The key notion that Busch communicates in the introduction is that of ubiquity. Standards are first listed out in their mundane ever presences, followed by an emphasis on a range of fields, ideas, and processes that sacrum to an idea of standards. Here, Busch very quickly builds a running thread of concern that is communicated with an almost commonsensical tone. He concern is the idea of ubiquity, a proximate ubiquity that the reader is embedded in, and has access to. However, Busch soon shifts focus to the various thinkers and disciplines that have concerned themselves with standards. Busch achieves two things with this move. First, his presentation of former scholarly analysis serves less in populating his own work with ideas, and more in building another dimension of concern, legitimizing the consistency this idea, thus making the question of standards as ubiquitous as its actual presence. However, in this first move, the prevalence is articulated as a distributed idea, commented on and engaged with varying philosophers, sociologist, and historians. Throughout this listing Busch takes pains not to lose the commonsensical tone, unhesitatingly drawing attention to the drab and tedious nature of studying standards. The second simultaneous, subtler move, is that of shaping concern. The ubiquity of standards is well established and legitimized, however, this legitimacy is done through the gaze of social science, thus lays the foundation for the direction with which he takes his reading of standards. To be clear, though Busch makes it clear that standards are wide-ranging and complex, he ultimately focuses on socio- philosophical aspects such as power, quality, justice, and democracy. The weight of this point, especially at the level of context is that seed of his larger idea, that standards though existing as conditions that shape the world we know are implicitly dependent on larger socio-philosophical conditions and operations themselves.
This point is prefaced in the introduction by the concept of ubiquity again, however in Busch's problematization of same. Busch, in his characterization of the ubiquitous nature, both in its presentation and historical treatment, exposes the limitations of its subsequent understanding. A particular aspect comes from a proposed dislocation between analysis that operates at the institutional and the embodied level. Thus ubiquity in its tediousness, vastness, and general appearance obfuscates the complex and locative condition that make the operation of standards possible