On its face, this passage is gibberish—a gossamer net of high ethical values wafted over a bottom line of market success. However, it is gibberish bearing significance. These two definitions suggest that best practices aim to maximize competitive advantage without cheating — they represent a steroidally charged form of Weberian instrumental rationality wrapped in Aristotelian ethics and Kantian legal rectitude. So why the wrapping? In bundling together concerns with legality, transparency, accountability, ethics, and competitiveness and at least formally attending to each, best practices represent more than the suffusion of the public sphere with market metrics. They also represent the opposite, namely, the absorption of public or political concerns into markets and consequently the elimination of the need for legal, political, or ethical interference from the state or any other source.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 271