in terms of ‘order-making’ which is both semiotic and material (see Michael, 2000). I use tactics in the sense of de Certeau (1984) to mean a responsive and immanent wandering that at once occupies and overflows the confines of discipline.

Bibliography Akrich, M. (1992), ‘The De-scription of Technical Objects’, in W. E. Bijker and J. Law (eds), Shaping Technology/Building Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Barry, A. (2001), Political Machines (London: The Athlone Press). BBC (2008), ‘Alliance “not a Sticking Plaster”’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ ireland/7627213.stm, date accessed 22 October 2008. Beck, U. and E. Beck-Gernsheim (2001), Individualization (London: Sage). Beiersdorf (2008), ‘Hansaplast: Brand History’, http://www.beiersdorf.com/AreaBrands/Core-Brands/Plaster-Brands/Brand-History.aspx?l⫽2, date accessed 8 October 2008. Boots (2008a), ‘Bandages and Plasters – Skin Closures Kit’, http://www.boots. com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId⫽10052&productId⫽ 2018&callingViewName⫽&categoryId⫽4138&langId⫽-1&catalogId⫽11051, date accessed 10 October 2008. Boots (2008b), ‘Bandages and Plasters – Hydrocolloidal Dressings’, http://www.boots. com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId⫽10052&productId⫽ 2020&callingViewName⫽&categoryId⫽4138&langId⫽-1&catalogId⫽11051, 149date accessed 10 October 2008. Bowker G. C. and S. L. Star (1999), Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Brand Republic (2008), ‘Elastoplast Case Study’, http://www.brandrepublic. com/InDepth/Features/656124/Superbrands-case-studies—Elastoplast/, date accessed 3 October 2008. Canguilhem, G. (1994), ‘The Normal and the Pathological’, in F. Delaporte (ed.), A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem (New York: Zone Books). Coupland, R. M. (1992), ‘The Red Cross Classification of War Wounds: The E.X.C.F.V.M. Scoring System’, World Journal of Surgery 16, pp. 910–17. De Certeau, M. (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press).



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Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University (2008), ‘Band-Aid’, http://literature.sdsu.edu/nericcio/band-aidBIG.jpg, date accessed 10 October 2008. Don, A. and J. Patrick (2003), ‘User Requirements’, in B. Laurel (ed.) Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Elastoplast (2008), ‘Scar Reducer’, http://int.elastoplast.net/products/scar/ scar/16004.html, date accessed 8 October 2008. European Tissue Repair Society (2002), European Tissue Repair Society Bulletin, 9(3). No page numbers. http://www.etrs.org/bulletin9_3/section7.html, date accessed 8 October 2008. Forrest, R. D. (1982), ‘Early History of Wound Treatment’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 73, pp. 198–205. Goffman, E. (1963), Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall). Greco, M. (1998), ‘Between Social and Organic Norms: Reading Canguilhem and “Somatization”’, Economy and Society 27, pp. 234–48. Independent (2008), ‘Judicial Review is a Mere Elastoplast’, http://findarticles.com/ p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19950802/ai_n13998173, date accessed 22 October 2008. Kilmer House (2008), ‘The Story of Johnson and Johnson’, http://www.kilmerhouse. com/?p⫽454, date accessed 8 October 2008. Latour, B. (1992), ‘Where are the Missing Masses? A Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’, in W. E. Bijker, and J. Law (eds), Shaping Technology/Building Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Latour, B. (1993), We Have Never Been Modern (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf). Latour, B. (2005), Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lippmann, A. (1998), ‘The Politics of Health: Geneticization versus health Promotion’, in S. Sherwin (ed.), The Politics of Women’s Health: Exploring Agency and Autonomy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). Lupton, D. (1997), ‘Foucault and the Medicalization Critique’, in A. Petersen and R. Burton (eds), Foucault: Health and Medicine (New York: Routledge). Lury, C. (1996), Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Polity). Mauss, M. (1985), ‘A Category of the Person: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self’, in M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Michael, M. (2000), Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature: From Society to Heterogeneity (London: Routledge). Michael, M. (2001), ‘The Invisible Car: The Cultural Purification of Road Rage’, in D. Miller (ed.), Car Cultures (Oxford: Berg). Michael, M. (2006), Technoscience and Everyday Life (Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill). O’Connell, J. (1993), ‘Metrology: the Creation of Universality by the Circulation of Particulars’, Social Studies of Science 23, pp. 129–73. Ovington, L. G. (2002), ‘The Evolution of Wound Management’, Home Healthcare Nurse 20, pp. 652–6. Power, M. (1999), The Audit Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Serres, M. (1982a), Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).



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Serres, M. (1982b), The Parasite (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Socialist Worker (2008), ‘Housing Plan is Little More than a Sticking Plaster’, http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=15889, date accessed 22 October 2008. TextMex (2008), ‘Oldie-but-goodie-mexican-flesh-bandaid’, http://textmex. blogspot.com/2007/04/oldie-but-goodie-mexican-flesh-bandaids.html, date accessed 13 October 2008. The Guardian (2008), ‘The Trillion Dollar Band-Aid’, http://www.guardian. co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/15/climatechange.eu, date accessed 22 October 2008. Wilkie, A. and M. Michael (2009), ‘Expectation and Mobilisation: Enacting Future Users’, Science, Technology and Human Values 34, pp. 502–22. Wynne, B. E. (1989), ‘Frameworks of Rationality in Risk Management: Towards the Testing of Naïve Sociology’, in J. Brown (ed.), Environmental Threats (London: Belhaven Press).



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Part III The Contestation and Adaptation of Standardizing Practices




Local Experiments with Global Certificates: How Russian Software Testers are Inventing Themselves as a Profession Melanie Feakins

9.1 Introduction The central goal we are trying to achieve from the beginning is to establish the understanding of testing as a separate, serious profession with a serious background. The biggest problem in achieving this goal is that there is confusion about whether being a tester can be a distinct specialization; in fact, there are still no specialized courses or specialized training in testing. (Project manager with a software firm in St Petersburg, Russia, 2008) The above appraisal of software testing,1 made by a self-described software enthusiast, points to a curious paradox that dominates this occupation in the Russian software industry today: the more software testers are in demand and the more testers themselves are eager to be recognized and formalized as a distinct profession, the more there is uncertainty within the wider industry about the content and boundaries of testing activity, its status among software developers, and the qualifications its practitioners should possess. This paradox is playing a central role in defining the emergent profession of testing in Russia, and because of it, Russian testers are particularly ready to experiment with various norms and techniques of professionalization developed in the global software industry. Testers in Russia are now referencing and drawing upon an existing, globally accessible, body of knowledge to articulate and formalize what they are already doing. This globally accessible knowledge, in the form of testing standards and procedures, is made available by the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB). The ISTQB, 151



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established in 2002, began by creating an international professional certification scheme and making widely accessible a set of educational and training materials devoted to it, in the hope that they will become universally accepted across national borders. It is to these materials that Russian testers have turned as part of their strategy for creating software testing as a profession in their own local context. Global certification processes, which often include specific procedures for the verification of knowledge, performance, or quality through independent assessment, also generate exposure, recognizability, and belonging to communities of practice (Gertler, 2008; Wenger, 1999). While these aspects serve as resources for those who become knowledgeable about certification (whether or not they formally acquire certification, prefer to comply with its recommendations, or actively refute it), they also do something else – they create conditions for certification to be evaluated and its meanings recast in the local context (Feakins, 2007). Because international certification can be recast locally, it is important to examine how actors learn, understand, and implement international standards in their own contexts as the meanings of certifications can be nuanced and are not easily discerned from outside that context. For instance, the reach for, and use of, the ISTQB knowledge and certification process by testers in Russia is not an attempt to ‘catch up’ with more advanced foreign professional settings, and it would be wrong to presume so. It is a local experiment with a certification for the purpose of professionalization that is not under the control, nor any direction, of the ISTQB. It is akin to what Nigel Thrift describes as an ‘impulse without determinate goals’ and it cannot be reduced to sets of instructions and invitations for participation with a predictable meaning attached to the identity of internationally certified professional tester (Thrift, 2005, p. 1). Instead, it is a creative and local experiment by Russian testers who use the professional certification materials and processes offered by the ISTQB for their own visions. They are not only trying to generate a means of belonging to the geographically dispersed global profession (which easily coheres with the stated interests and goals of the ISTQB), but equally important and perhaps more interesting, they are experimenting with the international certification as a means to collectively establish local professional recognition. This chapter is organized as follows. I begin by introducing the offshore as a transterritorial economic space and explore how certification and professionalization are initiating a form of governance at a distance, emphasizing that this should not be equated with neoliberal governance. I argue for recognizing the collective aspirations that are expressed in this professionalization experiment, noting that the establishment



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of a professional field, enticements to belong to this field, and the popularizing of communication norms and a professional lexicon are oriented towards formalizing and growing the local professional community. In the next section I explore the concept of professionalization in relation to international certification, paying attention to what both mean in postSoviet Russia. Following this, I describe current shifts in the offshore industry (e.g., the increasing development of software for medical and financial institutions) that are changing the way software testing is seen and valued. I focus on the attention which is now paid to software’s accuracy and analyse how this accuracy is measured. After this, I discuss the historical stages through which the development of certification norms by the ISTQB has proceeded since 2002. Then, in the longest section of the chapter, I examine how the norms of international certification are employed by the emerging group of Russian software testers for their own goal – namely, to organize and represent their activities in such a way that Russian software developers would recognize them as an equally legitimate ‘profession’. I argue that a perspective which appreciates how actors adapt locally the standards of certification that were designed internationally shows that although the use of these standards partly accords with the idea of governance at a distance, this interpretation does not acknowledge that alternative local agendas also underlie this process. This chapter is part of a larger ethnographic research project conducted between 2002 and 2009 in St Petersburg, Russia. During that period I spent over a year doing fieldwork research among Russian software firms. I interacted with, observed, and interviewed individuals involved in different activities of these firms: CEOs, project managers, software designers, coders, user interface developers, quality assurance professionals, and testers. I conducted almost a hundred interviews, which were semistructured, recorded, and later transcribed. During my fieldwork I also attended three Annual Offshore Outsourcing Summits that were organized in 2002, 2005, and 2008 in St Petersburg, Russia by Russoft and Fort Ross – two Consortiums of Russian software firms that consider themselves as the ‘Russian offshore’. The materials I analyse also include presentations made at these summits and interviews I conducted with their participants.

9.2 Governance as a collective aspiration The professionalization of testing is occurring in the software industry globally, but there is particular intensity to the process in the ‘offshore’.



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I use the term ‘offshore’ to describe a trans-territorial economic space where software services and production are oriented towards clients and parent firms located ‘onshore’. This space is trans-territorial because networks and arrangements for this kind of software production transcend multiple geographical boundaries, including the supposed boundary between the onshore and the offshore (Amin, 2000; 2002). Project communities that design, code, and test software are located in different global sites; their work teams are dispersed across borders and include people who work onshore (at the client site) and offshore (in various independent firms subcontracted by the client) (see Aneesh, 2006 for further examples; Xiang, 2007). In such distributed projects, the knowledge of what specifications, standards, and protocols of practice are used in different places has become a prerequisite for being able to work. Offshore software firms, including Russian firms whose clients are mainly in Western Europe and North America, turn to international certification for many reasons. For example, the knowledge of standards, practices, and terminologies used elsewhere is valuable for local firms because it enables them to perceive, understand, and even anticipate the expectations of their foreign clients. International certification provides offshore firms with access to important economic spaces and places, as participating in tenders and winning contracts can be restricted to firms that are formally certified. And yet, these reasons should not obscure the fact that international certification may also be used for quite different purposes by local actors within firms. Russian software testers, I argue, turn to international certification for a specific reason that is central to their context. They use it as a means for making their occupation, which already exists, into a profession that is locally recognized as legitimate – something that has not happened automatically, because software designers tend to think that they already ‘test’ their work themselves and therefore do not see having a separate testing profession as relevant. In other words, while it is certainly true that the introduction of international certification regimes in Russia can be seen as a form of governance ‘at a distance’ (Larner and Le Heron, 2004), it is no less important that local enthusiasts also actively seek these certification regimes for their own purposes, and this form of action is not governed from afar. At the same time, these local enthusiasts cannot quite avoid the choice of international certification, even if they choose it for their own purposes. This choice is meaningful to them and it is not dictated; it is a choice governed by mechanisms that are persuasive without being authoritative, in other words, through the mechanisms of governmentality (see Dean, 2007; Foucault, 1991; Miller and Rose, 2008).



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However, this form of governing should not be reduced to ‘neoliberal governmentality’ because neoliberal governmentality presupposes that those who engage with certification are being invited principally to remake themselves as neoliberal subjects or neoliberal certified professionals (Higgins and Tamm Hallström, 2006; Higgins, 2006) – the kind of individuals who come to create themselves as subjects maximizing their positions vis-à-vis markets. The wider contours of this emerging certification scheme have underpinnings of neoliberal governmentality with its ‘attempts to integrate new geographic spaces and populations not by overt coercion, but by instituting a host of “harmonized” regulations, codes, and standards’ (Dunn, 2005, p. 175). However, the actual fit is more tenuous than might at first be thought since such attempts to govern are not necessarily accompanied by forms of neoliberal individualizing through self-governance techniques (Dean, 2007). In the Russian context, certification is being used by testers collectively, to render their work and skills into the shape and status of a profession. Equating the adoption of international certification by Russian testers with a technique of shaping neoliberal professionals would fail to notice that this is a collective strategy for creating a professional field, not necessarily a form of individual cultivation.

9.3 Generating a professional field What constitutes a profession in the software and IT industries is not as clear as in traditional professional fields of law, medicine, dentistry, architecture, and engineering. In these fields the meaning and control of the professional sphere has often been a coordinated effort of educational institutions and specialized guilds that have sought to establish state-sanctioned regulation. Such regulation typically takes the form of clear boundaries for inclusion in, or exclusion from, professional fields for individuals and institutions. The boundaries are enforced with explicit educational requirements and examinations for individuals and accreditation of professional boards and educational institutions. The boundaries of professional space and belonging are, however, constantly under construction. The development and enhancement of ethics committees (with membership review powers), professional codes of conduct, standards of performance, and continuing education requirements are just a few of the ways in which professional spheres are becoming more intensely regulated, both in form and meaning. Unlike these examples, the emerging software and IT professions are relatively unregulated. Often, what constitutes a ‘profession’ in this sector is an open question.



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The unregulated nature of this professional space means that governance through certification is more likely than explicit state regulation involving professional boards and licensing. In the Russian offshore software industry, the open question of what constitutes a profession is accompanied by a consistent and explicit focus on professionalism and on what it means to be a professional. The terms ‘professionalism’, ‘professional’, and ‘professionalization’ are used with striking frequency in conversations among colleagues and the materials produced by firms, business consortia, and consultancies. The frequency with which these terms are used in Russian is greater than in English and their meaning tends to be different and broader.2 From the perspective of those who work in the Russian software sector there are two distinct meanings of the word ‘professional’ – one, an internationally recognized designation of being a professional through certification;3 the other, a locally recognized identity as a professional that emerges among peers, which refers to knowledge and a high level of performance in a specialized area and attitude to work, none of which is guaranteed by being certified. It is this second meaning of being a professional tester that testing enthusiasts in Russia are striving to achieve. Russian testers are drawing on one sense of ‘professional’ – as a kind of label assigned by international certification – in order to become recognized as professionals in the locally understood sense. Since they can be seen as professionals in a certain occupation (testing) this also means that the occupation itself is recognized as a ‘profession’. In other words, these enthusiasts are acquiring international certification not to evaluate individual skills of testers within a pre-existing field (the meaningful evaluation comes from elsewhere – from their peers in the industry), but rather to produce that field itself. It is not about comparing one tester who has a certificate with another one who does not; it is rather about generating a critical mass of individuals with certificates so that they become visible as a professional field. Because it is not about individual evaluation but about generating a collective profession, certification is being used not descriptively, but performatively (see Yurchak, 2006).

9.4 Producing accuracy This experiment in professionalizing testing is happening at a critical moment, while testing is gaining momentum and recognition both locally and globally. The moment is critical because testing is now almost a routine part of proposals, estimations, bids, contracts, and ongoing development partnerships for the creation of computer software. Although testing is still subject to speculative trimmings and re-evaluations, especially 10.1057/9780230289673 - Calculating the Social, Edited by Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner


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compared to other parts of the software development process whose time and/or resource needs take precedence within projects, testing is increasingly seen as essential. It is no longer a discretionary part of projects because the measurements and assurances it articulates are part of how the success of a project or product is defined. This new regard for testing is not due to changes in the content and procedures of testing, but rather to a wider shift in how the outcomes of testing are understood and valued. With the use of calculative technologies that are capable of describing certain features of software performance, testing results are gaining greater visibility and recognition. Aside from catching and tracking bugs, one of the tasks that testing performs is to provide measurements of ‘accuracy’ and ‘reliability’. These measurements describe how frequently a software programme can be expected to produce anticipated results in the form of data, action, and decisions on the basis of particular inputs. Accuracy and reliability measurements are derived from functional testing, and the more comprehensive the testing, the more precise the measurements of accuracy and reliability. To guarantee that these measurements are intelligible and provide bases for comparison, they are usually described using such expressions as performed ‘with 99.5 per cent accuracy’ or ‘with 99.8 per cent reliability’. In this way, testing creates benchmarking material that provides a basis for making comparisons, much of which tends to be between the previous and the current versions of software, although other kinds of comparison also become possible (on benchmarking see Larner and Le Heron, 2004). Software testing is not concerned with the actual process of code writing and does not assess the attributes of code in terms of algorithmic appropriateness, density or simplicity. While these categories can be subject to quality assessments and control, they are outside the purview of testing. Similar to these other areas that are subject to quality control and assurance however, there is also discretion in the processes. Testing procedures can vary in the rigour of their scripts, number of test cases tried, extent to which bugs are caught and reported, and types of testing software used. Importantly, this means that manoeuvreability and discretion are embedded in the processes that produce the increasingly valued measurements of accuracy and reliability. The efforts and strategies of Russian enthusiasts to professionalize testing address these discretionary possibilities by increasing the availability and awareness of the now commonly referenced global standards, making testers more openly aware of testing practices that are known (if not necessarily used) elsewhere. In recent years St Petersburg software firms have developed expertise in industries that value specifiable accuracy and reliability. Increasingly, 10.1057/9780230289673 - Calculating the Social, Edited by Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner


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these firms are developing software for medical diagnostics, financial services, options trading, and medical records management for clients in the United States and Western Europe. This is a trend that is experienced across the offshore and the demand for accuracy in these sectors is intense; Software glitches, unanticipated results, or mistaken actions within the software in these sectors can lead to inaccurate medical assessment, patient diagnoses, trading actions, etc (see Grote and Taube, 2006 for similar sector trends in India). Because such mistakes can have profound implications the demands for measurable accuracy and reliability are high.

