Non-Regulated Deviance from Standards at MetroEngineers
With the case study MetroEngineers, Sarah Langer, Ronny Gey, Diana Karadzhova-Beyer, and Andrea Fried highlight organizational deviance from standards in the software development of a service engineering company for rail vehicles called MetroEngineers. Despite the initial intention to develop software according to European standards, the case study explains the reasons why the software developers deviate from standards nonetheless. First, software development at MetroEngineers is provided for a Chinese market which is hardly regulated through standards. Deviations from standards are therefore hardly sanctioned, but even MetroEngineers itself has not established an adequate internal sanctioning system for standard deviations. Second, MetroEngineers’ software developers lack allocative and authoritative resources for standard enactment and a lively internal discourse on the importance of standard-compliant development involving middle management and the customer. This means that software developers are ambitiously trying to develop in accordance with European standards, but ultimately fail to overcome the various contradictions that arise in standard enactment. This chapter represents one of the two manipulation-oriented types of organizational deviance introduced in the book.