Standardization has been extended far beyond the industrial world. It participates in governing our lives and the lives of all living entities by producing public guarantees in the form of standards. Social studies of medicine have provided a precious contribution to advancing standardization as a topic of inquiry, most notably through investigations of the relationship between ‘regulation’ and ‘objectivity’, drawn together in the concept of the standard. This postscript discusses this contribution from the point of view of ‘regimes of engagement’, that is, a variety of ways in which humans are committed to their environment — from public stances to the closest forms of proximity — and in pursuit of a kind of ‘good’. These regimes are distinguished according to the good they promise, as well as the degree to which the guarantee being offered can be held in common. The discussion in this postscript extends the critique raised by scholarship on standards by taking into account the oppression and subjugation that standardization can engender.
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