9.5 Global resources for certification The International Software Testing Qualifications Board was established in 2002 in Edinburgh by a group of professionals who were aware of two different phenomena: growing expectations for software performance and an intensification of globalizing trends in the industry. Having identified the lack of an international qualification ‘scheme aimed at software and system testing professionals’ as a major problem for the industry, employers, and testing professionals, the ISTQB decided to create and support a ‘single, universally accepted, international qualification scheme … by setting guidelines for accreditation and examination for national boards’ (ISTQB, 2005, Mission Statement). The examinations offered by accredited national boards that belong to the ISTQB as members lead to certifications that bear the stamp of ISTQB. The certifications that are offered by the ISTQB have a history traceable to national board certifications that pre-date the formation of the ISTQB. The initial syllabus and training materials used by the ISTQB were drawn from the training materials of the German and UK Testing Boards, with both contributing to the development of the ‘Foundation Level’ syllabus. For several years the syllabus of those boards were used in their entirety not only for the Foundation Level, but also for the ‘Advanced Level’ ISTQB certification. In late 2007 the ISTQB released its own Advanced Level syllabus, which was the collaborative outcome of an ISTQB working party. In 2009 the very first ‘Expert Level’ syllabus was released as a Beta version by ISTQB and it was developed entirely by a working party of the ISTQB. The historical trace of certification to the UK and German testing boards, though now waning in terms of its recognition, was important in the early years of the ISTQB. The initial use of existing syllabus materials developed by the UK and German boards helped the ISTQB not to waste effort in repeating the development of



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existing resources, but it also helped the ISTQB to gain recognition. The ISTQB benefited from the already established reputation of the British and German testing certification schemes and the ‘transfer’ of that regard to ISTQB’s international certification scheme. The ISTQB articulates a vision of common professional space stretching beyond national borders. To be exact, the ISTQB represents its aims as follows: make testing skills comparable across countries, enable testers to move more easily across national borders, have testing mean the same thing everywhere to benefit multi-national projects, promote testing as a profession, provide materials for people to earn an internationally recognized certificate in their own language, establish a standard framework for career progression, and help firms establish recruitment and training policies to increase recognition of testing qualifications (ISTQB, 2005). The ISTQB’s testing certification scheme is one of the techniques for developing greater coordination, recognition, promotion, and comparison across borders. By making testing approaches, practices, and methods more widely available, the ISTQB is providing resources that can be used both individually and collectively.

9.6 Localizing certification To quote once again the software manager from the earlier epigraph, the goal of software testers in Russia is ‘to establish the understanding of testing as a separate, serious profession with a serious background’. This is the goal of a self-styled network of enthusiasts who have been in testing for a number of years and are engaged in these activities mainly because, to quote another tester, ‘They like their profession, want to dispel the misunderstanding about its role, and try to draw more skilled professionals [into it]’. Drawing more skilled professionals to the field is one of their most difficult tasks, as there has not been a clear and discernable route for acquiring testing knowledge and skills. So far testers have been largely self-educated, having learnt their professional skills in teams when they are already employed. Testing teams are structured in a way that allows recently hired people without experience, known as ‘juniors’, to acquire the necessary knowledge and language on the job, by observing and talking with more experienced testers, conducting assignments and reading literature. A typical experience of being initiated into the profession is described by one tester: I had no formal experience in testing before, so it was several months of self-enhancement in testing. Mostly reading literature, reading



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proper books and filling some gaps in other technical disciplines. Then I was involved in several projects. I started in the dedicated quality team, starting in the testing team. After something like one and a half or two years, I moved up to deputy manager. (Deputy Manager of a Testing Team, 2008) Such an informal approach to developing knowledge in testing means that skills are continually deepened and fine-tuned, as is the case with many of the occupations in software development where experience is often reputed by developers and testers to be the best training. The informality of the process and the lack of structured training does not necessarily mean that testers have difficulty acquiring the skills necessary for their work. Rather, the informality means that it is harder to recognize the extent of exposure and depth of understanding that a tester has achieved. It is exactly for that reason that the professionalization of testing by means of its certification becomes attractive for testers. Professional certification, though widely regarded in the local labour market as incomparably less important than university degrees, still provides means for people to gain status. Employees in St Petersburg software and IT firms uniformly have at least a Masters degree; in this sector high regard for formal higher education is unshakable. However, the chaotic economic transformations that have taken place in Russia since 1991 have disrupted the traditional routes for professional development and advancement (Shevchenko, 2009). Partly as a result of these changes, the local software and IT industry has turned towards international certification regimes for recognizable professional credentials. As one CEO put it, describing his understanding of individual certifications in the industry: I think it’s very important to have the ability to measure whether a goal has been reached or not. If you have formal credentials about having passed some tests and graduated from university, this shows that you have managed to achieve your goals. The same thing happens in certification. I understand perfectly well that I may employ a non-certified guy who is very very clever, but I also understand that it is much better to employ a certified guy who is very clever. (CEO and Founder of a Software Firm, 2003, emphasis added) It is increasingly important to earn certification that attests to one’s specific knowledge and preparation and which applies to concrete areas of work. Today, when there is a shortage of recognizable, experienced



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testers and when measurements of accuracy and reliability that testing produces are becoming more visibly valued, the circumstances are set for professionalizing testing and testers. Although certification is not yet accepted exclusively as the professional path (because it is new and not everyone understands what it means or what it may contribute), it is certainly gaining prominence as a reference point for discussing qualifications and developing verified expertise in testing. Certification’s new prominence derives partly from the verification of professional knowledge, skill and exposure, but it is also created by local enthusiasts who are interested in expanding the field by absorbing expertise from elsewhere in order to generate more locally. In 2006, the Russian Software Testing Qualifications Board (RSTQB) became a member board of the ISTQB. In its previous brief incarnation under a different name, the RSTQB experimented with developing its own syllabus and learning materials. However, after joining the ISTQB as a member, it began evaluating and adopting the syllabus materials and certification procedures that are part of the ISTQB scheme. This move has introduced to the local industry learning materials that were developed elsewhere, making known which testing approaches and procedures are performed in other places, especially other offshore places. Because so many member countries use the ISTQB syllabus to offer education, professional training and certification, knowledge of these materials provides the possibility of being included in the ‘wider offshore’ or, at least, minimizing exclusion from that wider offshore. One testing enthusiast described the importance of such inclusion: Take, for example, an outsourcing company. We get some tasks from a customer in the United States for a project that has already been partly done by another team in China. So, we have a big amount of scripts, code with comments, maybe some scripts for automatic testing, and so on. If we do not have this common language, we really have a big problem understanding what was done, what should be done, and what we can do. (Senior Tester, 2008) The ISTQB syllabus and learning materials are now being referred to as ‘common’, and one way to avoid the threat of being excluded from the expanding networks that stretch across borders is to familiarize oneself with these common materials. Knowing the common professional lexicon, and tracing its constant development, increases one’s communicability and ability to write and read actual testing scripts, code notes and



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project documents. This is especially important because software codes and projects are circulating across borders with increasing frequency during the periods of creation, testing, maintenance and enhancement. The circulation of materials, project life-span and the nature of virtual teams generates a need for a common language with testing terminology understandable to those who are currently involved in projects and those who will use the materials in the future. One of the Russian Board’s big concerns is the lack of an accessible professional dictionary, which is needed all the more urgently considering that the testing vocabulary used by practitioners is expanding at an increasing speed. The RSTQB is currently involved in an important project of creating a glossary in Russian that will define terms used in the daily work of testers to make communication among them easier. ISTQB publishes its own glossary in English; however, that version is focused on defining testing-related terms that are used in the teaching materials for certification. Since the current experiment with professionalizing testing is broader than only certification, the Russian Board is drawing on ISTQB resources, but it is also trying to create other conditions to help professionalize the occupation of Russian testers. This is why the Russian glossary, which does include a partial translation of the ISTQB glossary, also differs from it substantially. Russian testing enthusiasts who are involved in creating that glossary think of it as a means for creating a professional community of Russian testers that reaches beyond the boundaries of firms and project teams. According to one testing enthusiast, the current situation with terminology and communication in Russian testing is plagued by multiple misunderstandings and a slow pace of conversation; such problems become even more glaring when communication is written, and especially when it is conducted between testers in several firms. Routinely, companies and teams employ terms and phrases that do not match, and these unmatched vocabularies spread in parallel to each other, creating a multivalent linguistic situation, which one tester described as follows: The problem is not simply that one company is using one standard [language] and another is using another standard [language]. Rather, different groups of people in the same company might be using different terminologies that came to them from different firms. Because those versions [of language] happened to have spread. And then these different versions collide if a big group [of testers] uses one version, another group uses another version, and a small team uses the third. (Tester and an Author of the Dictionary, 2008)



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While the task of the new Russian glossary seems rather straightforward – to draw professional boundaries by creating a standard professional lexicon – the actual work of compiling it is anything but straightforward. Creating such a glossary involves grappling with the usual problems of translation, such as accounting for linguistic idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies (e.g., often several English terms refer to one concept or several concepts are referred to by one term, which means that one-toone mapping of Russian and English descriptions is impossible). A more challenging problem is that a glossary is an attempt to fix a language which is by definition fluid and rapidly evolving, and whose terminologies and objects of description frequently shift. This linguistic situation is particularly endemic to high-tech environments, where words are invented and recoded to be useful for new systems and designs more often than in other professions. The authors of the Russian glossary are trying to solve these problems by inventing a language which is not too anchored in technicalities and is flexible enough to permit colloquial use. In the words of its authors: ‘We try to create terms that are also used in real life, avoiding purely scientific or intensely conceptual ones. We want the terms that can be used in some short communication in the coffee room’.

9.7 Conclusion The testing enthusiasts, who together comprise the Russian Testing Board, are engaging a range of connected activities that are oriented towards formalizing their profession. As part of this project, they are using the materials and certification scheme of the ISTQB to become exposed to the methods, practices, procedures, and terminologies that are learnt in other places because it assists them in their efforts to become recognized in the Russian context as a profession. While the use of the materials and the certification scheme seems fairly straightforward, there is a new form of belonging to the international profession that is proving useful and interesting for the Russian testing enthusiasts. The newer materials of ISTQB, in particular the new advanced level certificates, are the outcome of collaborative working parties which are comprised of member boards. These materials are produced through a geographically dispersed collaborative network, a process that enables member boards to become involved in the global production of this certification scheme. For the RSTQB, the collaborative production provides a venue for participating in global production that can be represented locally in terms of its contribution to testing knowledge and standards that



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will be used elsewhere, which is another means of asserting professional competence. This invitation to not only use the material and belong to the certification community, but to actually participate in developing the ISTQB materials for global use, resonates with the known features of how governmentality works through influence and invitation. By inviting member boards to develop the knowledge and materials that will further develop the certification scheme, participants can shift themselves from being testing enthusiasts on the edges of the certification project to being active participants who identify with the project. Nevertheless, by shifting the focus of attention to the local context, and by focusing specifically on why Russian testers are experimenting with certification, it becomes clear that an analysis which too quickly asserts a clear fit with the concept of neoliberal governmentality cannot address the collective efforts and aspirations of creating the professional field locally. While it is the case that Russian testers are eager to be knowledgeable of practices and common languages that are used elsewhere, and to continually render themselves part of dynamic developments in the offshore software industry, this is not a full description of why they do what they do. The main reason that the enthusiasts are organizing certification in connection with the ISTQB, creating a Russian glossary, and participating in the production of the ISTQB syllabus is to create their profession locally. Their experiment with certification, including both how they absorb and contribute to it, provides very tangible means for creating and furthering their collective professional status locally.

Notes 1. Software testing refers to the activities aimed at evaluating an attribute or capability of a programme or system and determining that it meets its required result (Hetzel, 1988, p. 88). The scope of software testing has broadened in recent years to include activities that describe and evaluate software not only in terms of its functional aspects (i.e., ascertaining if the software performs the required functions), but also its non-functional aspects (i.e., ascertaining aspects of quality, stability, expandability, usability and security). 2. Since the start of the post-socialist reforms in Russia, the term ‘professional’ has become increasingly polysemic, acquiring many new meanings in different contexts (Urban, 2008). 3. Apart from the international certification scheme discussed here, there are also certifications established by large global corporations that exist in corporatespecific forms, such as Microsoft Certified System Engineer, Certified Microsoft CRM Expert, Sun Certified Java Developer, Cisco Career Certifications, etc. It is common for these designations to be listed on company websites, in marketing



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materials, and in individual resumes. These professional ‘corporate’ certifications are often displayed more prominently than academic credentials and post-graduate degrees (Xiang, 2007, p. 18). While such individual certifications can only tenuously be called ‘professional’ (because they originate with corporations rather than independent professional boards or state-sanctioned regulatory agencies), they are emerging as a global technique for professionalizing the workforce in offshore spaces.

Bibliography Amin, A. (2000), ‘The European Union as More than a Triad Market for National Economic Spaces’, in G. L. Clark, M. P. Feldman, and M. S. Gertler (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Amin, A. (2002), ‘Spatialities of Globalization’, Environment and Planning A 34, pp. 385–99. Aneesh, A. (2006), Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization (Durham and London: Duke University Press). Dean, M. (2007), Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and International Rule (London: McGraw Hill and Open University Press). Dunn, E. (2005), ‘Standards and Person-Making in East Central Europe’, in A. Ong and S. Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell). Feakins, M. (2007), ‘Off and Out: The Spaces for Certification – Offshore Outsourcing in St Petersburg, Russia’, Environment and Planning 39, pp. 1889–907. Foucault, M. (1991), ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Gertler, M. (2008), ‘Buzz Without Being There? Communities of Practice in Context’, in A. Amin and J. Roberts (eds), Community, Economic Creativity and Organization (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Grote, M. and F. Taub (2006), ‘Off-Shoring the Financial Services Industry: Implications for the Evolution of Indian IT Clusters’, Environment and Planning A 38, pp. 1287–305. Hetzel, W. (1988), The Complete Guide to Software Testing, 2nd ed. Wellesley, Mass. QED Information Sciences). Higgins, W. and K. Tamm Hallström (2007), ‘Standardization, Globalization and Rationalities of Government’, Organization Studies 14(5), pp. 685–704. Higgins, W. (2006), ‘How We Are Governed Now: Globalisation, Neo-Liberal Governmentality and the Nullification of Substantive Policy’, Journal of Australian Political Economy 57, pp. 5–29. ISTQB (2005), ‘International Software Testing Qualifications Board’, http://www. istqb.org/mission.htm, date accessed 14 August 2008. Larner, W. and R. LeHeron (2004), ‘Global Benchmarking: Participating “at a Distance” in the Globalizing Economy’, in W. Larner and W. Walters (eds), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge). Miller, P. and N. Rose (2008), Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Political Life (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press).



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Thrift, N. (2005), Knowing Capitalism (London, Thousand Oaks and New Dehli: Sage Publications). Xiang, B. (2007), Global ‘Bodyshopping’: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press). Urban, M. (2008), ‘“I Never Had a Political Career”: Russian Political Actors on Politics and Morality’, Working Paper of The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, http://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/2008_821-16-2_Urban.pdf, date accessed 12 December 2009. Wenger, E. (1999), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, Identity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press). Yurchak, A. (2006), Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press).



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Adapting Standards: The Case of Environmental Management Systems in Australia Vaughan Higgins, Jacqui Dibden and Chris Cocklin

10.1 Introduction Private standards and certification schemes provide an increasingly significant site of study for scholars interested in the restructuring of the agrifood sector. In the last ten years there has been a burgeoning literature on standards and certification schemes, focusing particularly on organic (Guthman, 2004), fair trade (Renard, 2005) and retailer-led schemes (Campbell et al., 2006; Hatanaka et al., 2005). The rise of private standards schemes has tended to be conceptualized as part of a broader global shift from public to private forms of governance as large international supermarket chains in particular, and to a lesser extent actors such as civil society organizations and social activists, exert increasing control over agri-food supply chains (Burch and Lawrence, 2007; Fulponi, 2006; Henson and Reardon, 2005) including the production practices of processors and producer-farmers (Hendrickson and James, 2005). This relates to the more general influence of what Cashore (2002, p. 504) terms ‘Non-State Market-Driven’ forms of governance that ‘derive their policy-making authority not from the state, but from the manipulation of global markets and attention to customer preferences’. While this literature is significant in drawing attention to the shifting power relations within agri-food supply chains from producers and processors to supermarkets, it gives little attention to how standards are implemented and adapted, and the role of state agencies, sub-state or regional authorities and producers in this process. Drawing upon insights from the literature on governmentality, this chapter examines the different ways in which a private standards scheme – environmental management systems (EMS), based on the international standard ISO14001 – has been implemented at a national, regional and industry level in Australian 167



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agriculture. We argue that the application of EMS has depended on alliances between a diverse range of agencies and actors – both public and private. Moreover, making EMS work at an industry and regional level has involved the adaptation of this standards scheme so that it accords with sectoral and local priorities rather than striving to meet the full requirements of the international ISO14001 standard. Prior to elaborating our argument, it is necessary to explore briefly the merits and limitations of the existing literature on agri-food standards, and the ways in which a governmentality perspective might assist in addressing existing gaps in knowledge.

