Schools of thought in and against total quality. (total quality management)

In the early 1980s, a new concept entered managerial discourse: Total Quality Management (TQM). Later called "Total Quality" (TQ), TQM was heralded by governments, major corporations and the business media as the most effective and elegant way out of the economic crisis and into the global market. It should be noted, however, that the preoccupation with quality is by no means new. In a 1956 article, Feigenbaum describes the new stakes confronting corporate managers in the early 1960s as follows: "Customers - both industrial and consumer - have been increasing their quality requirements very sharply in recent years. This tendency is likely to be greatly amplified by the intense competition that seems inevitable in the near future" (Feigenbaum, 1956: 93). In the 1980s, TQM became a product in itself, nearly a billion-dollar industry (Harari, 1993b).

Like many fashionable concepts, TQM has spawned abundant literature aimed principally at managers confronted with problems of implementation (Reed et al., 1996). Only recently has there been a more indepth analysis of the total quality movement, with several academics publishing the results of theoretical and empirical research. For instance, an entire issue of The Academy of Management Review (19(3), July 1994) was devoted to studies of this nature. TQM also earned its share of detractors who accused it of being merely a fad. Several authors pointed out that while total quality approaches have met with considerable success, their failures, though less publicized, have been even greater (Ahire, 1996; Dreyfuss, 1988; Hammonds, 1991; Krishnan et al., 1993; Roberts and Corcoran-Nantes, 1995; Schaffer, 1993; Sherwood and Hoylman, 1993; Spitzer, 1993). Others questioned TQM's conceptual soundness, its applicability and its ideological basis (Schaffer and Thomson, 1992; Dean and Bowen, 1994; Hill, 1995; Webb, 1995; Steingard and Fitzgibbons, 1993; Tuckman, 1995; Wilkinson et al., 1991).

Given the existence of diverse discourse on and against TQM, we believe that a literature review and a classification of this literature may be of value to both academics and practitioners who seek to better understand the value and limitations of TQM. The purpose of this article is to propose a classification of different schools of thought and critiques in quality management, to show the relationship between each of them and how they have engendered what is now called total quality. Table 1 shows excerpts of the schools of thought classification and Table 2 shows excerpts of the critique classification.

We believe that some of the harshest critiques of TQM originate in the nature of the evolution of the field of quality management, which is marked by the presence of several shifts. Classification helped us develop a theoretical analysis of the historical and discursive dimensions that we believe are being neglected. We think that our analysis may cast the current debate among believers, nonbelievers, and skeptics in a different light.

TWO SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT IN QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Several authors have described the confusion created by the existence of distinct definitions of, and perspectives on, quality management (Chatterjee and Yilmaz, 1993; Dean and Bowen, 1994; Gehani, 1993; Krishnan et al., 1993; Sitkin et al., 1994; Wilkinson and Willmott, 1995). For example, Dean and Bowen concluded that "Despite thousands of articles in the business and trade press, total quality remains a hazy, ambiguous concept. The difference among frameworks proposed by writers such as Deming, Juran and Crosby have no doubt contributed to this confusion" (1994: 394). In our view, however, the confusion is due not only to differences in approach, but also to the lack of interest shown by academics. To our knowledge, the attempts at differentiating schools of thought in the literature are limited to a distinction between "hard" and "soft" approaches. The former are associated with the systematic control of work using statistical tools, while the latter emphasize qualitative and human aspects (Hill, 1995; McArdle et al., 1995; Warnotte, 1992).

