Companies having obtained (or wanting obtain) ISO certification simultaneously implant a learning system at its centre. The new ISO 9001:2000 standard no longer emphasize procedures and conformity audits as a means of assuring customers of quality, but requires the companies themselves to identify customer needs, manage a series of interconnected processes to comply with these, and to measure and analyse improvements and performance. The search for ISO certification and assessments thus sets a continuous search for management and developmental optimum to be gained as a new "curriculum" in companies, restructuring the whole organisation. The paper is addressing the way companies turn into a kind of "laboratories" (Miller & O'Leary 1994) when adapting to the new ISO standards. Having followed the implementation process (for a ISO re-certification) within three companies in the microelectronic industry in Norway, I want to focus on how these new standard requirements are interpreted and read, the kind of "problematisation" effected dependent among others on the kind of technical and non-technical management recipes the companies have chosen to buy, implement and install, the collective, textual re-fabrication of the work processes within the companies included. The way the ISO adaptation as such and the textual re-representation of the work organisation built-in make up a new boundary practice and new boundary objects (cf. Star & Griesemer 1989, Bowker & Star 1999) are here of special interest. External, bilateral relations between divergent interests are replaced by contracts of mutual dependencies or trust facilitated by a series of "in-betweens". Hence, the ISO adaptation in companies assembles a knowledge or learning system intended to manage a fourfold tension between (i) individual and collective action; (ii) tacit and explicit knowledge, (iii) centralisation and decentralisation; (iv) routine and creativity in addition to over bridging or overriding potential conflicts between the customers and the company, the company and its employees. A new framework for the informal learning within companies is thereby constructed. I want to discuss how the informal learning among the workers or the internal power relations within companies seem to be affected by the way the companies value and weigh among others simplicity, transparency or detailed control as ordering principles, respectively the principles of systemic complexity or loose connections. The informal learning at the organisational level is an integral part of this discussion, for instance how the constant search for an organisational equilibrium represented by the systemic customer orientation might make a learning tension between the demands for "robust knowledge" (Nowotny 2000) on the one hand and "a work place curriculum" (Billett 2001) extending this on the other. Focussing on the tools of the knowledge and the quality management systems - that is, mostly textual devices - my theoretical interest is to bring about a discussion about prescriptive and performative learning, including the relationship between scholastic and informal learning, theories on situated learning focussing the social organisation (e.g. Lave & Wenger 1991; Wenger 2000) and socio-technical theories focussing task-interdependencies (e.g. van Ejnatten 1993) as well as the differences between linear conceptions often incorporated in the latter and theories on partial, fractal relations of complex systems (e.g. Latour 1999; Law and Mol 2002; Law 2002). References: Billett, S. (2001): Learning in the Workplace. Sydney: Allen & Unwin Bowker, G. C. & Star, S. L. (1999): Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press Ejnatten van, F. (1993): The Paradigm that Changed the Work Plaw: Analysis of STSD. Assen/Maastricht: van Gorcum Latour, B. (1999): Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991): Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. NY: Cambridge University Press Law, J & Mol, A. (2002): Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices. Durham: Duke University Press Law, J (2002): Aircraft Stories: Decentring the Object in Technoscience. Durham and London: Duke University Press Miller, P. & O'Leary, T. (1996): The factory as laboratory. In: Power, M. (ed.): Accounting and science: natural inquiry and commercial reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp 121 - 150 Nowotny, H. (2000): Transgressive competence: the changing narrative of expertise. In: European journal of social theory, 3, 1, 5 - 21 Star, S. L. & Griesemer, J. R. (1989): Institutional Ecology, "Translations" and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. In Social Studies of Science, 19, 387 - 420 Wenger, E. (2000): Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization, 7,2, 225-246