ABSTRACT
In policy discourse, standards are depicted in a ‘technocratic’ language which does not convey much information about the actual nature of the standards. Standards are embedded in a sanguine rhetoric of the ‘proper’ and the ‘sound’, and presented as “the only practical way” of addressing problems of global fi nancial risk (Eichengreen 1999: 35). In their seminal work, however, Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildawsky (1983) argued that one should never take risks, nor their management, at face value. Rather, one should investigate what forms of social organization are being defended or attacked in and through notions of risk. This dictum is all the more important in the context of the IFA, given that the standards of the ‘proper’ economy are evoked as a global norm against which economies worldwide should be measured and restructured.
