Total Quality Management

Total quality management (TQM) is a management philosophy and practice that aims to meet and exceed customers' expectations through continuous improvement of processes, the involvement of employees, and a quality-driven leadership vision.

From its relatively humble beginnings at the start of the 1980s, TQM became, in the early 1990s, the most established managerial innovation: It was so widely proselytized, with such fervor, that it managed to cross national cultures, state ideologies, forms of ownership, and industrial sectors. Although an exact chronology is difficult to establish, one could argue that the early stage of TQM (the decade of the 1980s) was characterized by the attempt of technical experts (such as quality managers, engineers, and statisticians) to convince managerial and government elites that TQM is the only way forward for building and maintaining efficient organizations in the face of Japanese competition. TQM had deep roots in operational research and statistics, holding as prime concern the control of costs and the continuous improvement of processes of production and service delivery. Such a perspective has been labeled “hard TQM” by Wilkinson in 1992 and “mechanistic TQM” by Spencer in 1994.

At the beginning of the 1990s, there was a shift toward softer, more humanistic issues that highlighted the contribution each and every individual could and should make to the cause of quality. Labeled “soft TQM” by Wilkinson in 1992 and “cultural TQM” by Spencer in 1994, this approach suggests that it is not enough to get the production system right; if the system is disconnected from the people who are supposed to operate it, quality (in the shape of customer satisfaction rather than cost reduction) cannot be achieved. Given that the economic necessity of improving quality became established and taken for granted in the 1980s (being enforced by governments and managerial elites alike), the 1990s saw a shift in the agenda of TQM programs. It was thought that top managers, quality experts, workers, and all other stakeholders wanted the same thing (as who could oppose the cause of quality?). Organizations were regarded as unitary entities, being driven by the chief goal of customer satisfaction; as such, top management became charged with the task of changing employees' attitudes to be in line with the customer satisfaction philosophy. TQM became an umbrella [Page 1556]label under which all sorts of consensus-building exercises unfolded in the name of achieving quality and customer satisfaction.

In the mid-1990s, more and more voices started to suggest that TQM initiatives couldn't be controlled from the top because they involved complex social relationships whose outcomes were difficult to predict. Various commentators started to problematize the apparently benign façade of TQM, the ways in which quality is identified and pursued in organizations, and the purposes it may serve. In line with this so-called critical management perspective, TQM was depicted by Webb in 1995 as a device for translating the enterprise ideology into material and social practices. Kerfoot and Knights argued in 1995 that TQM is a social practice that professes to fill the gap left open by the decline of earlier forms of collectivism, while Steingard and Fitzgibbons suggested in 1993 that TQM is a totalizing discourse aimed at enhancing managerial control over the employees.

...