Our research investigates the mechanisms set in motion by the widespread use of standards in education through the detailed registration of the relations and activities these standards install in educational practices. Building on a socio-technical approach, our analyses consist in cartographic ethnographies mapping the way techniques, instruments and procedures form ‘apparatuses’ or ‘strategic assemblages’ (Foucault, 1977) which function as a kind of self-regulating order in both process and effect of (non-)human conduct (Latour, 2005; Simons & Olsen, 2010). The cartography presented in this contribution is a follow-up study on the specific assemblage installed by the teacher’s professional profile in the practice of (self-)evaluation in-the-making in teacher education in Flanders, Belgium. It builds on a detailed registration of the quality inspection and assurance process which is currently taking shape in all specific teacher programmes. Earlier research focused on the preparation for the quality inspection within the institutions through the editing of a self-evaluation report (Ceulemans, Struyf & Simons, forthcoming). In this contribution, we study the following phases of the quality assurance process, that is, the ‘external quality control’ by an ‘inspection commission’. More specific, we portray cartographic ethnographies 1) of the coming of an inspection commission in one teacher education programme; 2) of the interim report edited by the inspection commission at the end of their round, addressing the different teacher programmes they visited; and 3) of what occurs within the teacher education programme between these two moments in time. In this process, it was noted that comparison between and positioning oneself towards other programmes were characteristic type of relations with a strong self-regulating effect. Standards and comparison seem to be two sides of the same coin. To compare, one needs a mutual accepted standard, and with a shared standard at hand, it becomes necessary to position and situate oneself toward others. This leads us to the question if educational standards bring about activities concerning what we stand for and/or rather install mechanisms based on an interest in where to stand in order to stand out?

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