Making the world, one recipe at a time

摘要

Standards: Recipes for Reality (Infrastructures) by Lawrence Busch is an extremely ambitious book. It attempts an analytical review of a voluminous number of socio-technical relations collectively described as 'standards'. The audacious challenge the book sets for itself, is the idea that one can comparatively analyze sociotechnical phenomena as dissimilar as the caliber of ammunition rounds, clean farming techniques, the maximum ship size that the Panama Canal can accommodate and the Kyoto Protocol, to mention but a few examples from the book's introduction.