The first chapter establishes the claim to authority and the incorporation of choice in its nature of power. The second chapter adds the aspect of information mobility to the fold.
The third is builds an in-depth analysis of differentiation through a multitude of cases. It is here that Busch lists out the different types of standards. They are Olympic standards, filters, ranks, and divisions. Each one's treatment of their respective variables clutters creates different arrangements, systems, and qualities. Through the classification into types, Busch is able to show just how versatile the operation and function of standards really are. Moreover, each type is used in particular settings for particular functions, thus creating correspondingly particular forms of choice, value, and enactments. It is through this chapter that Busch laid the ground for his larger target, ethics in the neoliberal landscape.
The fourth chapter sees him move towards the larger standard systems in a neoliberal setting, emphasizing evaluation as the key aspect that is practiced, taught and expected. From systems of evaluation Busch moves to systems of value in the next chapter, dealing with ethics and justice. This bears the weight of all the technical aspects of standards that Busch has hitherto revealed. As complex dynamic technical objects of systemizing, their presence within areas of social value is anything but straight forward. In fact, Busch using Latour treatment of technology and society deduces that standards are social values made into technologies. And thus, differing notions of social value can be made durable simultaneously through the manufacturing of respective standards. The issue of contentions hence stems from durability rather than interpretive disagreement, for the common ground of evaluation is split into two different technologies that can exist operate and expound the same social value separately.
Taking on from this heterogeneity of standard systems in social spaces Busch final chapter incorporates the democratic state exists on economic principles. Here differentiation returns as an aspect of the economic state where such standards are used to incorporate or rather govern objects and people. Here Busch shows how frameworks of cost befit and risk assessments are untimely the technologized social values of the state. Moreover, there is more and more stock being put into such technologizing of social value, as such governance is optimized and suitable within a democratic framework.
Busch warns against such overemphasis on standards as allowing less and less for society as a real interactive process, making it more and more a technical performance. In this Busch suggests standards for standards that optimize fairness, equity, and effectiveness as key evaluative functions.
