Do bandwagons matter ? exploring the effect of early adopters on the diffusion of the iso 9000 management standard

Voluntary industry management standards are emerging as an important new form of industrial coordination. They now regulate management practices in industries as diverse as electronics and entertainment. One goal of these standards is the differentiation of wellmanagement firms. Unfortunately, theories of diffusion suggest that such differentiation may be short lived. Adoption of a management standard by high quality firms should encourage other firms to adopt — particularly those firms with lower quality. Thus, ‘negative’ bandwagons may destroy the value of management standards. In this paper, we explore this dismal hypothesis by investigating how the number and nature of previous adopters influences the propensity of firms to participate in the ISO 9000 quality management standard. We do not find the predicted linear relationship between quality of initial adopters and subsequent adoption rates. Rather we find that adoption is suppressed both by high and low quality previous adopters. We propose some explanations for this relationship and discuss the implications for theory. * Corresponding author. We would like to thank Magali Delmas and Michael Lenox for their help in the creation of this paper. We are also grateful for financial support from the Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego and the U.S. EPA (Grant # 99-063334).