Standards are not innocent technical specifications, but tools of power and dominance. Standards and the conformity assessment linked to them are a vital components of the neo-liberal project. Review of Standards: Recipes for Reality by
Lawrence Busch, The MIT Press, 408 pages.
We hear the
news every day about the price of oil expressed in dollars per barrel. The
standard barrel of crude oil is 42 US gallons (34.9723 imp gal;
158.9873 L). This measurement originated in the early Pennsylvania oil fields. Oil has not
actually been shipped in barrels since the
introduction of oil tankers, but the 42-US-gallon size is still used as a unit
for measurement. Interestingly enough, the ”standard oil drum” that you see in
use is a 55-US-gallon barrel! The two
sizes of oil drums represent some of the millions of standards that shape the
society we live in. Almost all products and services we are exposed to are
subject to one or, mostly, many standards. A life without standards is almost
incomprehensible today. Just think about how to conduct simple trade without
standards. There would be no agreed measures (scales), no clear quality
standards, no agreed value reference (currency), and there would be no standard
terms of trade etc. We would be back to the situation of two unrelated
civilizations have their first encounter. Standards, and their cousin norms,
give us predictability in an otherwise rather chaotic world.
Within most
professions, there are heated debates about the standards to apply, and people
spend a lot of time arguing over them, write them and revise them. But very few
actually think about standards as a social institution, their governance and
how they can be used in the interest of some groups against others. In the
excellent book Standards: Recipes for
Reality, Lawrence Busch, Professor at Michigan State
University, makes us
aware of how standards shape our lives every day. More importantly, he puts
standards in a wider economic, social and political context.
Busch questions
many of the claims normally related to standards. For example, in the language
of ISO and others, standards are developed based on consensus. Busch argue that
consensus is not at all a salient feature of standards. It is rather that they
are taken for granted or forced upon people that ensure that people conform to
them. The organic sectors shows ample evidence of this. Even more striking is how
certain proprietary technical standards can dominate markets, e.g. Microsoft Windows
and its associated programs. Even governments yields to their powers in many
cases.
For a
frequent traveler like me it is a normal hassle to carry adapters. For some
reasons sockets developed differently in different countries, and today we sit
with huge assets built with one type of socket in each country. It is an example
of “path dependence”, i.e. that we follow a certain path, not because it is the
best one, but it is the one we choose in an early stage, and the cost to go
back and start all over is simply too big. On the larger scale, the automobile
transportation system is a another example of path dependence, where all those
within the system have an interest to continue developing it, despite the fact
that neither the car itself nor the combustion engines use to propel them, are
the best transport solution for cities of today. So while we have thousands of
car models to chose from, and each model has hundreds of variations, many
people can’t chose whether they want a car or not. This situation is what the
priest and sociologist Ivan Illich called “radical monopolies”. Unfortunately,
second-best solutions are likely to remain in the future as a result of path
dependency, says Mr Busch.
Busch calls
the combination of standards, certification and accreditation for the
tripartite standards regime (TSR) and sees the TSR emerging as an alternative
mode of governance for most aspects of social life. He is rather critical
towards the TSR and claim among others that audits often do violence to the subject
of certification. This is particularly the case when the audits are weakly
related to the real purpose of the standards; when audits take away attention
from other important but difficult to measure aspects, when the audits follow
an approach of ”mechanical objectivity” which relieves the certification body
from responsibility or when audits intrude into the subjects pursuance of
whatever goals they have. It seems to me that all those four points apply to
how organic certification is mastered. The problem, and the violence done, is
exacerbated when standards are written into law, says Busch. Busch concurs with
the Michael Power in his book The Audit Society that one main requirement of
the TRS is that organizations subject to certification are forced to reorganize
their work to be more easily auditable, but that such a reorganization to
satisfy the auditors may backfire, and risk to confuse predictability with
trustworthiness.
He sees the
standards movement of the last century as part of the industrialisation
concept, linked to the division of labour, economies of scale and to the whole
organization of the factories. The same standardization enables global markets
and unlimited competition. Through standardization in transportation, such as
containerization, improved communications etc., the competition is now also
truly global in many markets. The container itself, once it was standardised in
1965, determined shapes of the ships but also of pallets, boxes and of goods to
fit into the standardized boxes. This competition in turn drives the
”technological treadmill”. I can’t raise the price (as the quality is fixed)
which means that I have to lower costs of production, e.g. by using chemical
fertilizers or by using more efficient machinery.
