In this chapter, the focus shifts to how language policies are enforced, a term which I use instead of the more traditional ‘implementation’ to highlight the need to focus on action in specific policy contexts and accept the messiness and asymmetry inherent to such a focus. I argue in particular for greater attention to how policies impact the individual by codifying emotional responses and structuring the linguistic habitus. The case study looks at how English language learning is enforced as a moral imperative in Thai mass media through emotive references to the English Proficiency Index published annually by Education First.

Over the last three decades, the emergence of ‘audit culture’ providing assurance about the qualities of consumer products has become a ubiquitous element of economic worlds. In the pursuit of greater sustainability, audit systems provide a particular kind of solution to questions of environmental sustainability in the sourcing of a wide range of consumer products. In doing so, audit culture has the potential to reduce our individual actions and responses to environmental concerns from ontologies of ‘environmental citizenship’ to the more truncated ontology of ‘environmental consumerism’. This chapter examines this pivotal shift towards audit culture, and its treatment by sociologists, around three questions: 1) What is ‘audit culture’ and how has it been associated with the rise of neoliberalism in economic worlds? 2) How do audits work to empower and disempower participants in economic worlds? 3) How do audits, as technologies with intriguing powers, act to shape outcomes and perform in unexpected ways? These three questions are explored in an examination of the rise of environmental auditing in agrifood chains that have been introduced to service a rising demand for ‘sustainable’ products for Developed World consumers.