In this paper we are interested in organizations as recipients of standards and question how standards are enacted in their daily practice. The aim of the paper is to develop a practice lens on standards to gain knowledge about the use of standards. To understand recent critical deviances from standards in several industries better, we suggest to investigate the interplay of legitimation, signification and domination during the enactment of standards within organizations. Based on the structuration theory (Giddens, 1984) and the enactment approach (Weick, 1988), we develop a heuristic framework for the analysis of standards as practice. We deliver qualitative, ethnographic insights from ongoing empirical research on the enactment of standards in a railway vehicle engineering company which is engaged in a metro development project for a Chinese client. We could retrace 28 metaphors for standards in the empirical data describing how standards appear in the daily practice. Our empirical investigations reveal that legitimation, signification and domination are intertwined during the enactment of standards. Furthermore, the interaction of legitimation, signification and domination induces three organizational tensions: (1) divergent interests for standard compliance, (2) blurred responsibilities for standard compliance, and (3) the drift between the internal significance of standards and the available resources. We trust that depending on how organizations solve these tensions it will have an influence on the organizational deviance from or compliance with standards and finally a crucial impact on human health, safety or environmental protection.