As a counter-reaction
to this development, there has been a drive last decade to use standards for differentiation. Organic standards and
certification is one of the most prominent examples of such differentiation. Classic
standardization leads producers down the path of ”commodity hell”. It has
cleared the market from unique products, made to order or in a one-by-one
production process and transformed it to ”same” products. With the new
standards differentiation, we get a market where we can ”chose between hundreds
of different, but equally standardized – varieties of ketchup, automobiles or
airline tickets”. But Busch also notes that ”their (the differentiating
standards) value as such is diminished as their numbers increase”. Busch
explores how this contradiction came into being.
He sees the
rapid increase in use of standards coinciding with the neo-liberal project,
with less central planning and retreating states. He sees an inherent conflict
in that managers of companies on the one hand want less regulation on the other
hand are afraid of the vacuum created by the retreating state. The total free
market situations favoured in most liberal economic theories have been
abolished by the companies themselves through the development of closely
knitted supply-chains which in turn are a pre-condition for lean management,
outsourcing and other modern trends. To make all participants in a supply-chain
subject to standards and certification means they are tied together and the
market is less free, and therefore predictable. ”No large firm can afford to
subject itself to the instabilities and risks associated with the free market”.
In this way, the Tripartite Standards Regime becomes a new model for
governance. The lead firm or lead firms in the supply-chains or value-chains
will mostly impose their standards on others. The standards themselves often
also distribute burden and costs unevenly in the value-chain. Busch mentions
GlobalGAP as such an example, where small farmers are not able to carry the
substantial direct and indirect costs involved . He also discusses how NGOs
have turned to certifications and supply chains in attempts to advance their
goals, instead of lobbying increasingly powerless governments.
Busch shows
how standards are intimately connected to power–that they often serve to
empower some and disempower others; ”in our modern world standards are arguably
the most important manifestation of power relations”. He points to the dual
character of the English word “ruler” as a manifestation of this, on the one
hand, it is someone who rules, on the other hand a measuring device. Busch
gives examples from colonial times of how schools in the British colonies
taught medieval British history, but didn’t include the history of the
countries where the books were used. The imposition of Western standards for
private property in conflict with customary ownership systems is another
example.
Also today,
standards are tools of power and domination, but now in the hands of companies.
By means of standard, conflicts are seemingly resolved or at least transferred
from a political domain into a technical, technocratic domain. The claimed
“voluntary” nature of standards also adds to the perception that the use of the
standard is just an economic choice which is made in the market place. In this
way, standards are stealthily becoming weapons for power and blurs power
relationships. Because of the perceived technical nature of the standards, the
standards governance model (the TPR) falls short of ethics, justice and
democracy. In a recent article, Can Fairy Tales Come True Mr Busch writes:
The TSR is a new and ubiquitous form of governance that, although supported by the state, is fundamentally responsible only to itself and not to any democratically elected legislative body. Hence, while it can do good, it can just as easily do harm, with little or no democratic oversight.
That
standards are power tools is shown by the many social movement that are formed
around standards such as the women’s suffrage movement, anti-apartheid movement,
labour movement and lately gay rights movement. Many of these movements want
rights to be extended to their constituency, instead of being limited to just
some group, e.g. the right of marriage to be limited to heterosexual couples.
The
privatization of public services requires further standardization as services
that before were just provided (say schools and electric utilities) now have to be purchased in the market place, and
therefore made comparable, i.e. standardized. This development transforms all
sorts of habitual action into decisions where we are forced to make rational
choices. To this can be added the stress of the market place where we are
supposed to decide whether we want, for example, fair trade or organic
products. The increase in choices by the differentiation in the market as well
as by privatization of former public services may not be very democratic
according to Busch, all the choices and decisions to be made are time consuming
and require skill-”skills that the middle class might have, the upper class can
buy, the lower class is rarely able to pursue and the ”underclass” cannot
pursue at all.”
“Standards” is a book to read for those
professionally engaged in the tripartite regime of standards, certification and
accreditation. It will pose some hard questions, and give some ideas for
improvements. While the tone is critical, Busch makes no attempt to trash
standards as a whole: "Thus, the challenge
is not to eliminate standards, to return to some mythical past during which
standards were of trivial importance, Instead [...] to ensure that seemingly
benign standards do not lead to gross injustices." Before embarking on
making a standard, we should ask the central question: Is standards the most
appropriate form of governance in this particular situation? There are laws,
regulations, statutes, customs, norms and habit that could perhaps be a better
alternative. He makes a list of qualities –standards for standards if you so
wish - that he believe standards should have such as subsidiarity; use of precaution;
do minimal violence; make actionable standards; encourage participation in
standard setting; and review standards frequently.
Read and enjoy.
Other reviews of this book:
Wall street Journal
Galveston daily news
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