10.2 (Re)conceptualizing agri-food standards Political economy underpins much of the existing literature on private agri-food standards and certification systems. From this perspective the rise of private standards on a global scale is associated with three interrelated trends. First, the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has enabled greater global regulation of trade (Peine and McMichael, 2005) and encouraged a free trade agenda as the assumed basis for worldwide economic prosperity. Trade liberalization has also resulted in the further concentration of agri-food industries already under way at a global scale (Morgan et al., 2006). Busch and Bain (2004) argue that the WTO has made possible a number of significant changes in agri-food governance. These include introducing ‘a new set of international institutions and organisations to regulate trade’; making ‘several existing but voluntary standards de facto mandatory’; and opening ‘the door for greater private regulation of the agri-food sector through standards, contracts, and agreements’ (Busch and Bain, 2004, p. 322). Second, a combination of trends in the agri-food system – intensification of agriculture, extension of supply chains, increasing distance between farmers and consumers and a series of food scares (Freidberg, 2004) – have resulted in a loss of trust by consumers in the food supply system. In order to overcome consumer mistrust, new systems to manage supply have developed ‘through new sets of intermediaries (such as certification bodies, dealers, transport firms, distributors) that place stricter control on the particular quality of the product’ (Morgan et al., 2006, p. 67). Increasingly, emphasis is placed on the ‘qualities’ of food – rather than just the mass production of undifferentiated commodities. As many voluntary standards become de facto mandatory, supermarkets are emerging as key gatekeepers (Lawrence and Burch, 2007), using private standards to compensate for inadequate public standards, to differentiate the



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‘qualities’ of their products from competitors and to reduce costs and risks along supply chains (Fulponi, 2006; Hatanaka et al., 2005; Henson and Reardon, 2005; Konefal et al., 2007). Finally, the use of independent, or third-party, certifiers has become an important means for verifying standards in both conventional and alternative (e.g., organic and fair trade) agri-food sectors. Third-party certification (TPC) has benefits for some producers,1 for example providing a means for specialty producers to win the trust of consumers outside their immediate locality (Renting et al., 2003). However, the scale and cost of changes required to conform to standards may, as Hatanaka et al. (2005, p. 361) note, ‘result in some suppliers being squeezed out of business or forced into alternative, less profitable markets’. TPC has been identified as an increasingly important mechanism through which supermarkets consolidate their power, enabling retailers to exercise control over all parts of the supply chain (Campbell et al., 2006; Hatanaka et al., 2005; Konefal et al., 2007). A political economy approach is of clear analytical significance in drawing attention to the increasing power of large retailers – particularly supermarkets – in regulating agri-food supply chains, and the structural changes at a global level that make this possible. In addition, it is useful in showing that standards and TPC are not simply objective and value-neutral mechanisms of governing. They are used and enforced, predominantly by supermarkets, ‘as strategic business tools … to gain access to new markets, to coordinate their operations, to provide quality and safety assurance to their consumers, to complement their brands, or to define niche products and markets’ (Hatanaka et al., 2005, p. 356). The strategic use of standards contributes to a shift in power up the supply chain to retailers: those producers and food manufacturers or processors who do not have the resources to conform to standards are left without access to potentially lucrative markets. While we believe that political economy represents a powerful theoretical lens for the critical analysis of private standards and certification, it is limited in identifying the specific ways in which standards are implemented and adapted in practice. In general, the emergence of private standards and certification is examined as part of a linear historical narrative in which there is a wholesale shift of power from state agencies to global regulatory bodies (such as the WTO) and transnational retailers. The structural capacity of these actors to impose standardized practices throughout agri-food supply chains is assumed to drive the shift from public to private forms of governance. We have two problems with this reasoning.



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First, the displacement of one form of governing by another neglects the often complex ways in which programmes are implemented and rendered workable in practice (see Higgins, 2004; O’Malley, 1996). What is particularly overlooked is the ongoing significance of state agencies in making private standards, and other market-oriented forms of governing, workable. As Buller and Morris (2004, p. 1079) argue, there exists a ‘critical interplay and interrelationship of public policy and market forces in the setting of sustainability objectives. The market cannot act alone or in isolation.’ While public agencies are acknowledged in the agri-food standards literature as playing an ongoing role, little detail is given beyond claims that state capacities have been ‘reorganized’ to accord with the free trade ambitions of transnational retailers and global governance agencies. We argue that it is important not to lose sight of how standards are made workable in the process of their implementation, and the often complex reasons for their adoption. Second, the standardization of technique (via standards and auditing) is treated as an unproblematic starting point in examining the impacts of standards on various actors in supply chains. Specific fractions of capital, such as retailers, are conceptualized as the main locus of power within modern agri-food production chains. Due to their structural power as creators and enforcers of standards, retailers are assumed to exercise increasing influence down the supply chain, with the practices of downstream actors harmonized and brought into line through standards and auditing technologies. Many existing explanations of agri-food standards are arguably based on such a conceptualization of restructuring in which predominantly retailer-led private standards have the necessary momentum – through TPC – to transform food production by shifting power from producers to retailers. The producers who are responsible for implementing these standards in practice are viewed as having little or no capacity to alter or adapt them. Such views, according to Barry (2001, p. 75), are flawed since ‘a standard or regulation does not have any natural force or intrinsic momentum. It requires agents who are prepared to make it into a reality’ (emphasis in original). With specific reference to the agri-food sector, Campbell and Le Heron (2007, p. 135) argue that standards, as forms of governance, must ‘be seen as varied, emerging in particular conditions, malleable in their functionality, [and] accessible to use by different actors in differing ways’. On this basis, it is important to focus on how standards are made to work, and the diverse processes and actors through which this occurs. In order to examine the problems involved in achieving standardization, we draw upon an analytics of governmentality. This approach



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has been used previously in agri-food studies2 and it is not our intention to provide another outline in this chapter. We are interested here primarily in one aspect of a governmentality perspective – technologies of governing – and its merits in addressing the limitations of political economy approaches. According to Rose (1999, p. 52), technologies of governing are mechanisms ‘imbued with aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects and averting certain undesired events’. In this respect, standards are undoubtedly technological, given that their design and deployment are aimed squarely at shaping the conduct of a diverse range of actors so that they adopt a more uniform and desired set of practices. Technologies include those: … humble and mundane mechanisms by which authorities seek to instantiate government: techniques of notation, computation and calculation; procedures of examination and assessment; the invention of devices such as surveys and presentational forms such as tables; the standardization of systems for training and the inculcation of habits; the inauguration of professional specialisms and vocabularies; building designs and architectural forms – the list is heterogeneous and in principle unlimited. (Rose and Miller, 1992, p. 183) While scholars from a political economy perspective might view these mechanisms as enabling specific social groups to exercise power over others, and reflecting a broader historical logic, such as the logic of capital, this risks overlooking the often complex ways in which particular technologies are assembled so that they are capable of regulating human conduct. As Rose (1999, p. 52) argues, technologies ‘are never simply a realisation of a programme, strategy or intention: whilst the will to govern traverses them, they are not simply realisations of any simple will’. Technologies – such as standards – represent a means for shaping human conduct by linking calculations in one location with action at another (Miller and Rose, 1990). However, the process of shaping human practices is fraught with difficulty. Drawing upon the work of Bruno Latour, Miller and Rose (1990, p. 11) note that attempts to govern action ‘at a distance’ rarely achieve the outcomes envisaged by authorities. This does not mean simply that the reality of governing constantly fails to meet some ideal regulatory state. Rather the failing nature of rule is a constitutive aspect of governing and the struggle to overcome problems and imperfections may, in fact, enable programmes ‘to be




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rendered both workable and durable’ (Higgins, 2004, p. 472). In this respect, technologies can work in multiple and adaptable ways which do not necessarily accord with the objectives of any one group of actors. Equally, the harmonization of technologies and human action is a contingent achievement that needs to be investigated. The notion of technologies of governing has been applied as part of a broader governmentality approach to study such issues as the construction of a national farming sector in Britain (Murdoch and Ward, 1997), the emergence of the entrepreneurial farmer in Australian agricultural policy (Higgins, 2002), and discourses of best practice in farming (Lockie, 1998). However, apart from some work by Larner and Le Heron (2004) on benchmarking in New Zealand agriculture, the technological aspects of governmentality have not thus far been applied in a systematic way to private agri-food standards. In the remainder of the chapter we respond to this lacuna by exploring how EMS standards for agriculture have been assembled, and adapted, at a national and regional level in Australia.

10.3 EMS as a technology of governing Australian agriculture was first exposed on a broad scale to EMS in 2002 when the Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council, a group of State and Federal Ministers responsible for agriculture and natural resources, released the National Framework for EMS in Agriculture (NRMMC, 2002). Based on the ISO14001 standard, EMS was aimed at providing farmers with a voluntary, flexible, and internationally compatible and credible tool for meeting ‘current and future challenges, whether imposed by government regulation, by consumer market preferences, or by communities concerned about their local environment’ (NRMMC, 2002, p. 7). Given the strong export-oriented focus of Australian agriculture, as well as the serious environmental problems associated with existing productivist approaches to farming, EMS at face value provides a useful means to sustain natural resources and assure access to particular markets. This accords closely with Australia’s neoliberal position on trade in the WTO, and its opposition to farm subsidies in the United States and European Union (Dibden and Cocklin, 2009; Dibden et al., 2009). It also helps explain why EMS was chosen over other possible agri-environmental standards systems – such as those associated with organic agriculture. No other standards or certification scheme meets the diverse demands of integrating environmental, food quality, trade and farm management issues. EMS is a process-based standard which details ‘the processes that a firm, or other organisation, may choose to follow for the purposes of



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managing environmental impacts’ (Mech and Young, 2001, p. 8). Thus, EMS is based on a ‘plan-do-act-review’ process of continuous environmental improvement. There are no baseline requirements for best practice apart from adherence to relevant environmental legislation, although EMS can be used, for example, as a way of building on existing industry codes of practice or improving natural resource management practices at a catchment/regional level. Consequently, the actual content of an EMS is largely dependent on the goals and priorities of individual land managers. This begs the inevitable question as to why landholders might be interested in adopting an EMS. The EMS Framework (NRMMC, 2002, pp. 7–12) argues that there are three main drivers for EMS adoption by farmers: • Consumer demand for safe, ethically produced and environmentally friendly food. This is argued to contribute to increased scrutiny of farming practices and the need for formal verification that food is produced in a safe and sustainable manner. EMS provides this verification, hence ensuring access to markets where demand for ‘green’ food is strong. • Retailer requirements for third-party certification covering food quality and safety, in response to growing consumer concern. The linking of EMS to the international standard ISO14001 enables farmers to be prepared for the auditing practices associated with TPC. • Government environmental regulations and community concern over the health of natural resources. As the Australian Federal and State governments impose increasingly stringent regulations, and local communities exercise greater scrutiny over the impacts of farming, landholders will be forced to demonstrate sound ecological practices to ensure ongoing access to particular resources. Having an EMS is viewed as a way of documenting management practices, demonstrating a ‘duty of care’, and showing formally farmers’ adherence to environmental regulations. In order to test the applicability of EMS to Australian agriculture, the Federal government created three programmes: the National EMS Pilot Programme which funded 16 projects at both regional and industry levels (2003–6) at a total cost of AUS$8.7 million; Pathways to Industry EMS which assisted industries to develop and implement an EMS (AUS$11.9 million); and the EMS Incentives Programme, which encouraged adoption by individual farmers through grants of AUS$3,000. Following arguments common in the existing literature on agri-food




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standards, these schemes might be interpreted as an attempt by the state to impose standardized means for farmers to align their practices with the requirements of transnational capital. However, given the flexibility of EMS as a process standard, as well as current lack of demand in both national and international markets for food produced using ISO14001, this standard has in practice been used to deal with a number of different issues, such as linking with regional natural resource management targets, providing for future staged integration with other systems/ codes of practice and laying the foundations for prospective upgrading to ISO14001 certification. Thus, while state agencies may wish to encourage the adoption of certified EMS as a mechanism for integrating farmers’ agri-environmental practices with the logic of ‘the market’, in practice this technology of governing has been harnessed to a diversity of purposes and made to ‘work’ in a variety of ways. In the following section of the paper we examine an industry-based case study, in which EMS was adapted in the course of its implementation. The case study uses qualitative methods drawing upon interviews with two dairy industry representatives, collected as part of a broader study by the authors on market instruments for environmental management in Australian dairying, as well as material from rural newspapers, government and dairy industry reports, websites, newsletters and ‘grey literature’.

10.4 Adapting EMS – the Australian dairy industry The implementation of EMS through the National Pilot Programme showed that this technology of governing could be potentially reworked to conform to a range of regional, industry and farmer goals. In the case of the Australian dairy industry, EMS provided a potential means to ameliorate adverse environmental impacts and associated reputational problems arising from intensive dairy farming. These problems had been anticipated in 2000 in the lead up to the deregulation of the dairy industry, which removed price supports for dairy farming, resulting in more intensive production (Dibden and Cocklin, 2005). The experience of New Zealand, which had adopted neoliberal, free trade policies even earlier than Australia, was instructive: severe environmental problems had become increasingly apparent since deregulation of the dairy industry in the mid-1980s ( Jay, 2007). Despite the relatively low priority given to environmental practices compared to food safety (Fulponi, 2006; Morris, 2000), and the lack of evidence of demand by retailers (Morgan et al., 2006), both government agencies and the dairy industry in Australia have recognized for some time that they may eventually be called to account for the adverse 10.1057/9780230289673 - Calculating the Social, Edited by Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner


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impacts of intensive dairy farming. While dairying in Australia has thus far escaped the ‘dirty dairy’ tag applied by fishing and environmental groups in New Zealand (Jay, 2007), there is nonetheless an awareness that the ‘clean and green’ image of Australian food production must be supported by improved natural resource management (Chang and Kristiansen, 2004; Lawrence, 2005). These concerns arose at a dairy industry level in the lead-up to deregulation in 2000, which was predicted – accurately – to result in a growth in the scale and intensity of production accompanied by increased use of inputs, notably water, feed and fertilizers, and problems dealing with expanded effluent discharges into waterways. To deal with these issues, a project (Dairying for Tomorrow) was funded under the National Landcare Programme and later through Federal government grants to promote EMS to the farmer-suppliers of milk processors (Dibden and Cocklin, 2005). The way that EMS has been adopted and modified by Dairying for Tomorrow and processors provides an interesting study in how EMS has been adapted to meet industry needs. Our focus is on the Gippsland region of south-eastern Victoria, where EMS-type initiatives have been most fully developed. Soon after deregulation in 2000, a ‘Dairy Self-Assessment Tool’ (DairySAT) was developed at the instigation of a Gippsland dairy farmer. At that time, the image of dairy farming had been tarnished by a toxic algal bloom outbreak, largely attributed to pollution from dairy farm effluent, in the scenic and environmentally important Gippsland Lakes. This inspired the idea of finding a means to demonstrate farmers’ environmental credentials. According to the farmer who originally developed DairySAT, though most people in agriculture do the right thing, not many people know that, or not many people are aware of that. You only hear of the bad examples that are highlighted in the press or taken to court or whatever. (Interview, 2007) At the same time, a project initiated by a group of Gippsland beef producers (Higgins et al., 2008) suggested a way for dairy farmers to demonstrate environmentally responsible behaviour through third-party EMS certification consistent with ISO14001. However, the farmer who developed DairySAT also saw the problems experienced by the Gippsland group in the early stages of developing a beef EMS. I saw farmers’ wives crying because it was so stressful on the day of audits, and … look, work was pulled apart and so on and these were people that were very good record keepers and very, very good 10.1057/9780230289673 - Calculating the Social, Edited by Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner



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environmental managers and I thought, wow, if they’re having trouble with it, I can certainly see that the dairy farming community will totally dig their heels in. … I didn’t want to see us going down that path in the dairy industry because I thought it would be a disaster. … So it was more or less, let’s think up a programme that every farmer … can read through at their leisure or their timing and benchmark themselves against what is an accepted standard. (Interview, 2007) This idea was taken to the regional dairy extension organization (GippsDairy), gained support from other catchment and state government agencies in Gippsland and was developed together with a group of farmers who ‘rated the project as an opportunity to be proactive, rather than being subjected to a “big stick” over environmental issues’ (DfT, 2003, no page numbers). The outcome was a simple self-assessment tool for dairy farmers to use on farm. The fact that DairySAT is a farmerinitiated idea has been widely used to promote the tool to dairy farmers, dairy industry organizations and government bodies. After initial development by GippsDairy and the Victorian Department of Primary Industries,3 and ‘road testing’ by 74 Gippsland dairy farmers, DairySAT was endorsed by Dairying for Tomorrow (DfT) ‘as the single national platform for the dairy industry to address environmental issues’, and Federal government funding was received for an ‘EMS Pilot Dairy Project committed to using DairySAT as the first point in developing its EMS’ (Neilson, 2003, no page numbers). Federal funding for DfT enabled DairySAT to be tested and promoted at a regional level through a network of Natural Resource Management (NRM) coordinators appointed in each of eight dairying regions of Australia. In Gippsland, DairySAT was largely promoted through environmentally oriented land care groups4 or Environmental Best Management Practice training programmes. It thus sat squarely within the area of government attempts to build NRM partnerships between farm and rural groups and government agencies, including quasi-government regional NRM or catchment bodies. Increasingly, the projects and underlying philosophy of DfT actively encourage collaborative partnerships between the dairy industry and catchment managers to set on-farm targets for change that will contribute to healthy catchments and communities. For example, according to a dairy regional project officer, a recent DfT programme in Gippsland – Targets for Change – has explicitly sought to address ‘high priority hot spots’ identified by West Gippsland Catchment Management Authority (Interview, 2008).



