Global quality norms within national production regimes:: ISO 9000 standards in the French and German car industries

This article examines the impact of ISO 9000 upon different national production regimes. It asks how ISO 9000 has influenced the reorganization of industry, and how this reorganization has affected the production systems of different advanced industrial countries, in this case France and Germany. The paper argues that within the wider context of increased international competition within the car industry, ISO 9000 technical norms have facilitated a modernization of supplier network practices and work organization in both countries. Yet, at the same time, the implementation of ISO 9000-based quality management systems within firms and the reorganization of relationships across firms have tended to reproduce the previously existing architectures of authority and risk distribution, but within the context of modernized technical practices. In France, the quality standards reproduced, while modernizing, the underlying Taylorist company organization and the hierarchical links between final assemblers and their suppliers. In Germany, in contrast, ISO 9000 norms became embedded within new production concepts that reinforced the autonomy of skilled workers. In inter-firm relationships, they act as an informal insurance clause against new liability risks associated with network forms of organization, thus safeguarding the autonomy of small firms.