Symbolic adoption of ISO 9000 in small and medium-sized enterprises: The role of internal contingencies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the decoupling between the rhetoric and practice of ISO 9000, an internationally disseminated standard in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Extensive fieldwork based on 65 in-depth interviews of general managers, middle managers and employees was undertaken in eight Spanish SMEs which adopted the standard over a long period of time. Contrary to common belief and the dominant neo-institutional approach to ISO certification, the findings indicate that firms tend to adopt ISO 9000 symbolically in response to various internal organisational contingencies, rather than as part of their adaptation to external pressures. ISO 9000 certification in SMEs can be compared to the acquisition of an organisational degree whose optimistic rhetoric and similar institutional pressures mask the considerable heterogeneity of certified organisations and elasticity of the standard when integrated into daily activities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".