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From the early days of development of DairySAT it was accepted that few farmers were likely to adopt this tool without the offer of incentives. The original group of farmers who helped to pilot DairySAT were enticed by ‘a very nice carrot … that if they helped review the DairySAT and went through it, then they’d get a whole farm nutrient plan done’ (Interview, 2008). Similarly the role of DfT regional co-ordinators included providing ‘assistance in obtaining incentives and grants’ (Interview, 2008). In general, DairySAT has been incorporated within projects to encourage sustainable farming combining environmental improvements with production benefits. The major emphasis has been on appropriate use and disposal of fertilizers and effluent rather than improvements with less obvious production links, such as tree planting or biodiversity conservation. However, DairySAT projects have endeavoured to show that most environmental best management practices have productivity gains linked to them, such as improved milk production where trees provide shade and shelter, or fencing off watercourses which protects water quality and prevents injury to cows from falling down stream banks. DairySAT consists of a kit which can be used in training courses and also worked through by farmers in their own time. In this way, it is a technological means by which farmers can self-monitor and thereby govern their agri-environmental conduct in a ‘responsible’ way (Rose, 1999). It not only provides checklists for farmers to assess their own environmental performance, but also brings together useful information about legislative requirements and sources of advice and support. Nevertheless, despite the encouragement offered to farmers, DairySAT has to date only been adopted by approximately 20 per cent of Australian dairy farmers. It has increasingly been recognized that adoption by dairy farmers is unlikely to progress far without backing from the dairy companies, which are potentially in a strong position to influence their suppliers. A new DairySAT manager appointed with Federal funding in 2006 is required to spend 50 per cent of her time promoting the instrument to dairy companies. However, the response by most dairy companies has been decidedly lukewarm. There is reluctance on the part of these companies to impose burdens on already financially stressed and increasingly footloose farmers. Farmers have shown a preparedness to leave the industry or change processors if hard pressed. At the time of deregulation, the increased cost of meeting new hygiene standards, combined with lower prices, resulted in a steep reduction in dairy farmer numbers and eventually also in competition between processors to attract farmersuppliers (Dibden and Cocklin, 2007). More recently, Warrnambool




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Cheese and Butter Company lost a third of its milk supply within a matter of days when payments to suppliers were reduced abruptly (Smith, 2009). In addition to the difficulty in ensuring adoption, DairySAT has been criticized for its inability to provide accurate measures of environmental performance. In theory, information provided by farmers about their own environmental actions can be used to establish the extent to which land managers are meeting resource condition targets set by quasi-governmental regional catchment authorities. But in practice, the subjective nature of DairySAT self-assessments makes this difficult to achieve. As the farmer who originally developed DairySAT notes, ‘the DairySAT has a check list within it or a programme to follow and if you don’t come up to scratch, it’s purely up to your conscience to decide if you wish to do something about it’ (Interview, 2007). There has been a reluctance to adopt ISO14001 within the dairy industry both because there is currently no clear market benefit to be gained and because dairy farmers are perceived to be too stressed as a result of problems ranging from severe drought to low prices on global markets. Since DairySAT records are not audited, there is no third-party ensuring that standards are maintained. However, even an EMS with a full third-party audit ‘has some serious shortcomings’, particularly the fact that ‘ISO14001 is a process-based standard which does not guarantee environmental performance outcomes’ (Gunningham, 2007, p. 304). Apart from some interest by small dairy companies supplying niche markets, only one major processor has made a serious commitment to introducing auditable environmental standards. Murray Goulburn Co-operative (MGC), which processes over a third of Australia’s milk supply, is a major exporter of dairy products and hence particularly attuned to present and future demands from overseas consumers for ‘environmental sustainability in its business from “cow to customer”’ (MGC, 2008, p. 3). As the only remaining major dairy co-operative, MGC is obliged to compete with other processing companies for a dwindling pool of suppliers by providing needed services and anticipating regulatory changes which may affect the viability of the co-operative and its members. In 2007 (and again in 2008), MGC obtained a Federal government grant5 to ‘pilot supply-chain driven engagement of dairy farmers in improved environmental performance and reporting via milk company field officers and supplier intranet’, bringing ‘together dairy processor/supplier relationship, service providers and catchment planners to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach for wider application across the Australian dairy industry’ (NLP, 2007). DairySAT would



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be incorporated into the existing intranet information management system (MGF@RM), which currently integrates milk production and financial information. The incorporation of DairySAT into a web-based reporting system marks a significant movement beyond self-assessment towards a potentially auditable system. Indeed, West Gippsland Catchment Management Authority, which worked closely with MGC in establishing information relevant to catchment health to be reported by farmers, was described as ‘acting as the auditing authority’ for the pilot project (MGC, n.d., p. 2). The initial motivation for the MGF@RM enhancement appears to have been the desire to pre-empt possible future environmental regulation and meet anticipated customer requirements. However, increasingly MGC has become concerned to find a way to link MGF@RM to emissions trading as part of a broader approach of shielding dairying (and farmers) from anticipated risks. The very real threat posed by emissions trading was expressed in Murray Goulburn’s response to the federal government’s proposed emissions trading scheme. An MGC executive claimed that the increased cost of the energy used in dairy processing meant that, even without a charge for emissions from farms, dairy farmers supplying the co-operative would lose an estimated AUS$5–$10,000 a year. These losses would be exacerbated by the ‘major trade imbalances arising from the scheme’, and the different emissions trading rules in other countries, creating an ‘unlevel playing field’ for Australian producers (Cawood, 2009, pp. 1–2). As the executive observed, Because most of the products MGC produces are freely imported from other countries, or exported into other hotly-contested markets, passing on emissions cost to consumers would be business suicide. … All we can do is reduce the price we pay our farmers. (Cawood, 2009, pp. 1–2) In an effort to forestall these adverse impacts, MGC has recently obtained funding6 to update MGF@RM to incorporate a range of tools to measure nutrient loss, nitrogen utilization, energy use and the effects of greenhouse gas abatement strategies. The system will be set up in such a way that farmers can feed in information from third-party vendors, such as energy bills, automatically upload data relating to emissions into the accounting tools and transmit these data to MGC. The project aims to enable farmers to account for emissions with minimal disruption to their farm businesses. At the same time, one-on-one support will be provided to assist farmers to implement best management




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practices which reduce and mitigate emissions without (ideally) losing productivity.

This chapter contributes to the literature on agri-food standards in two key ways. First, it illustrates how standards may be adapted in the course of their implementation. Drawing upon a governmentality approach, which conceptualizes standards as ‘technologies of governing’, we demonstrate that standards indeed aim to align the practices of different actors in particular ways. However, in practice, the process of making standards work involves a range of agencies. This may contribute to the original aims of standards schemes being compromised from the outset, yet also make these schemes workable for those involved in their implementation. For instance, EMS in the Australian dairy industry has been partially adopted, and adapted, through a hybrid mix of public and private initiatives, which intermingle Federal, state and industry funding, with support from agricultural commodity organizations, agri-food processors, regional governance bodies and farmers. In recognition that insufficient market demand exists for a fully certified EMS, DairySAT was developed as a way to assist farmers with managing risk, and as a tool for helping to demonstrate farmers’ environmental credentials. Thus, our research supports Rose’s (1999, p. 52) argument that technologies of governing are ‘imbued with aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects and averting certain undesired events’ (emphasis added). They are not mechanisms which are able to guarantee particular outcomes. This contrasts with political economy analyses which typically view standards as a preconstituted technical means by which powerful actors are able to standardize and harmonize the practices of those downstream within food supply chains. Second, we show that private standards are not necessarily driven always by the interests of retailers, or other seemingly powerful actors. As Rose and Miller (1992, p. 184) note, ‘“power” is the outcome of the affiliation of persons, spaces, communications and inscriptions into a durable form’ (our emphasis). Hence, it is important to examine how technologies, such as standards, are constituted as objects of knowledge, and who has the capacity to exert ‘agency’ or ‘power’. While EMS is promoted by the Federal government as a way of meeting consumer, community and retailer requirements for ‘clean and green’ food, the introduction of EMS in the Australian dairy industry has been farmer-initiated. The main



10.5 Conclusions

rationale was to take a proactive approach to environmental issues and thereby avert more onerous intervention by governments. However, in order to meet the needs of farmers already stressed by falling commodity prices and drought, EMS was adapted through collaboration between public and private agencies as an environmental self-assessment tool (DairySAT). It is noteworthy that dairy processing companies have in general shown little interest in DairySAT and other technologies of environmental assurance. This contrasts with the strong focus by these companies on food safety and quality standards, which are essential for dairy companies to remain in business. The predominant focus on food safety and quality in the dairy industry, as well as the lack of market benefits from pursuing non-organic environmental standards, has arguably hampered widespread adoption of DairySAT, and interest in EMS more broadly. At farm level, Morris (2000, p. 444) argues that positive environmental improvements beyond those normally expected of farmers are only likely to be achieved ‘if farmers are directly rewarded’ for them and if payment is ‘targeted on specified environmental outcomes’. In terms of processing companies, research on EMS indicates ‘that enterprises are only likely to commit substantial resources to such systems, rather than making tokenistic efforts to comply, where they perceive a strong economic selfinterest in doing so, and most commonly they do not’ (Gunningham, 2007, p. 304). This suggests two possible ways forward for adoption of EMS or other private environmental standards in Australia: either governments must contribute sufficient resources to overcome this reluctance or enterprises must be subjected to strong public or private regulatory requirements, with substantial penalties for non-compliance. However, at present, there is only limited pressure for demonstrating responsible environmental performance from overseas markets, governments and consumers. Instead, it is the proposed creation of a national market for emissions trading that appears to be driving a shift towards auditable environmental standards.

Notes 1. See for instance the case study of the New Zealand kiwifruit industry in Campbell et al. (2006). 2. For a useful outline of the agri-food literature drawing upon a governmentality approach, see Higgins (2002) and Lockie and Higgins (2007). 3. Support was also received from the Victorian Environment Protection Agency, which is responsible for regulating pollution from dairy farms – and prosecuting farmers where necessary.




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4. Land care groups are a key vehicle of natural resource management in Australia and have been embraced by governments, farmer organizations and conservation groups ‘as offering a model for effective community action to manage land degradation and assist the move to more sustainable resource use’ (Curtis and De Lacy, 1996, p. 120). These groups are voluntary, receive limited government funding, are open to any member of the local community and tend to operate at a catchment or regional scale. Activities pursued by land care groups include the identification of resource management priorities, development of action strategies, conducting of field days and farm walks and a range of educational and promotional work (Curtis and De Lacy, 1996, p. 121). 5. A National Landcare Program (NLP) Natural Resource Innovation Grant of $123,000 was awarded for 2006/07, and a Caring for our Country-Landcare Sustainable Practices Grant of $98,000 for 2008/09. 6. MGC was awarded a FarmReady Industry Grant of $150,000 in May 2009 for ‘Tools for Dairying Change – The implementation of an on-farm climate change adaptation and greenhouse gas emissions mitigation support model for Australian Dairy Farms’.

Bibliography Barry, A. (2001), Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (London: The Athlone Press). Buller, H. and C. Morris (2004), ‘Growing Goods: The Market, the State, and Sustainable Food Production’, Environment and Planning A 36, pp. 1065–84. Burch, D. and G. Lawrence (eds) (2007), Supermarkets and Agri-Food Supply Chains: Transformations in the Production and Consumption of Foods (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar). Busch, L. and C. Bain (2004), ‘New! Improved? The Transformation of the Global Agrifood System’, Rural Sociology 69(3), pp. 321–46. Campbell, H., G. Lawrence and K. Smith (2006) ‘Audit Cultures and the Antipodes: The Implications of Eurep-GAP for New Zealand and Australian Agri-food Industries’, in T. Marsden and J. Murdoch (eds), Between the Local and the Global: Confronting Complexity in the Contemporary Food Sector (Oxford: Elsevier). Campbell, H. and R. Le Heron (2007), ‘Supermarkets, Producers and Audit Technologies: The Constitutive Micro-Politics of Food, Legitimacy and Governance’, in D. Burch and G. Lawrence (eds), Supermarkets and Agri-Food Supply Chains: Transformations in the Production and Consumption of Foods (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar). Cashore, B. (2002), ‘Legitimacy and the Privatization of Environmental Governance: How Non-State Market-Driven (NSMD) Governance Systems Gain Rule-Making Authority’, Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions 15(4), pp. 503–29. Cawood, M. (2009), Proposed ETS Law to Hit Dairy Hard, The Land, 14.5.09, http://sl.farmononline, date accessed 15 May 2009. Chang, H. and P. Kristiansen (2004), Selling Australia as ‘Clean and Green’ (University of New England, Armidale: Working Paper Series in Agricultural and Resource Economics).



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Curtis, A. and T. De Lacy (1996), ‘Landcare in Australia: Does it Make a Difference?’ Journal of Environmental Management 46, pp. 119–37. Dairying for Tomorrow [DfT] (2003), Press Release: Farmers Embrace the Opportunity to Self-Assess their Environmental Stewardship 5 March 2003. Dibden, J. and C. Cocklin (2005), ‘Sustainability and Agri-Environmental Governance’, in V. Higgins and G. Lawrence (eds), Agricultural Governance: Globalization and the New Politics of Regulation (London: Routledge). Dibden, J. and C. Cocklin (2007), ‘Contesting Competition: Governance and Farmer Resistance in Australia’, in L. Cheshire, V. Higgins and G. Lawrence (eds), Rural Governance: International Perspectives (London: Routledge). Dibden, J. and C. Cocklin (2009), ‘“Multifunctionality”: Trade Protectionism or a New Way Forward?’ Environment and Planning A 41(1), pp. 163–82. Dibden, J., C. Potter and C. Cocklin (2009), ‘Contesting the Neoliberal Project for Agriculture: Productivist and Multifunctional Trajectories in the European Union and Australia’, Journal of Rural Studies 25, pp. 299–308. Freidberg, S. (2004), ‘The Ethical Complex of Corporate Food Power’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, pp. 513–31. Fulponi, L. (2006), ‘Private Voluntary Standards in the Food System: The Perspective of Major Food Retailers in OECD Countries’, Food Policy 31, pp. 1–13. Gunningham, N. (2007), ‘Incentives to Improve Farm Management: EMS, SupplyChains and Civil Society’, Journal of Environmental Management 82(3), pp. 302–10. Guthman, J. (2004), Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (Berkeley: UCLA Press). Hatanaka, M., C. Bain and L. Busch (2005), ‘Third-Party Certification in the Global Agrifood System’, Food Policy 30, pp. 354–69. Hendrickson, M. K. and H. S. James (2005), ‘The Ethics of Constrained Choice: How the Industrialization of Agriculture Impacts Farming and Farmer Behavior’, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 18(3), pp. 269–91. Henson, S. and T. Reardon (2005), ‘Private Agri-Food Standards: Implications for Food Policy and the Agri-Food System’, Food Policy 30, pp. 241–53. Higgins, V. (2002), Constructing Reform: Economic Expertise and the Governing of Agricultural Change in Australia (New York: Nova Science). Higgins, V. (2004), ‘Government as a Failing Operation: Regulating Administrative Conduct “at a Distance” in Australia’, Sociology 38(3), pp. 457–76. Higgins, V., J. Dibden and C. Cocklin (2008), ‘Building Alternative Agri-Food Networks: Certification, Embeddedness and Agri-Environmental Governance’, Journal of Rural Studies 24, pp. 15–27. Jay, M. (2007), ‘The Political Economy of a Productivist Agriculture: New Zealand Dairy Discourses’, Food Policy 32(2), pp. 266–79. Konefal, J., C. Bain, M. Mascarenhas and L. Busch (2007), ‘Supermarkets and Supply Chains in North America’, in D. Burch and G. Lawrence (eds), Supermarkets and Agri-Food Supply Chains: Transformations in the Production and Consumption of Foods (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar). Larner, W. and R. Le Heron (2004), ‘Global Benchmarking: Participating “at a Distance” in the Globalizing Economy’, in W. Larner and W. Walters (eds), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge). Lawrence, G. (2005), ‘Promoting Sustainable Development: The Question of Governance’, in F. H. Buttel and P. McMichael (eds), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (Oxford: Elsevier).




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Lawrence, G. and D. Burch (2007), ‘Understanding Supermarkets and Agri-Food Supply Chains’, in D. Burch and G. Lawrence (eds), Supermarkets and AgriFood Supply Chains: Transformations in the Production and Consumption of Foods (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar). Lockie, S. (1998), ‘Environmental and Social risks and the Construction of “Best Practice” in Australian Agriculture’, Agriculture and Human Values 15(3), pp. 243–52. Lockie, S. and V. Higgins (2007), ‘Roll-Out Neoliberalism and Hybrid Practices of Regulation in Australian Agri-environmental Governance’, Journal of Rural Studies 23, pp. 1–11. Mech, T. and M. Young (2001), VEMAs: Designing Voluntary Environmental Management Arrangements to Improve Natural Resource Management in Agriculture and Allied Industries (Canberra: RIRDC). Miller, P. and N. Rose (1990), ‘Governing Economic Life’, Economy and Society 19(1), pp. 1–31. Morgan, K., T. Marsden and J. Murdoch (2006), Worlds of Food: Place, Power, and Provenance in the Food Chain (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Morris, C. (2000), ‘Quality Assurance Schemes: A New Way of Delivering Environmental Benefits in Food Production? Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 43(3), pp. 433–48. Murdoch, J. and N. Ward (1997), ‘Governmentality and Territoriality: The Statistical Manufacture of Britain’s “National Farm” ’, Political Geography 16(4), pp. 307–24. Murray Goulburn Co-operative [MGC] (2008), Environmental Report for 2008. Murray Goulburn Co-operative [MGC] (n.d.), ‘Farm Environment Program’, Information Sheet, accessed from MGC April 2009. National Landcare Program [NLP] (2007), Natural Resource Innovation Grants – Previous Investments, http://www.daffa.gov.au/_data/assets/pdf_file/0013/115141/ nrig_examples2.pdf, date accessed 29 May 2007. Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council [NRMMC] (2002) Australia’s National Framework for Environmental Management Systems in Agriculture (Canberra: Australian Government). Neilson, C. (2003), ‘Dairy SAT’, GippsDairy Annual Report 2002/03 (Warragul, Vic: GippsDairy). O’Malley, P. (1996), ‘Indigenous Governance’, Economy and Society 25(3), pp. 310–26. Peine, E. and P. McMichael (2005), ‘Globalization and Global Governance’, in V. Higgins and G. Lawrence (eds), Agricultural Governance: Globalization and the New Politics of Regulation (London: Routledge). Renard, M-C. (2005), ‘Quality Certification, Regulation, and Power in Fair Trade’, Journal of Rural Studies 21(4), pp. 419–31. Renting, H., T. K. Marsden and J. Banks (2003), ‘Understanding Alternative Food Networks: Exploring the Role of Short Food Supply Chains in Rural Development’, Environment and Planning A 35, pp. 393–411. Rose, N. (1999), Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rose, N. and P. Miller (1992), ‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, Economy and Society 43(2), pp. 173–205. Smith, S. (2009), ‘Suppliers Trickle Back: Warrnambool Dairy Saga Continues’, The Weekly Times 22 April 2009, p. 13.



