Managing Quality

Mihaela L Kelemen

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780761969044, 9780761969037
• eBook ISBN: 9781446232118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

Managing Quality provides a comprehensive review and critical analysis of quality management discourses and techniques by drawing on a number of management disciplines such as operations management, HRM, organizational behaviour, strategy, marketing and organization theory.

The book:

- introduces readers to key concepts and issues in quality management

- provides an overview of both managerial and critical perspectives on quality management

- presents the ?wisdom? of quality management gurus

- documents the way quality is pursued in manufacturing, service and public sector organizations

- compares and contrasts hard and soft technologies of quality management

- critically reviews the rhetoric of TQM and business process re-engineering (BPR)

- examines the consequences of quality on stakeholders

- scrutinizes the language of quality management

- documents the mundane nature of quality managemnt practices through the use of real life case studies

Managing Quality is an up-to-date and student-centered treatment of quality management that will be essential reading for undergraduate students of operations and quality management. It will also be extremely relevant to all MBA students, and useful reading for students of HRM, organization theory and the sociology of organizations.

PART ONE

Theoretical perspectives on quality

Re-defining quality

1

---

This chapter introduces the readers to various theoretical controversies in the quality management literature. It starts by suggesting that there are four managerial perspectives on quality (the product-based approach, the manufacturing-based approach, the value-based approach and the user-based approach) and four critical ones (the transcendental approach, the social constructivist approach, the discursive approach and the slogan approach). Managerial perspectives view quality as a self-contained entity or process that can be planned, managed, controlled with the help of technical and managerial knowledge. Critical perspectives assert that quality is a complex and multifaceted concept which escapes a definitive definition. Quality has multiple, contradictory meanings which arise from processes of intersubjective communication. Hence, quality is a political, cultural and social process rather than a technical, operational issue.

The chapter charts the strengths and weaknesses of each of the above approaches to quality, by placing them in their broader social and cultural context (Reeves and Bednar, 1994). In reviewing such strengths and weaknesses, the chapter asks two questions:

1. For which organizational stakeholders (i.e., manager, employee, shareholder, customer) do they constitute strengths and/or weaknesses?
2. To what extent does each approach to quality account for the interests of all organizational stakeholders?

The concept of quality has been contemplated throughout history and continues to be a subject of great interest today. Remember the story of the Titanic, the unsinkable ship that sank in 1912 as a result of colliding with an iceberg? Titanic was built to be the most technologically advanced, the fastest and most luxurious ship on the highly competitive North Atlantic mail and passenger route. The ship was made out of the finest steel and had a double-hulled bottom and automatic watertight doors that could be closed from the bridge. This, coupled with its elegant features such as deep plush carpeting, a gymnasium, an automatic dishwasher, a squash court and a swimming pool made the Titanic a symbol of excellence. Yet, what was supposed to provide a pleasurable experience ended up in tragedy for so many of the crew and passengers. The reasons may have little to do with the quality of design and manufacturing and more with the quality of the decisions taken by the people in command. Indeed, too much confidence in the Titanic’s technological superiority led the people in command to take the ship through an ice field at top speed instead of slowing down, as was the common practice. The result was disastrous. Therefore, it was not the quality of the technology that failed the Titanic: the quality of decision-making failed her (Bond, 2001).

Remember also the Challenger’s accident? On 28 January 1986 the space shuttle Challenger burst into flames 73 seconds after being launched into space. The loss of the space shuttle was caused by the failure of the joint between the two lower segments of the right solid motor. Subsequent investigation showed that the failure of the pressure seal called the O-ring was due to a faulty design relating to a number of physical and technical factors. Moreover, the people who made the decision to launch Challenger were not aware of the problems concerning the O-rings or of the advice given by the contractor against launching the shuttle at temperatures below 53 degrees Fahrenheit. They also did not take into consideration concerns expressed that it was not safe to launch because of ice on pads. What was supposed to be a marvellous technological achievement ended up destroying not only people’s lives but also NASA’s reputation as a quality-driven business (Bank, 1992).

