The purpose of this article is to define which organizational practices have significant impact on returns from new products or which foster or at least influence positively innovation. Survey responders were divided to see whether they innovated or not by the survey questions which explicitly asked...

Private standards are spreading rapidly in international food production and trade, and are moving beyond food quality and safety aspect to address environmental and social concerns. We examine how effective private standards are in improving employment conditions in global food supply chains. Using...

Certification from the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) has recently become the fundamental requirement of businesses seeking to ensure continuous quality improvement. However, further evaluation is needed to ascertain whether those ISO certified enterprises could enhance their ov...

The aim of this article was to contribute to the discussion about whether standardization has a positive or negative impact on working conditions. The case studies of organizations certified to the quality management standard ISO 9000 served as the empirical base. The article shows that there is no ...

The company selected for this study by the Standards and Quality Agency of Cameroon (ANOR) is ''Chococam'' one of the two leading companies dominating the cocoa industry in Cameroon. Chococam is specialized in the manufacture of chocolate-based products and various sweets from cocoa mass and has a d...

ISO 9000 quality system certification has been widely applied around the world, but with mixed success. A review of the literature revealed gaps in research in this area of quality/operations management, particularly in the empirical testing of the effects of ISO 9000 certification on innovation per...

General administration throughout history has sought the planning; organization, management and control are fulfilled accurately. Subsequently, with the introduction of Continuous Improvement Cycle by Edward Deming (Plan-Do-Check, which improved to Plan, Do, Check, Act) it has tried to make the cont...

For the conduct of this study, the Standardization Association of Senegal (ASN) has chosen ''Water Senegal - SDE (Sénégalaise des Eaux)'', a private limited company with regional offices across the country. With over a thousand employees, SDE serves around 5 million people and operates within an ins...

Innovation and quality are both important aspects of business excellence. ISO 9000 is a well-known quality management standard but its relationship with innovation is not completely understood. Previous quantitative studies have shown that ISO 9000 is positively correlated with technological innovat...

This study asserted that quality improvement (QI) requires the coexistence of two cultural values of innovation and attention to detail and proposed that their coexistence depends on the implementation of multiple QI practices. A longitudinal QI intervention, with five phases, consisting of multiple...

The ISO 9001 standard for quality management has been implemented by more than 1,000,000 organizations worldwide. It has received a high degree of attention in existing literature. However, findings about the impact of ISO 9001 certification on financial performance are not consistent in the literat...

On the basis of a unique firm-level dataset from the German manufacturing sector, this paper empirically examines the determinants of environmental and non-environmental product and process innovations. The micro-econometric analysis with multivariate probit models points to an extremely high releva...

Selected by the DIN German Institute for Standardization for the conduct of an assessment, ''Nanotron'' is a medium-sized engineering company participating in the global information and communication technology (ICT). With 25 employees at the time of the study (October 2010-June 2011), Nanotron deve...

This document, prepared by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), proposes the introduction and application of International Standards on Quality management systems: ISO 9000 / 9001 and 9004 within public governance....

Following a growing interest in corporate social responsibility, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) announced plans for development of the ISO 26000—guidance standard for social responsibility. Despite initial signals that ISO 26000 will be built on the intellectual and practic...

Total quality management is from a decade an important and useful organizational system for increasing companies' competitiveness, by optimizing processes with a particular focus on the customer. Among all the methodologies, ISO 9000 certification is one of the most common and recognized approaches ...

This is a case study conducted to determine the non-economic benefits of standards. The enterprise chosen for the study is Shanghai Shuguang Hospital (Shuguang), one of the earliest traditional Chinese medicine and non-profit hospitals in China. Founded in 1906, and affiliated to the Shanghai Univer...

Using a rich panel dataset of small and medium scale manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) active in the manufacturing sector in Viet Nam, this paper investigates the drivers of firm productivity, focusing on the role played by international management standards certification. We test the hypothesis that...

In this paper we analyse the impact of a variety of private standards on worker empowerment in the horticultural export sector in Peru. Empowerment is defined as workers’ knowledge of their own rights and workers’ perceived agency to improve employment conditions. We use data from a company and a tw...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the differences between the two most frequently used quality management approaches implemented by firms, ISO 9000 and EFQM, in terms of their impact on the adoption of innovative work organization practices. In order to accomplish this objective, we have selec...