It is always difficult to group and label approaches, particularly when they do not have well established foundations in management theory. Unfortunately, this is the case for most TQM approaches (Dean and Bowen, 1994). We nevertheless believe that it is important to try. Thus, we have borrowed the categories proposed by Barley and Kunda (1992) to chart the evolution of American managerial discourse. According to these authors, the managerial discourse consists of alternating waves of normative and rational rhetoric and forms of control. Rational control is characteristic of theories such as scientific management and systems rationalism, according to which productivity stems from expertise, careful work design, and coherent support systems. It presumes that employees are "calculative actors with instrumental orientation to work" and "understand the advantages of an efficient system or . . . [are] powerless to resist a well-designed structure" (1992: 384). Under this assumption, control is achieved by manipulating systems, and if the systems are adequate, compliance is assured. On the other hand, normative control (associated, for instance, with welfare capitalism in the 1930s and 1940s, and the more recent trend of organizational culture) assumes that the organization is "a locus of shared values and moral involvement" where "cohesion and loyalty . . . [are] the ultimate source of productivity. . . . Control therefore rested on shaping workers' identities, emotions, attitudes, and beliefs" (1992: 384). Barley and Kunda associate TQM with the more recent normative wave of organizational culture. However, when one considers the evolution of the quality management movement, it appears that both forms of control are present in the quality management literature. In fact, we argue that these forms of control constitute a prominent difference between the schools of thought. The schools of thought we refer to as rational and normative both share a common goal: customer satisfaction. However, each school proposes a different means to achieve this goal.

We must point out that the classification we propose is not the result of a systematic content analysis of the literature on TQM. Rather, it is inferred from an extensive (if not exhaustive) literature review. Quotes from the main authors associated with the two schools of thought are presented in Table 1.

The Rational School

The guiding principle of the rational school is the importance of acting at the level of systems and processes and, contrary to the normative school, not blaming poor quality on individual attitudes. This is the broadest, best documented, and oldest school of thought in quality management. Shewhart (1931) was one of the first to develop statistical tools allowing managers to make more enlightened decisions regarding not only product quality, but also the need to intervene in a given process during manufacturing. Statistical process control represented an important break with the traditional view of quality control, which until then had been limited to product inspection (Garvin, 1988). Even today, the rational school views statistical tools as a fundamental ingredient of quality management in a context of large-scale production using standardized components. In the 1950s, however, Deming - another statistician - argued that statistical tools are inadequate if managers use them improperly or impractically (for instance, by looking for a culprit), or when they foster managerial practices that inhibit workers from applying information acquired from statistics to improving processes. Indeed, Deming recognized that data on product quality and process stability are useless if management does not subsequently act to rectify the situation or if management's actions are limited to laying blame and exhorting improvement (Deming, 1982, 1986). Deming, thus, developed a set of "lines of conduct" for managers, which have come to be known as "Deming's 14 points."(1) Deming's message, introduced in Japan, was subsequently extended by Juran (1951), who also advocated changes in management practices. This was followed by the publication of Feigenbaum's Total Quality Control, which proposed to broaden quality management to include the functions of product design and maintenance (Feingenbaum, 1961). The introduction of the concept of "Total Quality Control" (TQC) represented a turning point in quality management because it attributed the responsibility for finished product quality to a larger number of key individuals. Ultimately, responsibility was spread over the entire company - "Company-Wide Quality Control" - and involved not only functions directly related to product creation but also all company services involved in supplying production support and resources. Within this framework, it is no longer enough to manage the quality of finished and unfinished products, but attention must also be paid to the quality of raw materials, worker training, equipment, etc. (Ishikawa, 1985).

To summarize, the rational school presupposes that individuals want to do a good job. If they do not, the reasons are twofold: they may be hindered by the obligation to conform to methods prevailing in their workplace, or they may not possess the necessary information to manufacture good products. Within this framework, any attempt at improving quality can only succeed by means of a systematic, critical examination of existing management systems and by developing tools to gather and analyze data about the quality produced.

The Normative School

The normative school stresses the individual responsibility of employees (whether line workers or managers) with regard to quality and the need to correct behavioral flaws. This school emerged in the 1960s with Crosby's "zero-defect" theory, which argues that there is only one acceptable level of quality (zero-defect), that the only way to ensure quality is "to do it right the first the time," and that the only true measure of quality is the price of nonconformance resulting from a lack of prevention. This is what led him to claim that Quality Is Free (the title of his best known book; Crosby, 1979), as well as to suggest that the solution to nonconformance consisted of involving individuals and refusing to accept that "to err is human" (Crosby, 1964).

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