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Standards, Orphan Drugs, and Pharmaceutical Markets Carlos Novas

11.1 Introduction Standards have been integral to the development of modern medicine. From the international classification of illnesses to the promotion of evidence-based medicine, standards, protocols, and guidelines have shaped the conduct of medical practitioners and the delivery of health care since the late nineteenth century (Timmermans and Berg, 2003). In the case of medicine, standards offer the promise of ensuring the safety of pharmaceutical products or medical devices. Standards are further used to ensure the consistency of how data is gathered, how decisions are made over organ transplants (Hogle, 1995) and the sequence of procedures that should be used to resuscitate patients following cardiac arrest (Timmermans and Berg, 1997). Standardization involves making objects or social practices conform to particular technical and social visions of order. As scholars within the field of science and technology studies have documented, the work of standardization is intimately bound up with the construction of techno-economic networks (Fujimura, 1992, Latour, 1988). Standards are integral to the development of large-scale systems such as international clinical trials (Petryna, 2009), and to the minuscule calibrations of instruments on the lab bench (Jordan and Lynch, 1998). Here, standards play a double-edged role: they facilitate the creation of enduring networks that pattern technical, economic, and social activity, but they close off certain technological and policy options. Although the work of creating socio-technical networks and standards enhances the flow of people and things along particular trajectories, it also serves to exclude persons and objects that are not adapted to moving along these ordered circuits (Star, 1991). This chapter is concerned with exploring the fate of non-standard drugs and 185



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Standards, Orphan Drugs, and Pharmaceutical Markets

therapeutic categories as they travel along the highly regulated technoeconomic networks of drug development. Using the example of orphan drugs, I illustrate how the struggles that have taken place around this therapeutic category have contributed to the reconfiguration of the government of drug development, in addition to the practices associated with assessing the cost-effectiveness of drugs in national health care systems. Orphan drugs provide an interesting case study to explore the limits of the standards, protocols, and calculative mentalities that inform drug development and the cost-effectiveness evaluation of medicines. Historically, the qualifier ‘orphan drug’ referred to medically significant chemical substances that were not developed or marketed by the scientific establishment, the state, or the pharmaceutical industry. Initially, the term orphan drug referred to chemical substances or therapeutic categories that by virtue of their clinical, legal, proprietary, or market characteristics did not readily fit into the standard economic and regulatory trajectory of drug development. In the present, orphan drugs refer to treatments intended for rare diseases or small patient populations. Current debates around orphan drugs tend to focus on their cost, as they are generally more expensive than treatments aimed at larger population groups. Due to the clinical and economic features of orphan drugs, there is debate over the validity of existing cost-effectiveness methodologies used to assess the funding of these drugs by national health care systems. Orphan drugs provide a historical and a contemporary example of how the standardized trajectories of drug development and costeffectiveness evaluations of medicines can result in the marginalization of therapeutic categories that do not fit squarely into the administrative and calculative parameters of these systems. Orphan drugs enable reflection on how non-standard objects can problematize governmental practices and lead to their reconfiguration. Since the early 1970s, orphan drugs have led patients’ groups, academic scientists, pharmaceutical industry representatives, and drug regulators to pose questions about the appropriateness of the standards that govern drug development and access to medicines. As I will attempt to flesh out, orphan drugs enable consideration of how the standards associated with drug development and cost-effectiveness evaluations of drugs are exclusionary – they work against particular types of drugs and therapeutic categories. This chapter focuses on how patients’ organizations, clinicians, pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies, and health authorities have contested in multiple ways the standardized trajectories that inform the development of drugs and their availability. The chapter



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begins by discussing how orphan drugs problematized the standardized trajectory of drug development in the 1970s and eventually led to legislation intended to promote these types of therapies. I will then move on to consider how orphan drug legislation has reshaped the government of drug development by reconfiguring the investment calculations of pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms towards the therapeutic needs of rare disease patients. Lastly, the chapter will conclude by examining contemporary struggles around the standardized forms of calculation used to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of orphan drugs.

11.2 Orphan drugs, patient activism, and drug development trajectories The highly regulated and standardized trajectory that a chemical or biological substance must follow in order to become an authorized medication requires that it pass through relays of power concerned with the administration of life (Lakoff, 2008). In this chapter, I draw upon Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics (Foucault, 1978; 1994; 2001a; 2001b) to analyse the forms of power relations that shape the development of pharmaceuticals and which govern access to medicines. What Foucault claimed to be distinctive about this form of power is its concern with addressing governmental problems in relation to phenomena characteristic of human populations (Dean, 1999; Foucault, 1991). Biopolitics is concerned with phenomena that affect the vitality of a population such as birth and death rates, levels of morbidity, fecundity, sanitary practices, hygiene, and the safety of consumer goods. As a governmental practice, biopolitics is concerned with the range of social, cultural, economic, and environmental conditions that limit or foster the health of the human species (Rose, 1999). Drawing upon Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose’s (2006) recent elucidation of this concept, biopolitics refers to contests or struggles over how the biological life of human beings should be governed on an individual and collective basis. The government of pharmaceuticals presents a significant site of contestation and struggle since it involves political and normative questions concerning the regulation of a milieu that relates to matters of human health, biomedical innovation, and an economically significant industrial sector. The kinds of struggles that emerge around the circulation and regulation of pharmaceuticals, as Andrew Lakoff (2008) has usefully characterized them, relate to struggles over the supply of pharmaceuticals (the drug development process; which illnesses are targeted as being of market interest) and the demand for pharmaceuticals (pricing, access to



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medicines, who pays for medicines). Orphan drugs provide a unique vantage point from which to consider these types of struggles, as in the past they raised questions about the supply of drugs for particular patient populations, while in the present, they pose questions about access to medicines and the social distribution of health care resources. I propose that the types of struggles that take place around orphan drugs are biopolitical in orientation as they are concerned with making possible the inclusion of the therapeutic needs of particular population groups into the standardized trajectories of drug development and the cost-effectiveness evaluation of medicines. As I will attempt to show, the non-standard character of orphan drugs works to problematize the government of a highly regulated and standardized milieu intended to ensure the flow of therapies and treatments into the bodies and populations that need them. Throughout the course of the twentieth century, states have been actively involved in developing a range of standards in an effort to protect national populations against the contingencies of life and risks to its health (Timmermans and Berg, 2003). Standards are particularly prominent in the field of consumption, most notably relating to food and drugs (O’Malley, 2004). In the case of pharmaceutical products, regulatory institutions such as the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were established in the early part of the twentieth century to minimize threats posed to the public’s health by the consumption of unsafe or ineffective medicinal goods (Marks, 1997). In the case of pharmaceuticals, the institutional forms and practices associated with its regulation have been shaped by a number of disasters (Daemmrich and Krücken, 2000). The greatest disaster, which has served to shape drug regulation from the 1960s onwards, relates to the drug thalidomide. Thalidomide was a sedative administered to women to deal with the nausea associated with pregnancy. One of the tragic consequences associated with thalidomide was that it led to the birth of a great number of deformed babies. In the United States, the thalidomide disaster led to the passage of the Kefauver-Harris Amendments to the US Food and Drug Act (1962). These amendments required pharmaceutical companies to provide greater safety and efficacy data based on adequately conducted clinical trials prior to the approval of a drug for sale (Abraham, 1995). One of the outcomes of reforms to pharmaceutical regulation in the early 1960s was that it institutionalized the randomized control trial as the ‘gold standard’ for evaluating the safety and efficacy of a chemical or biological substance. What the sweeping reforms to pharmaceutical regulation in the United States and in other jurisdictions accomplished was the introduction of a new series of standards that a chemical or



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biological substance must pass on its potential trajectory towards becoming an authorized medication. While the implementation of new regulatory standards concerning the approval of drugs for sale safeguarded the public’s health, it also served to alter the techno-economic network of drug development. In the 1970s, the pharmaceutical industry claimed that the KefauverHarris Amendments had increased drug development costs, extended the time required for a drug to gain regulatory approval, and eroded the duration of patent terms (Mitchell and Link, 1976). Representatives from the pharmaceutical industry asserted that the focus on drug safety had shifted their investment decisions towards drugs intended for short-term use and for large patient populations. This argument resonated in a number of conferences and publications in the early 1980s that focused on the orphan drug problem. These studies showed that the rising costs of drug development, combined with the prospect of limited economic returns associated with drugs targeted at small patient populations and the greater difficulties associated with conducting clinical trials for rare diseases, served to marginalize this therapeutic category from drug development (Brewer, 1983; Karch, 1982; Scheinberg and Walshe, 1986; Van Woert and Chung, 1985). Over the course of the 1970s, the orphan drug problem began to be understood as one shaped by the unwillingness of pharmaceutical companies to conduct the requisite clinical trials needed to sponsor medically promising drugs through the FDA approval process (Asbury, 2007). One of the side effects of the new drug safety standards was that it introduced a novel model or trajectory of drug development. This new model made atypical or non-standard chemical substances and patient populations that that did not readily fit into this trajectory. As Carolyn Asbury has carefully documented, drugs and therapeutic categories that became excluded from this trajectory consisted of the following: chronic diseases; vaccines; women of childbearing age; children and the elderly; rare diseases; unpatentable substances; substance abuse treatments; and drugs for developing countries (Asbury, 1985; 2007). In the early 1970s, growing recognition of what was then known as ‘drugs of limited commercial value’ began to problematize the government of drug regulation and the investment decisions of the pharmaceutical industry. In the United States, two interdepartmental task forces were convened in 1974 and 1978 to examine the problem of ‘drugs of limited commercial value’ (Asbury, 1985; United States Department of Health Education and Welfare, 1979). Both task forces recognized that government had an obligation to provide medically important drugs to populations



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that needed them (Asbury, 1985). Drugs of limited commercial value problematized existing regulatory standards and the drug development practices of industry by documenting the range of medically significant chemical substances excluded from the techno-economic network of drug development. Although a number of significant recommendations were made concerning potential financial, legal, and regulatory measures that could be undertaken in order to remedy this problem, they were unable to garner the support of the pharmaceutical industry (Asbury, 1985). It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s, through the advocacy efforts of patients’ organizations and academic scientists, that the orphan drug problem became known beyond a few specialists and identified distinctively with the plight of persons affected by rare diseases. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the orphan drug problem became a significant political issue. Drawing upon the work of Steven Epstein (2007), the struggles around orphan drugs were about the inclusion of the therapeutic needs of rare diseases patients into the biopolitical paradigm of drug development. This struggle commenced with the efforts of Sharon Dobkin, the National Myoclunus Foundation and Dr Melvin Van Woert (Meyers, 1988). For many years, they had tried to find a commercial sponsor for L-5HP – a then promising therapy in the treatment of myoclonus. Collectively, they had been unable to find a commercial sponsor or government agency that was willing to conduct the necessary clinical trials and make an application to the FDA for the marketing of L-5HP. They felt that since no commercial sponsor or government agency was willing to develop this therapy, legislative action was necessary to change drug regulation standards and the investments decisions of the pharmaceutical industry. They contacted Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman. After hearing of their experiences, she introduced a Bill in Congress in June 1980 (Asbury, 1985). This led to hearings on this proposed Bill conducted by Representative Henry Waxman. These Hearings were historically significant, in that they created a forum through which the orphan drug problem came to be understood and acted upon. The Congressional hearings (United States Congress, 1981) on orphan drugs served to narrow the scope of the problem from a broad range of therapeutic categories to the issue of drugs intended for the treatment of rare diseases (Asbury, 1985). Due to advocacy efforts of patient’s groups organized around myoclonus, Tourrette’s syndrome, Huntington’s disease, Wilson’s disease and many other groups, the Hearings served to document how the medical profession, the existing drug regulation regime, or the pharmaceutical industry was not adequately meeting the



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therapeutic needs of this population. The Hearings further helped to draw national attention to the unique problems faced by patients with rare diseases. The difficulties of gaining access to medicines for rare diseases was dramatized in the popular television series Quincy M.D.1 The subsequent media attention that followed this episode helped to transform the orphan drug problem into a national issue (Asbury, 1985; Henkel, 1999). Lastly, the Hearings made the orphan drug problem amenable to governmental thought and intervention by assisting in the definition of its contours and in proposing potential solutions. As the Hearings provided a venue for representatives from the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA, academic scientists, and patient’s groups to testify; it created an important forum through which the orphan drug problem became amenable to government. Nonetheless, defining the appropriate scope and limitation of governmental intervention was a site of intense political struggle. This intensity had to do with the stakes at hand: the regulatory framework and the economic premises underpinning the drug approval process in the United States. At the Hearings, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PMA) argued that the FDA standards relating to drug safety and efficacy significantly increased the time and expense of developing new medicines, creating disincentives for industry to invest in drugs aimed at small patient populations. The PMA proposed the development of a two-tiered drug approval system: one system, which employed the existing standards for drugs intended for large segments of the population, and a fasttrack system for orphan drugs. By way of contrast, the FDA argued that orphan drugs should be subject to the same regulatory provisions as drugs aimed at common conditions. The FDA suggested that to do otherwise, would be to subject individuals with rare diseases to a different standard just because they have a rare disease. The testimony presented by patients at the Hearings fit into a dominant ‘drug lag’ discourse present in the United States from the early 1970s to mid1980s (Daemmrich and Krücken, 2000). This discourse suggested that stringent FDA standards led to lengthy delays in the marketing of new drugs in comparison to other countries, causing unwarranted suffering and loss of life to American patients. The claims made by patients at the Hearings aligned themselves to this discourse through the suggestion that the lengthy and costly procedures present at the FDA for approving drugs further discouraged pharmaceutical companies from investing in the development of drugs intended for small patient populations (United States Congress, 1981). Over the course of the Hearings, the highly regulated and standardized techno-economic trajectory of drug



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development came into question due to its failure to meet the therapeutic needs of rare disease patients. The question then became one of how the existing standards could be adapted in order to promote the development of treatments for rare diseases. Over the course of the Hearings, it became apparent that the existing system of drug regulation and development created disincentives for firms to invest in diseases thought to be unprofitable. Given the concerns of the FDA to maintain the integrity of existing drug safety standards, the problem became one of defining the regulatory and legal incentives that would encourage pharmaceutical companies to sponsor drugs intended for rare disease through the FDA approval process. The Orphan Drug Act, in its final formulation, uses a range of legal and economic incentives to make possible the inclusion of the therapeutic needs of rare disease patients into the drug development trajectories of pharmaceutical companies. The Orphan Drug Act helped to create a novel trajectory of drug development through the provision of seven years of marketing exclusivity for orphan drugs, tax credits for clinical trial-related expenses, assistance with the drug application process, and a grant programme for research on orphan diseases.2 The series of struggles that took place around orphan drugs contributed to the reconfiguration of the government of drug development by modifying some of the risks and uncertainties associated with the development of drugs intended for small patient populations. As we will see in the following section, the Orphan Drug Act has successfully increased the number of therapies available to patients affected by rare diseases.

11.3 Markets, firms, and the Orphan Drug Act The struggles that took place around the passage of the Orphan Drug Act (ODA) reveals how standards can become contested and inventively modified to channel and pattern the trajectories of techno-economic networks. As a solution to the failure of pharmaceutical companies to develop treatments for rare diseases, the legal and economic incentives contained within the ODA have been successful in shaping the conduct of firms, industry, and regulatory agencies in directions considered socially and economically desirable. By many accounts, the ODA is often considered to be one of the most successful pieces of health-related legislation passed in the United States (Haffner, 2006; Tambuyzer, 2000). In the first instance, this legislation has shaped the investment calculations of firms as can be judged by the dramatic increase in the number of therapies marketed to treat rare conditions. Secondly, as a governmental



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technology intended to promote the development of rare disease treatments, the American Orphan Drug Act has served as a policy model for other countries and regions. Lastly, the impact of the ODA in shaping drug development markets finds support in the growing number of firms that specialize in the development of treatments for rare diseases. The ODA has effected a revaluation of rare diseases: previously these illnesses were of limited commercial interest, whereas now they are a potentially profitable market sector. As a governmental technology, the ODA has influenced the research and investment calculations of the drug development industry. By removing some of the risks and uncertainties previously associated with the development of drugs targeted at small patient populations, the ODA has positively shaped the kinds of patient populations which private industry decides to treat. One measure used to evaluate the success of this legislation is the number of orphan drugs marketed since 1982. In contrast to the 35 orphan drugs on the market in the 1970s, only 10 of which were developed exclusively by industry, 285 orphan drugs have received market approval since the passage of the ODA (Asbury, 1986; Haffner, 2001; 2006). The significant increase in the number of orphan drugs marketed is the result of the growth of the biotechnology industry from the 1980s onwards. As many rare diseases are genetic in origin, the legal and economic incentives contained within the ODA provided a stimulus to an emergent biotechnology industry (Haffner, 2003; Haffner et al., 2002; Tambuyzer, 2000). For many start-up biotechnology companies, orphan product designation is instrumental to securing venture capital investment which is assured by the prospect of seven years of market exclusivity and the tax credits associated with clinical trial related expenses (Alster, 1991, Calabro, 2006). Although in the initial years after the passage of the Act, orphan drugs were developed primarily by the pharmaceutical industry, from the 1990s onward, one-third of all marketed orphan drugs have come from the biotechnology industry (Ashton, 2001; Haffner et al., 2002). The ODA has not only shaped the conduct of markets and firms, it has contributed to the health of populations affected by rare diseases. Through shaping the economic circumstances of drug development, the US Orphan Drug Act has contributed to augmenting the health of the estimated 20–25 million Americans affected by rare diseases. Of further significance is how the Act has extended the clinical reach of medicine to conditions where no viable treatment option previously existed, creating new possibilities for augmenting human health and health care costs (a topic explored in more detail in the next section).



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Patients’ groups, industry, and the FDA argue that the success of the ODA in promoting the development of new treatments has led to the adoption of this legislation in locales outside the United States. The American Orphan Drug Act has served as a model for the development of similar legislation in Singapore, Japan, Australia, and most recently, the European Union. Despite the generally positive assessments of the ODA, the creation of favourable market conditions for the development of rare disease treatments is not without a number of problems. The legislative intent of the ODA was to encourage firms to develop and market therapies for small patient populations where there were limited prospects of making a reasonable return on their investment. However, some orphan drugs have proven to be profitable and amongst the most expensive. In the case of firms such as Genzyme – a pioneering biotechnology company that effectively demonstrated the market potential of drugs intended for small patient populations – its therapies are among the most expensive in the world (Novas, 2008). Let me take the example of a drug developed by Genzyme known as Cerezyme. The average annual cost of treating a patient with Cerezyme varies from USD$70,000 to USD$300,000 dependent on dosage and body weight. Considering that a treatment such as Cerezyme is required for the remainder of a patient’s life it generates substantial revenues. Genzyme is not alone in producing profitable orphan drugs: Genentech’s Propotin, Amgen’s Epogen, and Novartis’ Gleevec have all managed to rank on the list of the top 100 selling drugs (Maeder, 2003). It is important to emphasize that the vast majority of orphan drugs have sales in the region of $USD15–20 million and are not profitable. On a different register, the high cost of some orphan drugs raises the more serious problem of how national health care systems are able to pay for these treatments – a topic explored in the following section.

