ISO 9000: Outside the Iron Cage

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. (ISO 9000; Certification; Resistance; Institutional Theory) The ISO 9000 standards have increasingly come to represent a commercial imperative that is difficult for organizations to avoid without also jeopardizing client loyalty and market access (Anderson 1999, Simmons and White 1999). The many practical manuals that describe the standard’s requirements, the implementation stages, and the benefits for organizations (Tricker 2001, Kanholm 2000, Hoyle 1998, Wealleans 2000) bear witness to the growing interest of managers for these highly prescriptive management systems. The objective, rational, and structured appearance that it presents and the concern for image and conformity that it addresses characterize the resolutely mechanistic and instrumental view of quality management on which the ISO 9000 standards are based. What is more, this functionalist viewpoint is shared by most of the studies of ISO 9000. The literature on the subject focuses primarily on describing the objective of this standard and its implications for quality management and organizational performance improvement (Acharya and Ray 2000, Hughes et al. 2000, Docking and Dowen 1999, Carlsson and Carlsson 1996). The ISO standard is seen as a system of objective, collectively accepted rules whose legitimacy is rarely challenged inside organizations. This consensual, homogeneous, and mechanistic view of organizations has been strongly contested by critical theory (Burrell and Morgan 1979, Clegg 1975, Alvesson and Willmott 1992, Parker 1995). To begin with, management practices are not politically neutral. Rather, they represent instruments of power that reproduce or reinforce often oppressive systems of employee control (Clegg 1981, Alvesson and Deetz 1996, Alvesson and Willmott 1992). However, when the employees’ subjectivity is considered, the many possible interpretations of real situations and their socially constructed character become more obvious, thereby casting doubt on the rationale of order and shared objectives that the traditional, dominant paradigm puts forward (Berger and Luckmann 1967, Morgan 1980, Putnam and Pacanowsky 1988). Much of this same criticism of the functionalist paradigm also applies to the predominant role that authors accord to mechanistic and consensual views when analyzing ISO 9000. Consequently, the Organization Science © 2003 INFORMS Vol. 14, No. 6, November–December 2003, pp. 720–737 1047-7039/03/1406/072