Among the many words and numbers which circulate in our contemporary world, descriptors of quality are particularly numerous. Ratings, rankings, metrics, indicators, auditing, accreditation, benchmarking, smileys, user reviews, dashboards, international comparisons, and various forms of quality reports are used to capture quality.
Quality is one of the most widely used terms in our time. Three observations testify to its contemporary relevance as a social phenomenon which deserves to be studied (Dahler-Larsen 2008).
The first observation is that discourses of quality have proliferated to a broad range of social domains. Quality is expected to occur not only in art and music but also in consumer goods and service provision. We expect quality in schools, hospitals, universities, and housing. We expect quality in the air we breathe and in our personal relations. More recently, it has even become legitimate to talk about âquality of lifeâ both as something personally and existentially relevant and as something that institutions and polities must take into account. The discourse on quality thus claims to encompass our life, as such. It has become a meta-discourse describing how we live; a mirror in which we should see our existence. This is no small accomplishment.
The second observation is that organizations play important roles in relation to quality. Organizations are providers of goods and services characterized by more or less quality. Organizations have recipes, standards, and prescriptions for how to measure and document quality. Some organizations make a living from the construction and implementation of such quality regimes. Organizations make sure that particular inscriptions of quality travel through time and space. They do so in the form of pre-arranged quality statements (reviews, rankings, websites, and reports) that are filtered through some organizational machineries and which hold other organizational machineries accountable. Organizations not only provide quality, they also hold each other accountable for the provision of quality, thereby also defining quality in practice in terms of dimensions and standards pertaining to goods and services.
Organizations are linked in chains and networks and organizational fields (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). In some views, the smallest unit of analysis that works as an organizational field independent of other organizations is the world (Meyer 2008). Many of the organizations that help define regimes of quality relevant for others do in fact operate on a global scale. On the micro level, however, organizations are also the sites for practical negotiations about what quality might mean faced with the dissonance possibly occurring in the friction between universal standards and the contingencies of the local situation at hand (Stake 2004; Stark 2009).
It is not up to each individual to invent quality from scratch; the organizational world is already defining quality for us and making it relevant in many ways.
The third observation is that quality today relates to public matters. Quality has invaded the public space. We demand quality from hospitals, schools, foundations, and governments in their capacity as public institutions. Quality has become an important way of dealing with that which ancient Rome discovered as res publica: the public thing. The res publica (the etymological source of political units such as the republic) is basically all of the matters connecting us in a society, as they represent our common destiny. The public thing stands between us and connects us, because what you do with it influences my life. Take the quality of the air we breathe: Once the issue of air quality is raised, we have to talk about pollution from industry and cars. We also have to talk about the regulation of smoking. As much as we may disagree on how we balance the different and opposing interests of drivers, smokers, industry, and so forthâand correspondingly, what constitutes various dimensions of the notion of air qualityâthe matter is a public one simply because people affect each otherâs lives through the air, like it or not. Addressing an issue of quality is often a particular way of mobilizing others or regulating the behavior of others around a matter of public relevance. Or rather, it has become that way.
There is a particular socio-historical particularity to the contemporary status of the concept of quality. Society has changed how it talks about its res publica. Schools were formerly supposed to bring education, equality, progress, dannelse, or Bildung1 (Dahler-Larsen et al. 2017). Today, their primary obligation may be quality. We deal with the management of public services in terms of quality management. We now see public issues in the light of how they are framed and presented as issues of quality. Perhaps we are even at a turning point where we see them as quality issues rather than as public issues.
The constitution of something as a quality issue creates a fundamental hermeneutical contradiction undergirding social life. On the one hand, quality can be understood as collection of subjective viewpoints. You like some thingsâI like others. De gustibus not est disputandum, as the Latin maxim goes. Personal taste simply cannot be discussed. With such a fragmentation of viewpoints, there can be no collective reasoning about res publica.
On the other hand, the definition of quality can be delegated to an institutional arrangement, so that common criteria, goals, and instruments are made possible. The institutionalization of quality, however, is afflicted with uncertainty (Boltanski 2011: 275). Which definition of quality is at play? Who speaks on behalf of which institutional arrangement? With which consequences?
So if we want to understand the contemporary form and shape of public matters, we should attend to quality as a concept as well as its social and institutional embodiment.
There exists other concepts in society, which also help structure common social realities, which are also more or less institutionalized, and which are more or less contested. In this perspective, academics have analyzed security (Buzan, WĂŚver, and de Wilde 1998), sustainability (Gorz 1980; Latour 2004), equality (Rasmussen 1981), and risk (Beck 1992; Power 2016). Some of these discursive constructions have overlapping or competing relations with quality.
However, we are still lacking an academic analysis of the politics of quality itself. Such analysis should be sensitive to institutionalizations of the concept through metrics and other documentation practices, as well as the socio-political consequences hereof. At the same time, an analysis should pay attention to the uniqueness of quality as a concept. How does quality in particular help structure reality?
The Many Meanings of Quality and One Thing That Keeps Them Together
Given the broad applicability of the concept of quality, it is hardly surprising that quality is one of the richest terms in our civilization, perhaps superseded only by âculture.â The term is used in a variety of meanings, such as: Quality referring to properties of things and human beings. It can refer to a wide range of phenomena, such as physical attributes, artistry of performance, taste, freshness, conformity with norms, durability, user satisfaction, and others; each of which, in turn, embodies multiple dimensions.
Quality can be used in the singular and in the plural (âqualitiesâ). Quality also occurs as a quantified variable, since there can be more or less quality. Quality may refer to both absolute scores on some scale and relative rankings. It may be based on standards or a responsive appreciation of the specificities of the situation that takes into account that quality is relative to human experience (Stake 2004).
Quality can refer to phenomena in a category in itself, parallel to excellence.
Quality can be used in the context of globalization or in the most specific contexts in time and space. It can stand alone or be combined with a number of other terms (quality management, quality indicators, quality assurance).
It may be futile to seek any core meaning inherent in the term. It may be more realistic to think of a number of meanings that may be mobilized with flexibility and in different combinations. The concept would be threatened by fragmentation, however, unless it was used with at least one common denominator. There is one: Quality is positively loaded. Higher quality or more quality is always better.2 Even without further qualification, if your friend describes a new restaurant simply as âquality,â then you know it is good. When negative instances occur, a negative qualifier is mandatory: The other restaurant is âbad quality.â
In the absence of further qualification, quality itself tilts toward the positive. As a consequence, even if ...