How Organizing Expands: Organizing Among Organizations in the World of Standards

Abstract We live in a world of extensive organizing, often leading to highly organized social orders not only within, but also among and outside formal organizations – even on a global scale. What drives this widespread level of organizing? We present empirical studies of how the international management standard ISO 9001 has implied an organizing among organizations that has expanded over time and resulted in a highly organized global order. We provide a typology of three ways by which organizing expands and escalates and analyse the arguments that organizers use for expansion. We argue that the search for trust, transparency, independence, and impartiality can be significant drivers of organizing decisions and suggest possible explanations for the expansion of organizing that relate to fundamental characteristics of decisions as communications. As a next step, and in order to find more structural explanations for the expanding of organizing, we compare our main case with cases that have not led to expansion and a case in which expansion was avoided during an initial period.