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Record W310915437 · doi:10.1287/orsc.14.6.720.24873

ISO 9000: Outside the Iron Cage

2003· article· en· W310915437 on OpenAlexaff
Olivier Boiral

Bibliographic record

VenueOrganization Science · 2003
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicQuality and Supply Management
Canadian institutionsUniversité Laval
Fundersnot available
KeywordsRespondentCertificationQuality (philosophy)PerceptionProcess (computing)Resistance (ecology)RhetoricBusinessPublic relationsMarketingPsychologyPolitical scienceComputer scienceLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Adopted by an increasing number of organizations around the world, the ISO 9000 standards have become a growing concern for more and more managers who are often compelled to adopt this system without really knowing its requirements and implications for employees. Though the effects of this standard on quality management and on performance improvement have been widely debated, there is little knowledge of how the managers and employees who are asked to implement and maintain it perceive the ISO 9000 standards or resist its use. This study will thus attempt to analyze this perception and resistance with regard to both the standard and the certification process. So as to avoid the traditional and idealised view of this standard, whose commercial stakes often give rise to uncritical statements, almost 50 interviews were conducted outside of the workplace. The results of these interviews revealed highly contrasting attitudes that were frequently critical of the ISO 9000 system, which was often given only superficial support. A qualitative analysis of the data allowed us to identify three types of respondents. They were grouped according to their opinions and attitudes about the implementation of this standard. The three groups were ceremonial integrators, quality enthusiasts and dissidents. Although the “quality enthusiasts” discourse often reflects managers' “rhetoric of success” described by Zbaracki (1998) about the implementation of total quality programs, this rhetoric is not shared by the other respondent categories. Hence, this research project contributes to a better understanding of how institutional pressures, which create “isomorphic” organizations by leading them to adopt identical management models, are reinterpreted, renegotiated, and modified within organizations. The proposed typology casts doubt on the mechanistic, consensual, and monolithic view of the ISO 9000 system that underlies most of the work on this theme. In particular, this study demonstrates the relevance of adopting both the institutionalist and critical approaches in efforts to explain the respondents' opinions. In so doing, the personnel's support for the ISO 9000 system and the certification process can then be analyzed from different angles. This certification process would ultimately appear to be a rite of passage that gives rise to various strategies that depend on the respondents' category and their support for the standard.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.939
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.003
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.230
Teacher spread0.214 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2003
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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