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This book investigates standards as the recipes that shape not only the physical world, but human social interactions. The author outlines the history of formal standards and describes how modern science came to be associated with the moral-technical project of standardization of both people and things. The author also explores how standards are intimately connected to power, empowering some but disempowering others

Laplace once argued that if one could "comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated," it would be possible to predict the future and explain the past. The advent of analysis of large-scale data sets has been accompanied by newfound concerns about "Laplace's Demon" as it relates to certain fields of science as well as management, evaluation, and audit. I begin by asking how statistical data are constructed, illustrating the hermeneutic acts necessary to create a variable. These include attributing a certain characteristic to a particular phenomenon, isolating the characteristic of interest, and assigning a value to it. In addition, a population must be identified and a sample must be "taken" from that population. Next, I examine how statistical analyses are conducted, examining the interpretive acts there as well. In each case, I show how big data add new challenges. I then show how statistics are incorporated into audits and evaluations, emphasizing how alternative interpretations are concealed in the audit process. I conclude by noting that these issues cannot be "resolved" as Laplace suggested. His Demon, already banished from physics, needs to be banished from other fields of science, management, audits, and evaluations as well.

In his celebrated 1951 work, Social Choice and Individual Values, economist Kenneth Arrow asked how the values of individuals might be aggregated into a social choice. Today, we live in a world in which choice is celebrated as a virtually undiluted good. Indeed, in the agrifood sector in much of the world, there is considerable evidence that the range of choices has increased markedly in the last 30 years. In much of the world today, we can choose from a vast array of items in the local supermarket, as well as from a range of restaurants that differ on price, quality, and ethnic or regional specialties. Consumer choice is also seen as a means of promoting fair trade, animal welfare, geographically specific food and agricultural products such as wines and cheeses, and fair labor practices, as well as protecting the environment and biodiversity, among other things. In short, choice is seen as both "revealing preferences" of consumers as well as their ethical stances with respect to various issues facing the world today. But all this assumes that choices are individual. It not only accepts the methodological individualism common to mainstream economics and psychology as a research strategy, but assumes that it provides an adequate means of understanding and organizing the world. However, if we reject that individualism as both research strategy and social project, and grant that humans are social beings, then appropriate food choices are learned through a complex process of interaction. One might say that the Arrow points the other way: individual choices are and must be based on socially held, shared values. Governing this process requires rethinking and revisioning the future of agriculture and food.

The biotechnology industry possibly made errors of omission by in introducing their technologies without properly preparing all elements of the market: technology developers, government regulators, sellers, farmers, and consumers. In order to successfully introduce a revolutionary technology into society, many forces are needed as "sweepers" prepare the stakeholders to accept the technology. The biotechnology industry followed past practices in introducing new products, ignoring the unique features of genetic modification and the multifaceted concerns of a wide range of stakeholders it generated. As a result, agricultural biotechnology can be thought to have failed so far despite a few successes here and there.

Abstract The problem of order is central to all societies. Bacon, Hobbes and Smith each proposed to resolve the problem of order by investing moral authority in a "Leviathan" that would guarantee order: science, state and market, respectively. Later scholars adapted their works to other ends. But putting the Leviathans into practice had the unintended effect of relieving individuals of moral responsibility and creating wide‐spread disorder. Widespread networks of democracy in all spheres of social life are proposed as an alternative solution to the problem of order, one that encourages the collective discovery of moral values.Such networks put moral responsibility neither on the shoulders of individuals where it becomes crushingly heavy, nor on society where it becomes unbearably light.