In short, best practices represent not merely the intimacy, but the consolidation of government, business, and knowledge endeavors into a market episteme that subtly banishes nonmarket values and aims. As best practices imbricate the formerly distinct purposes and ends of business, government, and knowledge in neoliberal regimes, they neuter or deflect normative challenges to neoliberal reason precisely through this imbrication. How do you contest a winning practice that claims (by virtue of being only a practice) value neutrality? How would you do so in the name of a (nonmarket) value or purpose that the practice spurns or does not recognize? It is through carrying market values while claiming only to be techniques that best practices promulgate certain norms and foreclose arguments about norms and ends.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 272