Dangerous and Beneficial Drifts of Standards in the Modern Working Environment

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Andrea Fried
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance ; Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 252328703

• Final Report Year: 2019

Final Report Abstract

Standards have become widespread regulatory tools that are set to promote global trade, innovation, efficiency, and quality. They contribute significantly to the creation of safe, reliable, and high-quality services and technologies to ensure human health, environmental protection, or information security. Yet intentional deviations from standards by organizations are often reported in many sectors, which can either contribute to or challenge the measures of safety and quality they are designed to safeguard. Why then, despite all potential consequences, do organizations choose to deviate from standards in one way or another? The project uses structuration theory — covering aspects of both structure and agency — to explore the organizational conditions and contradictions under which different types of deviance occur. It reveals empirical explanations for deviance in organizations that go beyond an understanding of individual misbehaviour where mainly a single person is held responsible. Case studies of software-developing organizations illustrate insightful generalizations on standards as a mechanism of sensemaking, resource allocation, and sanctioning, and provide ground to re-think corporate responsibility and a corporate criminal law when deviating from standards in the ‘audit society’.

Publications

• (2015). Certification matters – competition of market, rationalbureaucratic and professional logics in software development organizations. In: SIIT, I. (ed.) The 9th IEEE Conference on Standardization and Innovation in Information Technology. Sunnyvale, CA: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
  Gey, R., Fried, A. & Langer, S.
  
• (2016). Compliance in the ‘audit society’ – creation of deviance by standards. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2016, 16227
  Langer, Sarah & Fried, Andrea
  
• (2017). A phenomenological perspective on organizational deviance – the enactment of standards in software development. Critical Management Studies Conference. Liverpool, UK
  Langer, S. & Fried, A.
  
• (2017). Deviance in management and organization studies – functionalist and interactionist perspectives. Critical Management Studies conference. Liverpool, UK
  Fried, A. & Singhal, A.
  
• (2017). Thinking standards as practice: the interplay of legitimation, signification and domination in a railway vehicle engineering company. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2017, 11273
  Fried, Andrea; Langer, Sarah; Karadzhova-Beyer, Diana & Gey, Ronny
  
• (2018). Metastructuring for standards: how organizations respond to the multiplicity of standards. In: Jakobs, K. (ed.) Corporate and global standardization initiatives in contemporary society. Hershey, PA: IGI Global
  Gey, Ronny & Fried, Andrea
  
• (2019). The nexus between standards and innovation – an explanation of contradictory results through the concept of social agency. European Group of Organization Studies Conference. Edinburgh, UK
  Fried, A., Karadzhova-Beyer, D., Langer, S. & Pretorius, A.
  
• (2020). Understanding deviance in a world of standards, 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  Fried, A. (ed.)