11.4 Cost-effectiveness analyses and orphan drugs In his lecture ‘The Crisis of Medicine or the Crisis of Anti-Medicine’ Michel Foucault (2004) argued that states took on the responsibility for providing a healthy life to their citizens in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. From this moment onwards, health became a significant item of state expenditure and site of political struggle. Although the circumstances have changed, these two axes of Foucault’s analysis are relevant to considering how states over the course of the past three decades have become concerned with reducing the proportion



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that health care expenditures occupy within national budgets and have started to question the terms of their responsibilities to provide for the health of their citizens. The growth of health care budgets is in part due to advances in the biomedical sciences that have served to expand the field of health care intervention in terms of scope and cost. Orphan drugs are representative of this trend since they extend the domain of clinical intervention to illnesses that were previously untreatable. Furthermore, orphan drugs, in comparison to treatments intended for large population groups, are generally more expensive. This feature of orphan drugs raises questions about whether states should fund these types of therapies. High-cost orphan drugs pose the problem of whether the provision of these treatments to a small number of patients will have an adverse impact upon budgetary capacities to provide for the health care needs of the general population. In the remainder of this section, I concentrate upon the forms of struggle that take place around access to orphan drugs. As I will show, the high cost of some orphan drugs renders them atypical within the increasingly standardized metrics used to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of pharmaceuticals. I will suggest that these standardized metrics work to exclude many high-cost orphan drugs and the therapeutic needs of rare disease patients. The types of struggles that are taking place around cost-effectiveness evaluations are concerned with altering these standardized metrics in order to accommodate the particularities of orphan drugs. These struggles are significant, in that they are concerned with reshaping the forms of clinical and economic calculation that inform access to medicines. As states became concerned with health care spending from the 1970s onwards, the field of health economics and cost-effectiveness analysis gained prominence in shaping health care decisions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, health economics and cost-effectiveness evaluations gained an institutional foothold through the creation of bodies such as National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE, UK); Australian Health Technology Assessment Committee; Canadian Coordinating Office for Health Technology Assessment; and the Swedish Council on Technology Assessment in Health Care. This field of knowledge and practice is concerned with developing a range of principles to evaluate health practices so that the most efficient use is made of limited health resources. Cost-effectiveness analyses have become an essential technology used to make decisions about the types of drugs funded by national health care systems. In the course of making these types of decisions, health economics has developed standardized methodologies for evaluating the clinical and cost-effectiveness of drugs. On one register, cost-effectiveness



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evaluations entail an analysis of the clinical effectiveness of a therapy in actual practice to evaluate whether it produces significant health benefits. On a second register, the field of health economics has invented a range of standardized metrics by which to assess the cost-effectiveness of therapies. The most known and widely used metric is Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). This standardized metric enables comparison of widely differing health interventions on a clinical and monetary basis. QALYs make it possible to compare the cost-effectiveness of different therapies that compete for the same budget. Although QALYs do not constitute the sole metric used to evaluate drugs, they figure prominently in establishing health care funding limits. For example, in the United Kingdom, drugs which exceed a threshold of £20,000–£30,000 per QALY are generally not reimbursed (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, 2006). In the case of orphan drugs, the unique clinical and economic features of these therapies are often difficult to accommodate within the standardized trajectories of cost-effectiveness analyses. As I show, the atypical character of these drugs problematizes the standardized trajectories used to evaluate the funding of medicines within national health care systems. The forms of struggle that take place around these standards are politically significant since they are concerned with the inclusion of the therapeutic needs of rare disease patients into the regulatory regimes that shape access to medicines. As health care systems throughout Europe and North America struggle to contain health care expenditures, cost-effectiveness evaluation has become another standardized regulatory trajectory that a drug must pass in order to enter human bodies (Simon, 2006; Simon and Kotler, 2003). Similar to the standardization efforts of evidence-based medicine, cost-effectiveness analysis attempts to establish a series of procedural standards (Timmermans and Berg, 2003) for informing decisions about the funding of particular health care interventions (Hedgecoe, 2004). Through assessing drugs on the basis of clinical and cost-effectiveness, the standardized metrics which health economics employs seeks to depoliticize the process through which decisions are made over which treatments are funded by national health care systems. The impulse behind this standardization effort is to ensure that treatment funded by health care systems is evidentially informed and that the most efficient use is made of limited health budgets. As means of illustrating how high-cost orphan drugs do not readily travel along the standardized trajectories used to evaluate the clinical and cost-effectiveness of pharmaceuticals, I draw upon the experience of the West Midlands Specialised Commissioning Unit (WMSCU). The forms



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of cost-effectiveness evaluation that this group employs is analogous to that which takes places across most European countries (my case study builds upon the work of Moreira, 2007; Mulkay et al., 1987; Sjögren and Helgesson, 2007 who have examined cost-effectiveness analysis in the United Kingdom and Sweden). The WMSCU is a group composed of over 30 primary care trusts in the West Midlands region of England that provides specialized health services to a population of five million people. One of the decisions that the WMSCU had to make was whether to fund a series of high-cost orphan drugs used for the treatment of Gaucher’s disease, Fabry’s Disease and Mucopolysaccharidoses Type 1. In order to establish a principled basis for making these types of decisions, the WMSCU commissioned a series of studies that examined the economic, social, and legal aspects of funding these types of therapies. Towards this end, they commissioned cost-effectiveness studies of Imiglucerase, Fabryzyme and Migulsat (Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility, 2004a; 2004b); and conducted focus group studies to ascertain public opinion on this topic (McIver, 2004). Strategically, the WMSCU was attempting to move away from a system of health care rationing driven haphazardly by political expediency, patient group influence, and industry lobbying. Alternatively, the WMSCU sought to develop a rational, transparent, and fair means of allocating limited health budgets. Similar to the experience of other countries, one of the problems that orphan drugs present to standardized forms of cost-effectiveness evaluation is limited clinical trial data. As many orphan drug trials involve small patient populations and have not been in use for lengthy periods, there is often insufficient data to evaluate their clinical and cost effectiveness. Second, the high cost of many orphan drugs means that their cost per QALY considerably exceeds established guidelines. In the case of the WMSCU, the cost per QALY for Imiglucerase was £400,000, £252,000 for Agalsidase beta, and £450,000 for Laronidase (Burls et al., 2005). Based on their evaluation of the clinical evidence and the cost-effectiveness of these therapies, the WMSCU decided not to fund the treatments in question. In making this decision, the WMSCU highlighted that based on existing methodologies there are no adequate cost-effectiveness measures to account for the unique features of orphan drugs. Second, the WMSCU justified their decision using the economic concept of opportunity costs in order to address the normative question of the social distribution of health care resources. In an article describing the experience of the WMSCU, Amanda Burls and colleagues (2005) explain that when resources are devoted to high cost treatments that affect a small percentage of the population, the opportunity costs involved consist of



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there being less resources available to fund health interventions that have a greater impact on the health of the population. Shortly after this decision, the UK Department of Health decided to fund treatments for these disorders and asked NICE to review existing methodologies for evaluating high-cost orphan drugs (Department of Health, 2004). After reviewing existing methodologies, the NICE concluded that in the case of ultra-orphan drugs (conditions that affect less than 1000 people in the United Kingdom) further decision rules would need to be developed. The NICE stated that it would undertake further work on appraising ultra-orphan drugs and recommended the establishment of an UltraOrphan Drug Evaluation Committee (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, 2006). The UK Department of Health has not yet established this committee. At present, the cost-effectiveness evaluation of orphan drugs remains uncertain in the United Kingdom. The success of orphan drug legislation in promoting the development of a range of treatments for rare disorders has generated a novel interrelated problem: how can national health care systems and insurance companies afford to pay for the increasing number of high cost orphan drugs? On an individual basis, expensive orphan drugs do not have an effect on national health care budgets given that they treat a small number of patients; collectively, however, they can have a significant impact upon these budgets (Hollis, 2005). At its core, this problem involves a conflict between attempting to increase the capacity to act upon human health while attempting to contain increasing health care costs. Given the significant hope invested in the promise of contemporary biomedicine to alleviate human illness and regenerate national economies, the tension between developing innovative treatments for rare diseases and containing health care costs is a site of intense political struggle.

11.5 Conclusion In this chapter, I have illustrated how orphan drugs provide an interesting vantage point from which to examine some of the problems associated with standardization in health care. First, through the focus on orphan drugs, I have interrogated how standardization not only works to facilitate the development and assessment of pharmaceuticals, but also works to marginalize particular types of drugs and therapeutic categories. As a category, orphan drugs is a catch-all term that speaks to the forms of exclusion that non-standard drugs, therapeutic categories, and patients experience in relation to the standardized trajectories of drug development and cost-effectiveness evaluations of medicines.



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Through thinking of orphan drugs as non-standard, they help us think about how standards work by producing things that fit and those that do not (cf. Haraway, 1997). Secondly, this chapter shows how the types of struggles that historically and contemporaneously take place around orphan drugs are biopolitical in orientation. These struggles are significant, in that they seek to reshape the regulation of an economically important sector and are concerned with acting upon the health of populations affected by rare diseases. In the present, the types of biopolitical struggles around the cost-effectiveness analyses of orphan drugs are only likely to increase. As biomedicine discovers an ever-greater number of rare diseases, and biotechnology companies create ever more orphan drugs, struggles over the allocation of national health care resources will become increasingly prominent. As national health care systems struggle to contain rising health care expenditures, it is important to remain attentive to the kinds of administrative calculations and standards that inform the distribution of health care resources.

Notes 1. Following testimony presented on this Bill, the story was picked up by the LA Times (Maye, 1980). This story was read by Jack Klugman’s brother, Maurice (see Henkel, 1999) They decided to do an episode about persons affected by rare diseases. This episode of Quincy was incredibly popular. It was followed by a testimony by Jack Klugman and Adam Seligman in Congress in relation to a Bill that was reintroduced by Representative Henry Waxman. 2. The United States Orphan Drug Act provides a number of incentives to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to develop rare disease treatments. The greatest incentive consists of seven years of market exclusivity. Under the terms of this provision, the FDA cannot license any other drug or product for the same indication, with the exception of products that demonstrate a greater safety profile or clinical effectiveness. The Orphan Drug Act provides tax credits for up to 50 per cent of clinical trial related expenses. Furthermore, drug sponsors can request written protocol assistance from the FDA relating to the design of clinical trials that are most likely to satisfy the drug approval process. This provision works to encourage the development of rare disease treatments as it is often difficult to conduct clinical trials on small patient populations and it is not always possible to conduct randomized control trials. In the United States, the Orphan Drug Act provides a number of research grants to encourage the development of orphan drugs or medical devices.

Bibliography Abraham, J. (1995), Science, Politics, and the Pharmaceutical Industry: Controversy and Bias in Drug Regulation (New York: St. Martin’s Press).



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Part IV Conclusion





From Standardization to Standardizing Work Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner

12.1 Introduction 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. The notion of standardizing work highlights three key ways in which a post-realist approach advances social scientific theorizing on how standards shape ‘the social’.

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Standards are more complex than universal tools applied at local sites. Realist approaches view standards as being created through international standard-setting bodies and diffused on a global scale (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000; Drori et al., 2006). Little scrutiny is given to how such standards are made to work locally, and the consequences of such implementation. This is an issue given significant attention in social studies of science where standards, protocols and technical artefacts are argued to be given shape, or ‘performed’, in the course of their application (Berg, 1997; Dugdale and Grealish, Chapter 6; Latour, 1987; Mol, 1999). From this perspective, according to Timmermans and Berg (1997, p. 275), ‘universality’ is always local universality, in that standardizing ‘always rests on real time work, and emerges from localized processes of negotiations and pre-existing institutional, infrastructural, and material relations’. Therefore, it is important to focus on how standards are rendered workable in local interactions and settings. There are three main ways in which contributors to this book conceptualize the local implementation of standards: hybridization, adaptation and subordination. The notion of hybridization is developed in the chapter by Miller et al. (Chapter 2) who examine how the calculative practices associated with management accounting undergo a constant process of hybridizing as they encounter other bodies of expertise. In other words, such practices do not simply result in the standardization of those domains that they encounter. Rather hybridization involves adaptation and also forms of resistance. Pre-existing institutional practices in particular may give rise to hybrid forms that differ across organizational settings. Thus, while the hybridizing of medical and financial expertise within public hospitals has been embraced by medics in Finland it has been actively resisted by British medical personnel. For Miller and colleagues, hybridizing is a crucial aspect of standardizing, in that it ‘enables the governing of conduct to adapt to the specifics of the domain or activity in question’. The significance of adaptation in making standards workable is a theme taken up in the chapter by Higgins et al. (Chapter 10) and Feakins (Chapter 9). The former chapter is interested in how Environmental Management Systems (EMS) – underpinned by the international standard ISO14001 – have been adapted within Australian agriculture. As Higgins et al. note, EMS was viewed by Federal and state governments as part of the solution to encouraging more sustainable land management



12.2 Standardizing configures, and is configured through, local practices

practices by farmers. Yet, meeting the full requirements of ISO14001 was simply not practicable at an industry and regional level given the absence of market incentives for commodities produced using an EMS, and the pressure on farmers from low commodity prices and drought. Consequently, EMS was adapted, particularly by the dairy industry, as an environmental self-assessment tool which would enable farmers and processors to ‘demonstrate’ sound environmental practices but without incurring the costs of full ISO14001 certification. For Higgins et al., the adaptation of EMS in Australian agriculture shows how the process of making standards work locally may compromise the original aims of such standards schemes, yet also render them workable across a wider range of sites. Feakins also examines how standards are adapted locally. Her chapter focuses on how software testers in Russia have drawn upon the knowledge and certification procedures of the International Software Testing Qualifications Board. Rather than contributing to the diffusion of global standards in which local knowledge and practices are absorbed or colonized, Feakins argues that testers have actively sought to adapt international certification in order to establish local recognition of testing as a legitimate and serious profession. Finally, while not mentioned explicitly, Chapter 4 by Bain and Hatanaka is concerned with the subordination of local values and practices to those of outside ‘experts’. One of their case studies focuses on the problems faced by Indonesian shrimp farmers in working with a thirdparty certifier (Naturland) to develop appropriate organic standards. While Naturland sought to collaborate with shrimp farmers to develop locally relevant standards, considerable differences emerged between the two groups over what they understood ‘sustainability’ to entail. In the face of these differences the local knowledge of the farmers – which emphasized economic sustainability – was subordinated to the expert knowledge deployed by Naturland, in which environmental sustainability was privileged. As Bain and Hatanaka note, such subordination may undermine the effectiveness of third-party certification leading to partial implementation of the standards, or it can give rise to forms of fraudulent activity in which the paperwork provided by farmers/growers to certifiers differs from their on-farm practices. Outside science studies there has thus far been limited interest in the local shaping of standards, yet, as Star and Lampland (2009, p. 16) note, ‘standards are intensely local, in the sense that, despite their global reach, they touch very specific communities in very specific contexts’. This suggests that a more ‘localized’ analysis of standards, such as that pursued in this book, provides a useful way forward in taking account





of how ‘global’ standards are rendered workable in and through local practices. Law (2004, p. 21) and Thrift (2000, p. 380) concur arguing that taking the ‘small’ or ‘little’ as a methodological starting point – rather than looking up to search for ‘the broader picture’ – is crucial in discovering complexity within the concrete as well as heterogeneity, particularly material heterogeneity. Thus, focusing on how standards are ‘made’ in the process of their implementation enables a more nuanced analysis of the conditions of possibility of various standards, protocols and certification schemes, as well as the power relations that are an effect of standardizing work.

