Understanding Deviance in a World of Standards

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? This book 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 provides 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 when deviating from standards in the 'audit society'.

Table of Contents:
1: Andrea Fried and Besma Glaa: Introduction to Deviance in a World of Standards Part I: Framing Organizational Deviance from Standards 2: Andrea Fried and Arvind Singhal: A Second Order Observation of Organizational Deviance 3: Andrea Fried and Peter Walgenbach: Structurationist Framework to Explore Organizational Deviance from Standards 4: Sarah Langer, Ronny Gey, and Diana Karadzhova-Beyer: Investigating Organizational Deviance from Standards In-Depth Part II: Exploring Organizational Deviance From Standards In The FieldSarah Langer and Andrea Fried: 5: Ronny Gey, Sarah Langer, and Andrea Fried: Attentive Deviance from Standards at CraneSolutions 6: Ronny Gey, Sarah Langer, and Andrea Fried: Over-Conformity with Standards at MedTech 7: Sarah Langer, Ronny Gey, Diana Karadzhova-Beyer, and Andrea Fried: Non-Regulated Deviance From Standards at MetroEngineers Part III: Explaining Organizational Deviance From Standards 8: Andrea Fried and Sarah Langer: Typology of Organizational Deviance from Standards 9: Sarah Langer and Andrea Fried: Monitoring of Standard Enactment for Exploration and Exploitation 10: Andrea Fried: Understanding Deviance from Standards: Implications for Corporate Responsibility and Criminal Law

About the Author :
Andrea Fried is Associate Professor in Business Administration at the Linköping University, Sweden, and Director of the DFG research project Dangerous and Beneficial Drifts of Standards in the Modern Working Environment at the Otto Schott Institute of Materials Research, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.

Review :
Professor Fried and her co-contributors have produced a book with significant implications for the fields of compliance, regulation, organizational behavior, corporate governance, and applied business ethics. The book reviews taxonomies and case studies to help us understand how and why deviance from standards occurs in organizations. Most helpful for research into large-scale corporate wrongdoing, the book closes with a discussion of how their findings should shape our thinking about individual versus corporate liability, civil, and criminal penalties for such behavior. I recommend the book to anyone looking for insight into these questions. Why do organizations deviate from standards? Are there good and bad organizational reasons for deviations beyond individual misbehaviour? You can find answers to these questions in this intellectually stimulating book that is full of critical reflection and fascinating empirical insights, for example about attentive deviance, over-conformity, non-regulated, and illegitimate deviance within software developing organizations. Standards are intended and expected to be repeatedly or continuously used by a substantial number of the parties for whom they are meant. However, this use is not self-evident. Standards may be ignored, unconsciously or consciously, but this book highlights another phenomenon: stakeholders may deviate from standards - again unconsciously or consciously. This book provides a thorough analysis of such deviations using in-depth case studies, revealing that different categories of deviations apply. Some of these were touched on in previous research but this is the first real study of them, making this book a great addition to the body of knowledge of standardisation, relevant for both the academic community and practitioners.