While best practices may be “set forth by an authority, such as a governing body or management,” they embody precisely the consensus-developed directives with which neoliberal governance more generally aims to replace law, policing, punishment, and top-down directives. At the same time, best practices may incite or instigate certain legal reforms that would permit closer comportment between the law and business interests, and they also may entail or generate certain legal and ethical workarounds. Thus, while best practices often operate as replacements for law and regulation (not to mention for religion, tradition, or other forms of deliberation), while they are neoliberalism's alternative to the state that it officially abjures, proof that we can be both ethical and efficient without external interference, they can also be the Trojan horse through which law and the political order it secures may be transformed for and by neoliberal reason.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 273