Concluding Remarks: “Who Marks the Bench?”

Abstract

This chapter concludes that the Open Method of Coordination, which constitutes the policy ontology of the Bologna Process, institutes the new mode of soft governance in which all agents become standardizers themselves. The bench is not marked from the outside. All the actors involved in the Bologna Process mark the bench. The benchmarking is part of a material-affective economy in which affects such as fear and desire are capitalized, borrowed and exchanged – an economy that marks the bench in the sense of setting the standards by circulating them. Meanwhile, the chapter also suggests that governing through calculative practices such as standardization and auditing may not necessarily lead to an increased manageability of the agents involved. Standardization is a term that suggests a standardizing process has taken place, but the chapter concludes that this does not necessarily mean that the process has contributed uniformity. Many of the effects of the new standards prove to be unintended and disguised, yet the effects are omnipresent such as for example the transformations of everyday working life. The challenge is that no one person or organization is in control of the infrastructure that circulates the standards. And, to the extent that we live our working life in higher education through this infrastructure – in, on, and around it – we help sustain its power and effects. In this way the new standards have become regulators themselves – the faceless masters of higher education – even though they often enter higher education undetected as governance.