Abstract
It is perhaps fitting to begin this review of Lawrence Busch’s Standards in the same way that he begins, by noting that the hardcover edition of his book has a 9-point font and meets the standards set by the American Library Association. It is an apt beginning for a book that asks us to look closely at standards and the role that they play in coordinating and regulating social life. As Busch notes, standards have become ubiquitous and powerful in shaping the production of material objects and social relations in the modern world. One of their characteristics, however, is that standards are often overlooked, their consequences—the precise look and feel of a hardcover book, for instance—taken for granted, with an entire genre of social relations surrounding standard-setting and standard-implementation receding from our analytical view. Busch’s book seeks to remedy this situation of neglect through an ambitious and fascinating effort to rethink what standards are and how we should understand their significance for analyzing social life.
That ambition is hinted at in the subtitular definition of standards as “recipes for reality.” That sounds capacious given the narrowly technical sort of endeavor most commonly associated with the concept of standards, but it is precisely Busch’s claim that this narrower vision of standards has proved to be a real stumbling block in grasping their social significance. Elsewhere, but in a similarly hearty vein, Busch suggests that we think of standards as “metaphors made real,” and “measured comparisons” (p.10), and it is in this sense that his theoretical ambitions become clear. By serving as measurable metaphors, standards are able to mediate the incorporation of people and things into sociotechnical networks—or their exclusion. It is through standards that we determine what counts, what fits, and what is deficient or deviant. The notion of measurable metaphors includes standards in the narrower, technical sense, and the book happily includes its share of measurement arcana, but it goes much further. In an early passage (pp. 11–12), Busch argues for the equivalence, in the context of his concept of standards, of testing materials developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the determination of the fit of a suit, and the judgment of the suitability of a candidate for a job. All of these situations, according to Busch, involve the measurement of some thing or person against a metaphoric standard that determines its potential to be incorporated into a technical system, a wardrobe, or a new job, respectively. Busch’s effort to expand the concept of standards in this way is explicitly influenced by the argument developed in science studies that the distinction between people and material objects in social networks is untenable. In this sense, determining whether a uniform meets required standards for use in a particular job and determining whether a candidate meets the standards for employment in the same job are symmetrical social operations.
Busch effectively builds out this theoretical program in subsequent chapters, with especially interesting considerations of the role of standards in producing social power, the practical ethics related to standards, the history of standards as part of the moral project of science, the role of standards in responding to the declining efficacy of personal trust to guarantee quality in the increasingly complex commercial networks of modernizing Europe, and the role of standards in cognitive processes of differentiation. There is rich material throughout these chapters. That material, however, crystallizes rather than dispels some problems with Busch’s expansive vision of the standards concept. First, the book fails to engage the vast literatures already oriented to one aspect or another of the “measurable metaphors” of social life. To be fair, one must be willing to grant leeway for a book that aims, through conceptual extension, to take a new look at oft-crossed terrain. The whole point is to clear the ground and see what else might be. To be even fairer, Busch is well aware of all that he has ignored, and provides some justification for this decision. The book, however, takes this deck-clearing too far. In another definition of standards, Busch claims that “standards are where language and world meet” (p. 3). Even if we limit ourselves to sociology, a lot of people have done a lot of work at this intersection! Norms, interpretations, institutions, beliefs, laws, and so on have been considered in ways that are far more amenable to Busch’s vision than he seems to realize. Indeed, his main objection to these existing literatures—that they are blindly beholden to the independence of their own small patch of the theoretical terrain, whereas a standards approach uniquely allows us to grasp the underlying commonality of these processes of judgment—seems farfetched. A concept like norms, for instance, is fully transportable to any of the areas that Busch has in mind, but his discussion of norms is brief and aims merely to reject the concept as insufficient. Unfortunately, Busch’s entire discussion of norms seems to be based on Durkheim, and his insistence that the concept of a norm necessarily implies a high degree of consensus and is amorphously located in a collective conscience rather than in the patterns of practices and materials of everyday life seems to be fighting a battle long since won.
One of the reasons that this neglect of the existing literature matters is that it allows Busch too much freedom in his synthesis. It is salubrious for thinking about these issues to question barriers to thought such as the person-object distinction. But this does not mean that there are no useful distinctions to make. An effort to explicitly address the commonalities and differences between standards as developed in this book and concepts such as institutions, norms, cultural structures, and so on may have helped to clarify the specific analytical contribution of standards more precisely. In one section that exemplifies the blurriness that sometimes pertains to the central concept of this book, Busch lists the indicators of standards in an airplane bathroom. These include requirements such as the installation of a trash bin, symbols such as those asking the user to lock the door, to flush the toilet, or to return to one’s seat, and prohibitions such as those threatening punishment for smoking (p. 72). At such a remove from the technical judgments that are the concept’s inspiration, the benefit of calling such rules, symbols, and relations “standards” is dubious. We already have a lot of sophisticated conceptual tools to understand such processes of differentiation and judgment.
The book is most compelling when it is most precise about what “measurement” means in its definition of standards as measured metaphors. When it focuses on standards as metaphors that are measured in definite and explicit ways, the potential for this concept in helping to understand a specific relation of inclusion and exclusion in the sociotechnical networks that Busch takes as the ultimate object of analysis is far more compelling. For instance, the chapter on certification, accreditation, licensing, and approval—focused on explicit performances and practices of measurement—is one of the richest in the book. The section on the violence of audits developed through a discussion of the treatment of the concept of “error” in various commercial and technical fields shows the promise of the concept of standards at its best. It does not, however, show that it is at its best when it is at its least precise. Eliminating obfuscatory theoretical distinctions is a great strength of this book; eliminating analytically useful distinctions, such as that between measurement and other forms of differentiation, is the book’s greatest weakness.
Perhaps the best praise that can be offered for a book of this sort is that it blazes the way for a slew of new work by posing legitimately new questions. The theoretical shortcomings discussed above weaken the capacity of Standards in this regard, but not by much. One is left with an appreciation of the potential for using Busch’s concept of standards (especially in its most specific sense) to generate helpful questions for exploring the connections between measurement, metaphor, power, and social life. Standards are not the only recipes for reality, but after reading this book, it is hard to forget how much of our world is made to their measure.