Over one million organisations have a Quality Management System (QMS) certified to the ISO9000 standard; however, the system requires a lot of resources and its value has been questioned. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different types of uses of QMS correlates with management perceptions of QM in terms of respect, cost, and strategic importance. The paper is based on a survey within eight organisations and shows that a compliance-orientated QMS usage will more likely lead to a view on quality management as costly, and of little respect, than a business- or improvement-oriented QMS usage.