12.3 Standardizing involves the work of making different entities commensurable and comparable, as well as the enacting of distinctions between objects, subjects and forms of knowledge Whereas realist approaches view standards as acting on a world with pre-existing social divisions and structures, the perspectives applied in this collection contend, following Bowker and Star (1999), that standards are involved in the classification, categorization and constitution of social worlds, interacting with, as well as modifying, those objects which they seek to govern (see Pollock, Chapter 7). They enable otherwise disparate or unrelated entities to be brought together into a single space of calculation and to be compared in the same terms giving rise to new hybrid(izing) worlds that mix, for example, the economy and science or the economy and medicine (see Miller et al., Chapter 2) and which may not previously have been thinkable. In this way, standards may be viewed as boundary objects, in that they ‘both inhabit several intersecting social worlds … and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them’ (Star and Griesemer, 1989, p. 393). The drawing together of different entities through standards contributes to the harmonizing of political and economic life and thereby enables the construction of ‘new spaces of political rule’ (Barry, 2001, p. 63). At the same time, standards are also involved in the production of new ways of standardizing human bodies and capabilities (e.g., Epstein, 2009). However, ongoing work is required to make things commensurable, calculable and thus standardizable. As Callon (1998a, p. 16) argues, ‘if calculations are to be performed and completed, the agents and goods involved in those calculations must be disentangled and framed’. Attempts at framing constantly give rise to ‘overflows’ or externalities. For this reason, according to Callon (1998b, p. 252), ‘overflows are the rule and



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framing is a fragile, artificial result based upon substantial investments’. As a consequence, the framing of agents and goods through standards requires ongoing work; ‘standardization is a never completed process’ (Barry, 2001, p. 63). The investments required in bringing together incommensurable artefacts and actors, so that they can be compared in the same space and on the same terms, is the focus of the chapter by Pollock (Chapter 7). As Pollock notes, this work, which he describes as the labour of comparison, is central to standardizing. Yet, it is only beginning to attract attention from scholars. Focusing on one set of ‘industry analysts’ (the Gartner Group) Pollock examines their attempt to rank and compare software vendors through the production of a decision-making tool known as the ‘Magic Quadrant’. This tool enables previously incommensurable technologies to be compared on the same scale and for Gartner to enact a world which corresponds to the categorizations of the Magic Quadrant. Nevertheless, the actualization of this world is made possible through the construction of a research process to enable comparison and ranking of software vendors, and to provide a mechanism ‘whereby industry analysts could speak “authoritatively” about the performance and competence of software vendors’. Through this research process, Pollock shows how the Magic Quadrant becomes a black-boxed and authoritative way of comparing and ranking software vendors – a socio-technical agencement (Callon, 2007) – which shapes the activities of vendors and users. Standardizing work is not always aimed at making entities comparable and commensurable. It also involves the enacting of distinctions or divisions (Bowker and Star, 1999). Thus, following Dugdale (1999; see also Mennicken, 2008), standardizing work may be thought of as giving rise to singularity (sameness) and multiplicity (difference). The effects of standardizing work in creating difference are well illustrated in the chapters by Henman and Dean (Chapter 5), and Michael (Chapter 8). Michael, for instance, draws attention to how standardizing work serves to construct – and indeed reinforce – social boundaries. Using the seemingly mundane example of the sticking plaster, Michael shows how the standards that structure the plaster’s physical design enact a variety of social boundaries between the domestic and the professional, the expressive and the practical, the trivial and the serious, the public and the private or the lawful and the criminal. For example, where the dressing of wounds once required the need to call medical personnel, the sticking plaster reorders the domestic setting as a self-sufficient space in which one can attend to wounds ‘independently’ without the need for medical intervention. Thus, Michael argues, ‘the “simple” or standard





application of a “simple” or standard plaster is also the complex enactment of a complex society’. Henman and Dean too are interested in how standardizing enacts social boundaries. However, unlike Michael, they link this to a broader Foucauldian concern with the governing of populations. Focusing on the rise of ICTs in the administration of social policy, they note that such technologies are enmeshed with processes of standardization which reduce informational complexity or depth and contribute to the reduction of discretionary judgement for authorities. Yet, while ICTs standardize organizational information, at the same time they are involved in social sorting in which sub-populations are classified and differentially governed. In the process of producing sameness and difference, standards can also enact inequalities which exclude the knowledge, perspectives and experiences of particular groups. As Star points out, a standardized network is only stable ‘for the members of the community of practice who form/use/maintain it’ (1991, p. 43). Those who are not standard, but are subject to the standard network, are frequently excluded and regarded as Other. This issue is given explicit attention in the chapters by Bain and Hatanaka (Chapter 4) and Prieto-Carrón and Larner (Chapter 3). Bain and Hatanaka argue that the work of third-party certification – which is used increasingly to verify that agricultural production practices comply with particular environmental and quality standards specified by large global retailers – relies on techno-scientific values which marginalize the experiences and knowledge of workers and farmers in developing nations. These values privilege the knowledge of experts and the ‘objectivity’ of auditing procedures in determining what should count as environmentally or socially just practices. Such marginalization is difficult for farmers to question since, as Bain and Hatanaka note, it tends to be ‘obscured behind an audit process that is not intended to facilitate stakeholder dialogue or debate’. Nevertheless, as noted previously in this chapter, the limited involvement by farmers in the development of standards has contributed to a number of problems in the implementation of the standards, including various forms of fraudulent activity. Prieto-Carrón and Larner also draw attention to the marginalization of local knowledge and experiences in the development of standards within developing nations. Focusing on Chiquita’s Code of Conduct, and its implications for women plantation workers in Nicaragua, they argue that while the Code provides for the creation of equal opportunities, it fails to go the next step and create opportunities for women to improve their position. For example, the Code fails to mention issues



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‘such as proactive measures to advance women’s status in the workplace or to challenge the sexual division of labour in the banana plantations’. Significantly, the Code of Conduct has been watered down over time so that it now subsumes gender issues as a part of broader notions of ‘human’ and ‘environmental’ rights. On this basis, PrietoCarrón and Larner view the Chiquita Code of Conduct as providing some potential for female plantation workers to improve their circumstances, but only if forms of discrimination that affect women are included explicitly in the Code, and if women are active participants in its development. While standards may contribute to the marginalization of particular concerns, experiences or forms of knowledge, such marginality is not necessarily fixed and can lead to the problematization, and reconfiguration, of standardizing practices. As Novas (Chapter 11) notes, orphan drugs provide an ideal example of a once marginalized category that has come to problematize the standardizing trajectory of drug development and has reshaped the investment decisions of pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, as well as government legislation, towards considering the needs of rare disease patients. Despite high cost orphan drugs not travelling along the standardized trajectories used to evaluate the clinical and cost-effectiveness of pharmaceuticals, they have formed a site of intense political struggle over the development of innovative treatments for rare diseases on the one hand, and the need to contain health care costs on the other. The arguments raised by contributors to this book concerning the production of singularity and multiplicity, as well as the marginalization and problematization of particular entities, objects, knowledges and so forth, in standardizing work points to the need by scholars to devote greater attention in the future to what Timmermans and Almeling (2009, p. 25) refer to as the ‘ubiquitous, diverse, and ambiguous’ politics of standardization.

12.4 Standardizing makes possible, and contributes to the production of, new forms of identitiy, subjectivity and social organization The notion that standards give rise to more predictable, regularized and rationalized forms of conduct is well established within Weberianinspired narratives of social change (e.g., Ritzer, 2004) and provides a foundation for realist approaches to standardization. However, often neglected in these analyses are how standards are involved in the production, and governing, of particular forms of rationality, individuality





and social organization. Standards may facilitate and make possible certain identities, but also render other identities irrelevant (Timmermans, 1996). As Foucault (1982, p. 210) contends, ‘the word rationalization is dangerous. What we have to do is analyze specific rationalities rather than always invoking the progress of rationalization in general’. This reflects Foucault’s position that there is no such thing as the universal subject since human subjectivities and capabilities are produced in and through particular discourses. Consequently, for Anglo-Foucauldian scholars such as Rose (1999, p. 43), rather than engaging in ‘the interminable and ultimately fruitless project of constructing a general history of the human subject’, we need to undertake the modest yet more practicable task of ‘identifying the ways in which human beings are individuated and addressed within the various practices that would govern them, the relations to themselves that they have taken up within the variety of practices within which they have come to govern themselves’. This type of approach is well illustrated by Henman and Dean (Chapter 5). Rather than viewing new electronic technologies of governing, such as ICTs, as part of late modern processes of individualization in which individuals creatively construct their own identities, they argue that e-government portends a far more basic style, or rationality, of individuality based upon the standardized categories found in computer databases. The database enables customer populations to be segmented according to particular behavioural profiles based on their databasedefined characteristics. This leads to a targeted rationality of governing whereby certain populations and ‘types’ of individuals are constructed as risky, and are subjected to forms of surveillance and disciplinarity (see also Lyon, 2001), whereas others constructed as ‘good’ customers may be offered more personalized services. As a consequence, Henman and Dean argue that the provision of public services needs to be reconceptualized from ‘individualized service delivery’ to standardized individuality. If the consumers of public services are subject increasingly to standardized forms of individuality, and associated techniques of surveillance and disciplinarity, so too are service providers. The chapter by Dugdale and Grealish (Chapter 6) examines how the growth in Australia, as well as elsewhere in Western nations, of national competency standards in nursing is leading to the emergence of new modes of governing clinical practices. Aimed at improving the accountability, transparency and thus the quality of health care, competency standards work in a similar way to audits to provide an added level of assurance and control ‘that goes beyond direct surveillance’ (Dugdale and Grealish, Chapter 6). While national competency standards appear to govern the conduct of nurses



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in ways that are more indirect, and which allow for greater freedom and flexibility than in traditional supervisor/supervised relations they enact what Rose (1999) terms an ‘advanced liberal’ regime of governing in which risk is located as an individual characteristic that must be constantly monitored and corrected in highly specific ways. Thus, such standards encourage the ‘responsible’ exercise of freedom (Higgins, 2004) in which one is expected to be an entrepreneur of the self, monitoring and constantly improving one’s own conduct. Dugdale and Grealish note that if performance through self-governance does not improve, ongoing reviews of nursing performance, as well as random audits, provide a more direct means of exercising surveillance and disciplining those who do not have the capacities for self-regulation. Yet, at the same time that competency standards individualize risk, they have also contributed to a shift in power between the nursing profession, medicine and the state. The control of competency standards by nursing professional bodies has challenged medical dominance within hospital settings and has enabled nurses to take on new roles in the regulation of nursing practice and exercise greater control over the governance of nursing. Thus standards not only promote advanced liberal forms of subjectification and self-governance, they also resource new identities that may be empowering and lead to new forms of social organization. The notion that standards may resource new forms of identity and social organization is taken up in the chapters by Feakins (Chapter 9) and Prieto-Carrón and Larner (Chapter 3). Focusing on software testing in Russia, Feakins examines how software testers are drawing upon, and adapting, international certification schemes in order to become recognized locally as a legitimate and serious profession. From this perspective, the aim of certification is not to provide a more standardized means of evaluating the skills of testers, nor is it to enable distinctions to be made between certified/accredited testers and those without certification. Rather, certification is used by testers as a mechanism to become aware of, and connect to, the global professional community of software testers, and to generate a critical mass of local testers with certificates so that they are recognized as a professional field in Russia. While techniques of standardizing may be used by skilled occupational groups to acquire professional recognition, they may also provide spaces for vulnerable workers – particularly women workers – in developing nations to improve their circumstances. Prieto-Carrón and Larner (Chapter 3) argue that corporate codes of conduct, while frequently having little impact on the lives of workers, may be used by women to improve their situation. Focusing on women working on banana





plantations, which sell to the Chiquita corporation, Prieto-Carrón and Larner contend that codes of conduct need to be taken seriously since they can be used ‘as a political tool for workers’ education and advocacy work’ as well as providing guidance for workers and companies in ensuring more equitable work practices.

12.5 Conclusion Seen as a whole, the chapters in this book show that standards are worthy of study in their own right and they also underline the contributions that governmentality and actor-network approaches can make to this research field. The contributions of the authors complement broader trends in social scientific literatures to study ‘boring’ (Lampland and Star, 2009) things that are usually taken for granted, showing how they can provide valuable analytical entry points for research that take seriously the heterogeneity of our economic, political and social worlds. Rather than debate whether or not these techniques are ‘accurate’ or ‘true’ renderings of the world, they focus attention on the work they do in ‘making up’ the world in particular forms. In this regard, the work on standards contained herein speaks to broader discussions of ordering and governing that refuse singularities and emphasize the multiplicity of practices involved (Hinchliffe et al., 2007). If standards themselves exemplify attempts to disentangle diverse actors, goods and processes, and represent them in commensurable and calculable forms that can be transferred across time and space, then the aim of the contributors to this book has been to re-entangle standards in all their complexities. But we should be careful to avoid implying that we are seeing a gradual universalization of standards and processes of standardization, and that quantification and calculation are the only ways of governing in contemporary contexts. Indeed, there are recent discussions that suggest standards and other calculative practices now operate alongside more open-ended processes associated with what is sometimes called ‘governing through uncertainty’. The salience of these new forms of governance have been identified in a diverse and growing set of fields, including war and weather (Massumi, 2009), geopolitical threats (de Goede, 2008), biological security (Hinchliffe and Bingham, 2008) and industrial accidents (Collier and Lakoff, 2008). Engineers, for example, are no longer content with codes of practice that give rise to pre-determined outcomes, but rather are looking for new protocols that will allow them to engineer for diversity and adaptability, and for purposes that are not fixed in time and place.1 These new governmental techniques are neither calculative



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nor standardizing. However, like other governmental techniques they aim to make incommensurable objects and subjects commensurable, and are seen as potentially transferable across time, space and sector. Standards are not being superseded. Indeed, there would be a deep irony if just as standards became visible to social science commentators, they were usurped by alternative forms of governing. Nor is this a claim that we are seeing a paradigmatic shift from one form of (quantitative and calculative) governing to another (multifaceted and open-ended) form. But it is a reminder that calculative practices such as standards are not the only form of governmental technique worthy of our attention in efforts to uncover and study how mundane techniques have constitutive effects. In his study of insurance, for example, Collier (2008) argues the need to distinguish between forms of risk technologies involving calculated mitigation based on archival-statistical knowledge, and these newer, alternative, forms of risk techniques involving enactment-based knowledge (emphasis in the original). The challenge, he argues, is to trace how each of these knowledge forms spreads from one domain to another and has come to be assembled in distinctive political arrangements in particular contexts. Similarly, Massumi (2009), re-reading Foucault (2008), argues that we are now in a ‘generalized crisis environment’ in which we have moved out of the reach of standardization and normalization and are now working in settings that are more likely to embrace instability, spontaneity and self-organization. Risk, he argues, is now regarded as endemic, inexpungable and ultimately unknowable. These emergent discussions leave us, finally and perhaps unexpectedly, with a question about the relationship between standards and neoliberalism. It has been commonly accepted, including previously by us, that standards and other calculative practices are usefully understood as mechanisms of neoliberal governing (Higgins et al., 2008; Larner and Le Heron, 2002). Yet the term neoliberalism is strangely absent in the chapters within this book, featuring only in passing, and usually as a background concept (see, for examples, Bain and Hatanaka (Chapter 4) and Dugdale and Grealish (Chapter 6)). Moreover, we now know Foucault (2008, pp. 260–1) himself argued that neoliberalism is not standardizing in the sense that it uses normative mechanisms to govern individuals. Rather, it acts on the broader environment to create spaces that are open to fluctuating processes and political unknowns. How then should we understand the relationships between contemporary forms of rule and calculative practices such as standards? Are standards examples of disciplinary power rather than neoliberal governmentality? Or, like other attempts at ordering, are standards better understood as impure





practices that have mutated as they have become mobile across time and space, and increasingly complex as they have articulated with other logics and forms of rule (Hinchliffe and Bingham, 2008)? Such questions suggest there remains a rich terrain for further investigation by those who aspire to bring post-realist analytical approaches to their studies of contemporary modes of governing and the complex assemblages they form.

Note 1. Wendy Larner would like to thank her Bristol engineering colleagues Colin Taylor and Mike Yearworth for helping her understand the significance of this shift.

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Page numbers in bold refer to figures, page numbers in italic refer to tables. accountability 58, 70, 105, 106 accounting expertise, hybridization of 23, 24–6 accounting practices 22 accuracy 156–8 activity-based costing 23 actor network theory (ANT) 3, 13, 115, 133, 205, 214; conceptualization of standards 6–8; critiques 8; literature 6–7; translation processes 6 actors, coordination of 1 adaptation 206–7 agri-food standards 168–72. see also environmental management systems (EMS); governance 169– 70; governmentality perspective 170–2, 180; political economy approach 168–9; third-party certification (TPC) 169, 170 agri-food supply chains 167, 168–9, 170 algocracy 86 alteration 12–14 analytical approach 3–8 Aneesh, A. 86 archival-statistical knowledge 215 Asbury, Carolyn 189 assessment technology 102 auditability 67 auditing 4–5; competency standards 102–3, 107; EMS 178– 9; and government 100; thirdparty certification (TPC) 58–9, 67–8 Austin, J. L. 115 Australia 29, 206–7; agri-food standards 168–72; choice of EMS 172; dairy industry 174– 80, 180; Dairy Self-Assessment Tool (DairySAT) 175–80,

180, 181; Dairying for Tomorrow project 175, 176; DairySAT and environmental performance 178; EMS as a technology of governing 172–4; EMS auditing 178–9; EMS framework 173; EMS Incentives Programme 173–4; environmental management systems (EMS) 167–81; Environmental Best Management Practice training programmes 176; implementation of EMS 173–4, 174–80, 180–1; land care groups 182; National EMS Pilot Programme 173–4, 174; National Framework for EMS in Agriculture (NRMMC) 172; National Landcare Program (NLP) Natural Resource Innovation Grant 182; National Landcare Programme 175; Natural Resource Management (NRM) coordinators 176; nursing competencies 94–110, 212–13; Pathways to Industry EMS 173–4 authority 99 average man, the 80–1 Bain, Carmen 9–10, 56–70, 207, 210 Banana Link 48 Band-Aids. see sticking plasters Barrientos, S. et al. 40–1, 41 Beiersdorf company 136 benchmarking 5, 157 Berg, M. 6–7, 13, 206 bioeconomics 14 biomedicine 143 biopolitics 14, 90, 187–92 biopower 14 biotechnology 193 219



Index

Index

bodily capacities 133–4 boundary objects 23 Bovens, M. 86 Bowker, Geoffrey 82, 208 Briers, M. 23 budgeting experiments, medical practices 26–30 Buller, H. 170 Bureau Veritas 47 Burls, Amanda 197–8 calculating self, the 22 calculative networks 119–20, 121 calculative practices 14, 21–32, 206; centrality of 3; medical practices 26–30; and Moore’s Law 25–6; technology road maps 23, 24–5 Callon, M. 6, 115–16, 126–8, 128–9, 208–9 Canada 29 Canguilhem, George 80, 81 Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) protocol 7 categorization 79, 82, 84–5, 208 Cawood, M. 179 certification. see also third-party certification (TPC): bodies 60; Chiquita Brands International Inc 43, 47–9; codes of conduct 47–9; environmental 13–14; global 151–64; global corporation 164–5; international qualification schemes 158–9; local context 152; localizing 159–63, 164; professional 160, 213; software production 13 Cheek, J. et al. 97 Chile, export fruit sector certification programme 57, 64–8 Chiquita Brands International Inc 38–9, 42–4; certification programme 43; code of conduct 43, 44–7, 52, 210–11, 213–14; code of conduct certification 47–9; Core Values 46; enacting the code of conduct 49–51; and gender issues 43–4, 44–6; labour

inspections 50; quality audits 50; workers 52 Chua, W. F. 23 Cincinnati Enquirer 52 classification systems 79, 82, 84–5, 87, 91, 129, 208 Clinical Development Nurses 96 Cocklin, Chris 167–81 codes of conduct 9, 38–52, 214; certification 47–9; Chiquita Brands International Inc 39, 43, 44–7, 52, 210–11, 213–14; conceptualizing 39–42; enacting 49–51; and gender 40–2, 44–6, 47, 51–2; importance 51–2; rise of 39; role 38–9; and social norms 42 Coleman, G. 42, 45 Collier, S. 215 combinable mobiles 6 Commission for the Verification of Corporate Codes of Conduct 48–9 commodity chains 9–10 communication 80 community knowledge 119–21, 127 comparison, labour of 112–28, 126, 128; market analysis 114–16; partiality and bias 121 comparison, technology of 118, 128 competency standards 97, 212–13; accountability 106; assessment 94–5, 102, 104–5, 105–6, 108–9; auditing 102–3, 107; governance 95–7, 101–3, 108, 109; monitoring performance 104; nursing 11–12, 94–110; occupational control 96; review 102; and risk 107–8; and under-performance 101–2 conduct, technologies governing 3–5 consumers, concerned 56 contestation 12–14 co-operative working 29 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) 9, 38–52; consultancy industry 47–9; literature 39–40; role 40 cost-effectiveness analyses, orphan drugs 194–8



220

credibility 60 ‘The Crisis of Medicine or the Crisis of Anti-Medicine’ (Foucault) 194 culture 22 customer profiles 88 Customer Relationship Management 88 customer relationship management systems 123 dairy industry, Australia 174–80 databases: and discretion 86; informational processes 82–9; knowledge base 83–5; and organizational governance 87; records 84; and targeted government 88–9 De Certeau, M. 146 Dean, Mitchell 11, 77–91, 209, 210, 212 Dibden, Jacqui 167–81 Dickson, Earle 136 disability politics 133 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 98–9 discipline society, the 98–9 door grooms 133–4 drugs, orphan 14, 185–99, 211; access 195–8; Congressional hearings 190–2; cost-effectiveness analyses 194–8; definition 186, 198; development trajectories 187–92; numbers marketed 193; Orphan Drug Act 192, 192–4, 199; problem 189; struggles around 188 drugs, technology appraisal guidance 31 Dugdale, Anni 11–12, 94–110, 209, 212–13 Economic Sociology 112, 115 economic space, globalization of 5 economic sustainability 61 economic theories 115 economy of qualities 112, 126 e-government 77–91; and discretion 86; informational processes 82–9; targeted 88–9 El Salvador 51

Elastoplasts. see sticking plasters emissions trading 179–80 empowerment 9, 39–40, 51–2 enabling state, the 100 enactment-based knowledge 215 environmental management systems (EMS) 14, 167–81, 206–7; agri-food standards 168–72; auditing 178; choice of 172; drivers 173; and emissions trading 179–80; flexibility 174; framework 173; implementation 173–4, 174–80, 180–1; incentives 181; processes 172–3; as a technology of governing 172–4 Environmental Best Management Practice training programmes 176 environmental governance, certification schemes 13–14 environmental performance, measurement of 178 environmental sustainability 56, 61–4 Epstein, Steven 190 equal opportunities 40–1, 42, 45, 46–7 Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI) 40 everyday life, standardization 131–44 Ewald, François 79–80 expertise, displacement of 86–7 Feakins, Melanie 13, 151–64, 206, 207, 213 FETRABACH 48 financial management, medical practices 26–30 financial reporting 4–5 financial tools 115 Finland, New Public Management reforms 26, 27–8, 30 first-party certification 59 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (USA) 188, 189, 191–2, 194, 199 food safety 56, 174–5, 181 Forrest, R. D. 135 Foucault, Michael 14, 77, 78, 80, 91, 98–9, 107, 109, 187, 194, 212, 215 fourth-party certification 59 framing processes 115, 208–9



Index 221

Index

freedom 78, 89, 213 functionality 116–18, 145 GAP Inc 51 Garson, B. 86–7 Gartner Group 112–28 gender: and Chiquita Brands International Inc 43–4, 44–6; and codes of conduct 40–2, 44–6, 47, 51–2; interventions 42, 45 gender pyramid, the 41, 41–2 Genzyme 194 global certification 151–64; processes 152; professionalization of 152, 153, 155–6 global supply chains 40, 51–2 GLOBALGAP 57, 58, 59–60, 64–8, 68–9, 70 globalization 1, 5, 8–10 Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) 64 governance 214–15; agri-food standards 169–70; Non-State Market-Driven 167; software testing 153–5 government and governing 4, 132, 215; and auditing 100; EMS as a technology of 172–4; innovation 11; and norms 81–2; targeted 88–9; technologies and 5; technologies of 6, 10, 171–2 governmentality 3, 3–5, 13, 78–9, 90, 154–5, 167, 170–2, 180, 205, 214 Grealish, Laurie 11–12, 94–110, 212–13 Hacking, Ian 129 hard standardization 12 Harriman, Norman F. 79 Hatanaka, M. et al. 169 Hatanaka, Maki 9–10, 56–70, 207, 210 health care 11–12, 94–110; accountability 106; budgets 195, 199; competency assessment 94–5; competency auditing 102–3; competency governance 95–7, 101–3; occupational control 96

Henman, Paul 11, 77–91, 209, 210, 212 Higgins, Vaughan 1–15, 167–81, 205–16 Holtzman, Elizabeth 190 human rights 39 hybridization 206; of accounting expertise 23, 24–6; diverse nature of 32; of medical practices 23, 26–30, 31–2; practices 9, 13–14, 21–32; stabilization 22 hybrids: analyses 22–3; classes 22; definition 22; informal 29; regulated 26, 30 identity 138–9, 212, 213–14 immutable mobiles 6 impartiality 57 incentives 181 indefinite extension 80, 83 independence 57, 59, 66 individuality 11; standardized 77– 91, 212 individualization 89–90, 137, 144–5, 155, 212 Indonesia 10; shrimp certification programme 57, 60–4, 69–70, 207 industry analysts 112, 114–15, 126 inequalities 210–11 informal hybrids 29 information and communications technologies (ICTs) 11, 77–91, 210, 212; and discretion 86; displacement of expertise 86–7; and organizational governance 87; standardization of 82–9 information technology (IT), assessment and evaluation 128 informational complexity, reduction in 85 informational processes, standardization of 82–9 information-sharing arrangements 24 injuries, perceptions of 140–1, 142 innovation, governmental 11 institutions 22 Intel 24–5 interessment 6



222

International Labour Organization (ILO) 40–1 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 9 International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) 151– 2, 158–9, 161–2, 207 investment bundling 23 ISO14001 14, 167–8, 172, 174, 175, 207 Jaksch, George 43–4 Johnson, Robert Wood 135–6 Johnson and Johnson Company 135–6 Karamouzis, F. 120 Kent, William 85 knowledge 80; archivalstatistical 215; commodified 127; community 119–21, 127; database 83; enactmentbased 215; as information 85–6 knowledge claims 69 Kurunmäki, Liisa 21–32, 23 labelling 29 labour rights 45, 46–7 Lakoff, Andrew 187 Lampland, M. 3, 7, 11, 207 language 80; fixing 162–3 Larner, Wendy 1–15, 38–52, 172, 210–11, 213–14 Latour, B. 5, 21–2, 88, 133, 171 Law, J. 208 Le Heron, R. 5, 172 legitimacy 99 Levi Strauss & Co. 39 Lipsky, Michael 86 Lister, John 135 literature 2, 3, 5, 6–7, 10–11, 39–40 local empowerment 61, 68–9 local politics 8–10 local practices 205, 206–8 local values, subordination of 207 MacKenzie, D. 129 Magic Quadrant, the 12, 112– 28, 209; actors 124–5, 127;

background 113–14; calculative network 119–20, 121; community knowledge 119–20, 120–1; comparative machinery 127; defence of assessments 125–6; effects 125; functionality 116– 18; in the market place 121–5; partiality and bias 120–1; performativity 116; research process 118–20, 127; subjective criteria 120; vendor evaluation 118–19, 127, 129; vendor’s customers 119–20 management accounting 9, 21–32 marginalization 63, 211 market analysis: performativity 115– 16; tools 114–15 markets 100 Massumi, B. 215 materiality 6 measurements 131; accuracy and reliability 157–8 medical practices: clinical trials 185, 189, 193; development of 135–7; financial management 26–30, 31; hybridization of 23, 26–30, 31–2; New Public Management reforms 26–30; organ transplants 185; Reference Costing 31 medical protocols 6–7 medical technologies 143 medicines, evaluations of. see drugs, orphan Mennicken, A. 2 meta-standardization 139, 144 Michael, Mike 12, 131–44, 209–10 microprocessor industry 23; functionality 25, 26; hybridization of accounting expertise 23, 24–8; and Moore’s Law 25–6; rates of change 25; technology road maps 23, 24–5 Miller, Peter 4, 5, 9, 21–32, 23, 171–2, 206 mobilization 6 Modern Public Services for Britain: Investing in Reform White Paper 28 Modernising Government White Paper 28



Index 223

Index

modernity 99 Modernizing Government programme (UK) 28 Moore, Gordon 23, 25–6 Moore’s Law 23, 25–6, 31 Morris, C. 170, 181 multiplicity (difference) 209–11 mundane technologies, standardization 131–44

Organization Studies 112 organizational governance 87 organizational knowledge-practices 1 organizational legitimacy 58 organizational practices 82–3 Orphan Drug Act (USA) 192, 192–3, 199 outsourcing 13 oversight 70

National Framework for EMS in Agriculture (NRMMC) 172 National Health Service (UK) 27, 31 National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE, UK) 31, 34, 195, 198 natural resource management 175 Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council (Australia) 172 nature 22 Naturland 57, 58, 59, 60–4, 68–9, 69–70, 207 neoliberalism 64–5, 155, 215–16 networks of calculation 27 New Zealand 5, 29, 172, 174, 175 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 56 Non-State Market-Driven governance 167 normalisation 79–80 norms 80–2 Novas, Carlos 14, 185–99, 211 nursing competencies 11–12, 94– 110, 212–13; accountability 106; assessment 94–5, 105–6, 108–9; assessment technology 102; auditing 102–3; driving forces 103–4; governance 95–7, 101–3, 108, 109; monitoring performance 104; occupational control 96; review 102; and risk 107–8; and underperformance 101–2 nursing education programmes 101, 102, 103

panopticism 98–9, 107, 109 partnership working 28, 31 patient’s groups, advocacy efforts 190–2 performance indicators and targets 87–8 performativity 115–16, 145 pharmaceutical industry. see also drugs, orphan: demand 187–8; drug development trajectories 187– 92; drugs sales 194; economic returns 189; investment calculations 192–3; markets 185–99; Orphan Drug Act 192–4; regulation 188–92; standards 185, 188–9; supply of drugs 187–8 Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PMA) 191 points of reference. see norms Pollock, Neil 12, 112–28, 209 Porter, Theodore 129 poverty 81 power: political 9; relations of 51, 77, 98–101, 132; of technical devices 5 Power, M. 4–5, 23, 107 Prieto-Carrón, Marina 9, 38–52, 210–11, 213–14 private standards 167, 168–70, 180–1 privatization 100 problematization 6, 143–4, 211 professions, disciplining 98–101 programmes of use 133 public policy 81

objectivity 65, 68, 81, 210–11 offshoring 13 O’Leary, Ted 4, 21–32, 23

Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) 196 quality audits 50



224

quality control 106, 131, 168–9, 181 Quételet, Adolophe 80–1 Rabinow, Paul 187 Rainforest Alliance 48, 49, 52 rationalities 4–5 rationalization 78, 212 realist approaches 205, 206, 208, 211 record keeping 85 Reference Costing 31 regulated hybrids 26, 30 regulatory processes 2, 189 reliability 157–8 Return on Investment calculations 24 Rip, Arie 114 risk 11, 105, 107–8, 215 risk management 107–8, 110 Robson, K. 23 Rose, N. 4, 5, 99–101, 105, 109, 171–2, 180, 187, 212, 213 Russia, software testing 151–64, 207, 213 Russian Software Testing Qualifications Board (RSTQB) 161– 2, 163–4 SA8000 standard 44, 45, 47–9 SAI 49 scars and scarring 138–9, 145 Science and Technology Studies (STS) 112 second-party certification 59 self-governance 213 Serres, Michel 134, 144 service delivery 11, 84, 89–90 shrimp certification programme, Indonesia 57, 60–4, 69–70 simplification 79 singularity (sameness) 209–11 social accountability 47 social boundaries 210 social classification 84–5 social justice 56 social life, organization 4 social policy 81, 89–90, 210 social power 4 social world: intersecting 208; rationalization of the 205

socio-technical agencement 116, 126– 7, 128–9, 209 socio-technical assemblages 134 Soejarto, A. 120 soft standardization 12 software testing 13, 151–64, 207, 213; accuracy 156–8; education 160–4; global corporation certifications 164– 5; glossary creation 162–3; governance 153–5; informal training 159–60; international qualification scheme 158–9; lack of regulation 155–6; localizing certification 159–63, 164; offshore 153–4; processes 157; professionalization of 152, 153, 155–6, 160–4; reliability 157–8; scope 164; teams 159 sovereign authority 78 specification 79 stabilization 6 stakeholders, collaboration with 61 standard costing and budgeting 4 standard network, the 210 standardization 1–8, 132–4; definition 79; development and application 12, 131–44; dimensions of 131–2; everyday life 131–44; functions 79–80; generation of problematizations 143–4; hard 12; processes 79–82; programmes of use 133; soft 12 standardized ordering 134 standardizing practices 12–14 standardizing work 2–3, 205, 208–11 standards 1–8, 206–7; ANT conceptualization of 6–8; credibility 60; definition 79; development and implementation 12, 61–4, 65–8, 131–44; diffusion 2; governmentality conceptualization 3–5; and local practices 206–8; and marginalization 63; private 167, 168–70, 180–1; significance 1–2, 15; strategic use of 169; universalization of 214– 15; verification 65–7 standards of comportment 133–4



Index 225

Index

standards takers 63 Star, Susan Leigh 3, 7, 11, 82, 207, 208, 210 sticking plasters 209–10; children’s 138, 145; colour 138; cultural uses 139; development of 135–7; functionality 145; Hydrocolloidal 138; and identity 138–9; mediating role 136–7; medical and domestic use 137–8; perceptions of 139– 41; shape 141; sizing 141–2; standardization 12, 131–44; variety 137–9 street level bureaucracy 86 subjective criteria 120 subordination, of local values 207 Suchman, L. 82 Summers, Ann 95 supermarkets 169 surveillance 11, 107, 109 surveillance sorting 89 tacit skills 133 Tamm Hallström, K. 2–3 targeted government 88–9 techno-economic networks 185, 192 technologies: definition 3–4; of governing 6, 10; governing conduct 3–5; and government 5; power 5 technology appraisal guidance 31, 34 technology road maps 23, 24–5, 30 techno-scientific governance strategy 58–60, 68–9 temporalization 145 testing: accuracy 156–8; governance 153–4; informal training 159–60; international qualification schemes 158–9; localizing certification 159–63; professionalization of 152, 153, 155–6, 160–4 thalidomide 188 third-party certification (TPC) 10, 56–70, 210–11; accountability 58, 70; agri-food standards 169,

170; auditing 58–9, 67–8; certifiers 56, 59–60, 65–6; credibility 60; development and implementation of standards 61–4, 65–8; GLOBALGAP 64–8; impartiality 57; independence 57, 59, 66; knowledge claims 69; and local participation 63–4, 67, 69–70; role 56; as techno-scientific governance strategy 58–60, 68–9; value 57, 68; verification 65–7 Thrift, Nigel 152, 208 Timmermans, S. 7, 13, 206 trade liberalization 168 trade unions 39, 43 translation 6 transnational corporations (TNCs) 8–9 transparency 58, 67–8 trust 105 unification 79 United Kingdom: Department of Health 198; farming sector 172; Health Act 1999 29–30, 33; Modernizing Government programme 28; National Health Service 27, 31; orphan drugs Congressional hearings 190–2; Payment by Results’ programme 31; privatization 100; QALY thresholds 196; Thatcher government 100 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 44 United States of America: Food and Drug Act (1962) 188, 189; Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 188, 189, 191–2, 194, 199; Orphan Drug Act 192, 192–4, 199; pharmaceutical regulation 188–92 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 44 universality 206 value-neutrality 57 velcro 133 vendors, evaluation 117–18



226

verification 65–7 violence, perceptions of 140 wages 42 Waxman, Henry 190 Weber, Max 78, 91, 99 West Midlands Specialised Commissioning Unit (WMSCU) 196–8 women: childcare 45; and Chiquita Brands International Inc’s code of conduct 49–51, 210–11, 213–14; empowerment of 9, 51–2; gendered discrimination 40–2; provision for by Chiquita Brands International Inc 43–4; sexual

harassment 44, 45–6, 47; vulnerability 39, 45, 213–14; worker’s rights 38–52 Worker Health, Safety, and Welfare (WHSW) 64 workers: employment conditions 66; empowerment of 39–40; protection of 9, 38–52, 213–14; rights 45, 46–7, 51–2; welfare 64–8 working conditions 42 World Bank 9 World Trade Organization (WTO) 9, 168 Wynne, B. E. 133 Zouridis, S. 86



Index 227

Calculating the Social: Standards and the Reconfiguration of Governing

Calculating the Secrets of Life

Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life

Of States, Rights, and Social Closure: Governing Migration and Citizenship

Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life

Of States, Rights, and Social Closure: Governing Migration and Citizenship

Dynamic Reconfiguration: Architectures and Algorithms

Dynamic Reconfiguration: Architectures and Algorithms

Calculating Minds

Calculating Catastrophe

Calculating promises

Calculating God

Calculating God

The Grindwell Governing Machine

The Grindwell Governing Machine

Calculating God

Calculating God

Calculating God

Calculating God

Calculating God

Investigating the Influence of Standards

Investigating the Influence of Standards

Calculating God

Calculating God

Calculating Minds

Calculating God

Calculating God

Governing Health: The Politics of Health Policy

Governing the Metropolis: Principles and Cases

Calculating God

Calculating Minds

Calculating the Social: Standards and the Reconfiguration of Governing

Calculating the Secrets of Life

Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life

Of States, Rights, and Social Closure: Governing Migration and Citizenship

Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life

Of States, Rights, and Social Closure: Governing Migration and Citizenship

Dynamic Reconfiguration: Architectures and Algorithms

Dynamic Reconfiguration: Architectures and Algorithms

Calculating Minds

Calculating Catastrophe

Calculating promises

Calculating God

Calculating God

The Grindwell Governing Machine

The Grindwell Governing Machine

Calculating God

Calculating God

Calculating God

Calculating God

Calculating God

Investigating the Influence of Standards

Investigating the Influence of Standards

Calculating God

Calculating God

Calculating Minds

Calculating God

Calculating God

Governing Health: The Politics of Health Policy

Governing the Metropolis: Principles and Cases

Calculating God

Calculating Minds

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