A Standard Fit for Neo-Liberalism

Peter Gibbon and Lasse Folke Henriksen's paper 'A Standard fit for Neo-liberalism', just published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (Vol. 54 (2), 275-307) analyses the historical origin of the ISO 9000 standard on quality management, and specifically its relation to Neo-liberalism as a political phenomenon in the UK in the 1980s and as a distinct 'rationality of government' (governing at a distance) in the Foucauldian sense.

The paper argues that in the UK in the 1980s standards, and particularly standards that reconfigured definitions of quality in terms of management practices, were promulgated as a political initiative aimed at solving a variety of institutional problems. These included reform of the welfare state but were initially focused mainly in the industrial sphere. British forerunners of the ISO 9000 standard were aimed mainly at solving the problem of the non-competitiveness of UK industry, by changing the discourse through which international competition on quality was defined.

Furthermore, they were explicitly designed in a way securing their 'ownership' by managers, through alignment of their technical features with industry's spontaneous doctrine of managerial prerogative. This in turn was to make them a valuable resource in the later, broader project of Thatcherite welfare state reform.