Quality Management Standards: Theory and Practice

By Marco Sartor and Matteo Podrecca

This book provides a clear and structured guide to the international certifications and standards that organizations adopt to govern and improve their operations, products, and processes, while responding to regulatory, market, and societal demands for accountability and transparency.

The book is organized into chapters dedicated to the most widely adopted standards: ISO 9001 (quality management), ISO 14001 and EMAS (environmental management), ISO 45001 (occupational health and safety), SA8000 (social responsibility), and ISO/IEC 27001 (information security). It also covers emerging governance frameworks such as B Corp certification and the United Nations Global Compact. Two concluding chapters address the practical journey of adopting a standard and the strategies for integrating multiple management systems into a coherent whole. Each chapter combines theoretical foundations with real-world case studies, helping readers understand how organizations translate these standards into practice.

Offering a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective that is both rigorous and accessible, this book will be of great interest to scholars, students, managers, auditors and consultants. It helps readers not only understand each certification individually, but also see how standards interact with one another and with broader organizational strategies. Moreover, the book fills a gap between fragmented academic literature and practitioner oriented manuals by providing a balanced mix of conceptual grounding, case-informed examples, and operational tools.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3032311659
• ISBN13: 9783032311658
• Release Date: November 2026
• Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan