Conceptualizing and Exploring the Organizational Effects of ISO 9000: Insights from the Øresund Bridge Project

ISO 9000 is a quality standard that is widely used by many organizations, and perceived by many customers as being synonymous with quality, but at the same time there is a growing body of literature which is increasingly criticizing ISO 9000 for the negative impact that it has on quality because of the organizational effects that results. This paper develops and applies a framework for understanding the organizational effects of ISO 9000. In the particular case examined, the implementation and use of ISO 9000 had a profound effect on who, what, how, and why people communicated (discourse), on thinking (thought figures), and on working (social practice) in a large complex project. This suggests that the effective usage of the ISO 9000 standard clearly depends on understanding these effects and managing them such that the intended benefits of ISO 9000 are delivered.