The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standard has been widely applied all over the world since its introduction in 1987. By the end of 2013, ISO 9000 had been adopted by over 1,129,000 facilities in 189 countries. Both academics and practitioners are interested in understanding the relationship between adoption of ISO 9000, and other factors (Christmann & Taylor, 2006; Du, Yin, & Zhang, 2016; Fikru, 2014a, 2014b, 2016; Nakamura, Takahashi, & Vertinsky, 2001; Pekovic, 2010; Wu, Chu, & Liu, 2007).

In 2008, the National Bureau of Statistics of China conducted an Economic Census of the service firms. The descriptions of variables, the coding are shown in the table. The data is available in Moodle.

Table: Variables, their descriptions and coding

No	Variable name	Description of the variable	Coding
1	Year	Year the company certified	2004; 2005; 2006; 2007; 2008
2	Certification	Certification dummy	0= not certified; 1=certified
3	Industry2	Two digit industry code	58= storage and transportation; 60= telecommunication 61=computer service 62=software 74= business services 75= Research and Development 76= specialized technology services 77= technology exchange and promotion
5	Stpyear	Year of the founding of the company
6	I	Employee number
7	I_yjs	Number of employees with master or doctor
8	I_benke	Number of employees with bachelor
9	I_dz	Number of employees with diploma
10	I_gaozhong	Number of employees with high school education
11	I_chuzhong	Number of employees with junior high school or below
12	Revenue	Sales of the company
13	Profit_operation	Profit of the company
14	Ksum	Total asset of the company
15	Equity	Equity of the company
16	Kpaid	Total capital
17	Kstate	Capital from government
18	Koversea	Capital from overseas
19	Kother	Capital from other sources
20	ROS	Return on sales
21	ROA	Return on assets
22	FDIpercent	Percentage of overseas investment in the total investment
23	DFIdummy	Overseas investment dummy
24	agefirm	Age of the company

Required Task

You are expected to work in groups and write a research report. When you work on your report, you need to use the dataset, and other sources such as journal articles. If you use website material, please pay attention to the quality of the material (e.g. government website or industry website etc.). There is no word limit for the report. For the number of references, there should be at least ten academic sources (journal articles, or books). It is encouraged to use more relevant, high quality, and up to date sources in the report.

Students have a high degree of flexibility in doing the research. The important thing is that the research should be well connected with the literature.

The required structure should be as following.

1. Executive Summary: Major findings and major recommendations
2. Introduction: Background (of the case); purpose (of this report); two to three research objectives for a study that you would seek to conduct; and format (of this report).
3. Write a short literature review of at least ten academic sources relevant to your topic. Any source including books, journal articles are acceptable, as long as they are relevant. You can also use a particular website for some information. If websites are used they will be in addition of the ten academic sources.
4. Describe the methodology and justify your choice.
5. Discussion and managerial advises: link your findings to extant literature. Advise the management about the usefulness of the findings.
6. Limitations and directions for future research. Suggestions of how the research can be improved.
7. Include a correctly constructed reference list of all sources used in the project, not just those used in the literature review section. Appendices also should be attached which will include all the analysis and graphs etc. that are not included in the body of the report.