Standards and Modernity

Critical Inquiry, 2018

What is standardization? Three relatively recent books by social scientists all use the same tactic to introduce the topic. First, these books open with an example. It can even be the standardization of the paper of the book in your hands. Then, having thrust an example of standardization into the foreground, they alert us to the invisibility of standardization, its ordinary operation in the background, and at the same time contrast that with the ubiquity of standardized objects and processes, their presence all around, which their example also demonstrates. Largely unnoticed but everywhere thus becomes a theoretical frame—proceed to a number of further disparate examples. The examples are captivating. They are shown to evidence, as one might expect, how standardization empowers or disempowers people as they go about their lives, how it comes in categorizable forms, and how it intersects with the many social dimensions of humans and things. But there is a problem with the way these authors have framed the subject. The difficulty is not merely that even if successful standardization may involve some participants remaining unconscious of its presence, the supposed social in-visibility of standardization seems dubious given the countless stories of standardization, from railway gauge to MP3, all highly visible to extended I thank for their insights and unflagging encouragement the University of California, Los Angeles graduate students in our seminar on standardization—Devin Beecher,

Organization Studies, 2009

0. Objectius The epistemological status of (comparative) standardology and standardisation: an introduction The epistemological status of (comparative) standardology and standardisation according to Gelpí & Costa-Carreras’s (2007) model 2.1. Kaplan’s (2002) and Grabe’s (2002) reflections on the epistemological status of AL 2.2. The epistemological status of (comparative) standardology and standardisation following Gelpí & Costa-Carreras’s (2007) model 2.2.1. What is the object of (comparative) standardology and standardisation? 2.2.2. What does CS/standardisation research for? 2.2.2.1. Objectives 2.2.2.2. Products, outputs or services 2.2.3. At whom or what is (comparative) standardology and standardisation directed? 2.2.3.1. Users 2.2.3.2. Professional behaviour 2.2.4. How do (comparative) standardology and standardisation investigate? 2.2.4.1. Mediation between theory and application 2.2.4.2. Metalanguage 2.2.4.3. Evaluation 2.2.4.4. Working methodologies and methods 2.2.4.5. Multidisciplinarity 2.2.4.6. Criteria relevant to comparative standardology 2.2.4.7. Practical perspectives of (comparative) standardology and standardisation 3. Concluding remarks

Annual Review of Sociology, 2010

Standards and standardization aim to render the world equivalent across cultures, time, and geography. Standards are ubiquitous but underappreciated tools for regulating and organizing social life in modernity, and they lurk in the background of many sociological works. Reviewing the relevance of standards and standardization in diverse theoretical traditions and sociological subfields, we point to the emergence and institutionalization of

Grey Room, 2014

During the last century, studies of standardization in architecture and design have been limited by a series of elisions between wholly different vocabularies. In the work of Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Sigfried Giedion, the term standardization tends to be equated with mechanization, prefabrication, or mass production. The term is often taken to describe changes in how things are made—how the use of custom-made parts gives way to interchangeable parts. In Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) and Joan Campbell’s canonic monograph on the Deutscher Werkbund (1978), standardization is conflated with typification (Typisierung), which describes a related but ultimately distinct idea. Here, I will argue that standardization must also be thought in the light of what Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault term, in French, “normalisation.” That is, the concept of standardization (“Normung” or “Normierung,” as it is most frequently named in German) expresses a dimension of normalisation that is frequently overlooked in architectural discourse.

Organization, 2007

Organizational analysts have remarked on the retreat fromhard'regulation by nation-states and the formal international bodies they have ratified, in favour ofsoft'regulation, particularly in the form of standards issued by transnational bodies whose authority does ...

Philosophy & Technology, 2011

As Paul B. Thompson suggests in his recent seminal paper, "'There's an App for That': Technical Standards and Commodification by Technological Means," technical standards restructure property (and other social) relations. He concludes with the claim that the development of technical standards of commodification can serve purposes with bad effects such as "the rise of the factory system and the deskilling of work" or progressive effects such as how "technical standards for animal welfare… discipline the unwanted consequences of market forces." In this reply, we want to append several points to his argument and suggest that he rightly points out that standards can promote various goods; however, there are peculiar powers wielded by standardization processes that might profitably be unpacked more systematically than Thompson's article seems to suggest. First, the concealment of the technopolitics around standards is largely due to their peculiar ontological status as recipes for reality. Second, technical standards can and do commit violence against persons, but such violence is often suffered not in the formation of class consciousness, as Marx might have put it, but as a failure to conform to the laws of nature.

Organization Studies, 2009

2015

knowledge networking processes in transnational human resource management

Models, Methods, and Morality Assessing Modern Approaches to the Greco-Roman Economy, 2024

Pp. 185-219 in Models, Methods, and Morality Assessing Modern Approaches to the Greco-Roman Economy, edd. S. Murray and S. Bernard (Palgrave) The contribution I hope to make to the standardization question involves looking at how the issue plays out in two different areas— formal metrology and commercial manufacture—and try to see if those different lines of scholarly inquiry can support or inform each other. My general outlook is the following. “Standardization” comes to us with a prototypical form derived from the industrial and post-industrial world. It is universally understood that ancient standardization is quantitatively different, being of lesser scope and intensity. There is less agreement on the precise degree of those things—I happen to be a minimalist—but I’m at least as interested in what I think may be less noticed qualitative differences from the prototype. That is, I want to look for places where the pieces of our implicit model don’t fit together in the same way in antiquity