ISO 9000 quality assurance in an extreme situation: quality management in a home for multi‐handicapped

Although the latest Mobile Oil survey tells us that more than 200,000 accredited ISO 9000‐family certificates have been issued world‐wide up to September 1997, few of these have been given to organisations in the social sector. In this article the implementation of an ISO 9000 system in a public owned home for partially blind and mentally retarded people in Denmark called “Ebo” is analysed. The analysis focuses on three major areas: the motivation for choosing certification, the interpretation of the standard in the social sector, and finally the effects of the implementation process at Ebo. The central findings are that managerial technologies like ISO 9000 have little or no inherent core that makes them more or less compatible with any type of institution. They also have little or no core effects, but effects are a result of social sense‐making processes in an ambiguous situation. If ISO 9000 certification has any non‐socially constructed effects, they will be more pronounced when the cultural distance between the standard and the company culture is the largest. The research project has been conducted by action research methodology, where the authors have been involved in the implementation process as consultants.