Standards and standardization aim to render the world equivalent across cultures, time, and geography. Standards are ubiquitous but underappreciated tools for regulating and organizing social life in modernity, and they lurk in the background of many sociological works. Reviewing the relevance of standards and standardization in diverse theoretical traditions and sociological subfields, we point to the emergence and institutionalization of standards, the difficulties of making standards work, resistance to standardization, and the multiple outcomes of standards. Rather than associating standardization with totalizing narratives of globalization or dehumanization, we call for careful empirical analysis of the specific and unintended consequences of different sorts of standards operating in distinct social domains.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. In an unusual instance of lay participation in biomedical research, U.S. AIDS treatment activists have constituted themselves as credible participants in the process of knowledge construction, thereby bringing about changes in the epistemic practices of biomedical research. This article examines the mechanisms or tactics by which these lay activists have constructed their credibility in the eyes of AIDS researchers and government officials. It considers the implications of such interventions for the conduct of medical research;examines some of the ironies, tensions, and limitations in the process; and argues for the importance of studying social movements that engage with expert knowledge. One of the most striking aspects of the conduct of AIDS research in theUnited States is the diversity of the players who have participated in the construction of credible knowledge. Inside of a large and often floodlit arena with a diffuse and porous perimeter, an eclectic assortment of actors have all sought to assert and assess claims. The arena of fact making encompasses not just immunologists, virologists, molecular biologists, epidemiologists, In an unusual instance of lay participation in biomedical research, U.S. AIDS treatment activists have constituted themselves as credible participants in the process of knowledge construction, thereby bringing about changes in the epistemic practices of biomedical research. This article examines the mechanisms or tactics by which these lay activists have constructed their credibility in the eyes of AIDS researchers and government officials. It considers the implications of such interventions for the conduct of medical research; examines some of the ironies, tensions, and limitations in the process; and argues for the importance of studying social movements that engage with expert knowledge. One of the most striking aspects of the conduct of AIDS research in the United States is the diversity of the players who have participated in the construction of credible knowledge. Inside of a large and often floodlit arena with a diffuse and porous perimeter, an eclectic assortment of actors have all sought to assert and assess claims. The arena of fact making encompasses not just immunologists, virologists, molecular biologists, epidemiologists, In an unusual instance of lay participation in biomedical research, U.S. AIDS treatment activists have constituted themselves as credible participants in the process of knowledge construction, thereby bringing about changes in the epistemic practices of biomedical research. This article examines the mechanisms or tactics by which these lay activists have constructed their credibility in the eyes of AIDS researchers and...

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As a consequence of recent changes, health research policies in the United States mandate the inclusion of women and members of racial and ethnic minority groups as experimental subjects in biomedical research. This article analyzes debates that underlie these policies and that concern the medical management of bodies, groups, identities and differences. Much of the uncertainty surrounding these new policies reflects the fact that researchers, physicians, policy makers and health advocates have adopted competing, and often murky, understandings of the nature of sex, gender, racial and ethnic differences, and of the relation of the biological to the social in the manifestation of bodily illness.

In recent years, `state-centered' LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered) health advocacy has emerged as a distinctive form of health activism in the United States. These advocates seek the inclusion of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered persons as subjects and objects of biomedical research. Much of their attention has focused on changing the policies, practices, and priorities of agencies of the US Department of Health and Human Services, including the National Institutes of Health. This emphasis has developed out of the convergence of two trajectories: the histories of specific activist movements that show an increasing willingness to engage directly with the state; and the adoption by the state of a `policy paradigm' for including `special populations' within the concerns of federal health agencies. The impact of state-centered LGBT health advocacy can be traced in a number of specific domains. However, the partial successes of these efforts raise troubling questions about the medicalization of LGBT identities and the limitations of biomedical citizenship.