Quality is by no means a modern invention: quality has always been important to human survival and progress. The quality of the crops, the quality of houses and roads, of medical care were as important to our ancestors as they are to us. What is different, however, is the fact that in the last century or so, quality has become a scientific discipline of its own, safeguarded by a professional elite of managers, designers, engineers and marketers. And as a scientific discipline, it has its own vocabulary, techniques and rules that must be endorsed by those interested in pursuing its cause. Moreover, quality has become an institutional norm central to the effective functioning of the market: a norm that organizations (be they private, public or voluntary) are expected to endorse if they are to gain legitimacy in the eyes of society.

In recent decades, organizations have eagerly embraced the cause of quality in the belief that quality can offer new opportunities for competitive advantage. Critics, however, are quick to point out that organizations’ over-concern with quality usually translates into the bureaucratic implementation of standards, leading to the commodification of organizational relations (i.e., a situation where organizational members and relationships between them are treated as commodities to be sold and bought on the internal market). In contemporary Britain, quality appears to hold a central place in political, economic and social debates: politicians, policy-makers, consumers, managers, trade unions, and eco-activists call upon the imagery of quality in an attempt to give weight to their cause. Such parties allege that they pursue quality for and in the name of the consumer. The consumer has become a Godlike icon before whom markets and politicians alike bow (Gabriel and Lang, 1995). But sometimes this notion of consumer is too abstract and has little to do with the real needs and concerns of the actual consumer.

In western societies, but increasingly so in other societies, individuals are socialized into thinking of themselves and each other as consumers rather than producers. The market is both the common glue that keeps individuals together, for in order to exist they must engage in exchanges; and the differentiator between individuals as they can choose certain exchanges and not others, and thus, assemble a unique bricolage of products and services that may set them apart from the others by conferring them a unique identity.

The literature on quality is full of controversial perspectives and lacks clear conceptualizations. The purpose of this chapter is not merely to support some perspectives, or to criticize others from a particular vantage point but to suggest that different definitions may be appropriate under different circumstances. Furthermore, the chapter urges the reader to abandon the search for a universal definition of quality and accept that quality is an elusive, multifaceted and socially contingent concept.

To guide the reader in a more effective manner, the chapter builds upon and expands Garvin’s (1984) framework concerning approaches to quality. The boundaries between these approaches are rather artificial and various writers may in fact belong to more than one approach. The first four approaches – namely, the product-based approach, the manufacturing-based approach, the value-based approach and the user-based approach – seem to be very popular with organizations and quality management gurus alike. We term them managerial for they view quality as a technical, operational and manageable matter. The latter four approaches – namely, the transcendental approach, the social constructivist approach, the discursive approach and the slogan approach – broaden the analysis of quality: here, quality is seen as a social, cultural and political process which has multiple meanings.

MANAGERIAL PERSPECTIVES ON QUALITY

---

The product-based approach

This managerial approach views quality as a precise and measurable variable. According to Abbott, ‘differences in quality amount to differences in the quantity of some desired ingredient or attribute’ (1955: 126–7). Thus, the better the quality of cocoa in a chocolate cake, the higher the quality of the cake, providing that the attribute in question is considered desirable by all buyers. Product-based definitions first appeared in the economic literature, supplementing the theory of competitive markets. While the theory of competitive markets viewed the principle of price competition as the driving force in an exchange, quality competition drew attention to the fact that buyers and sellers did not engage in exchanges of homogeneous or standardized goods. Therefore, buyers are not only interested in agreeing the right price but are adamant that the good in question provides them with the expected experience (Knight, 1921). If products and services were homogeneous, they would all provide the same experience. It is the difference in quality that makes products and services capable of providing different experiences and in so doing, of meeting the diverse needs of the buyers. With a few exceptions, most economic theories on quality focused exclusively on durability (Levhari and Srinivasan, 1969; Swan, 1970), for increased durability ensured more of the same for longer and this was seen to contribute directly to improved quality.

Strengths and weaknesses of the product-based approach The product-based approach was the first approach to acknowledge the possibility of measuring and controlling the quality of a product by measuring and controlling the quantities of a desired ingredient. Although focused on the ingredients and capabilities of the product, this approach hinted at the role played by the customers and their needs in defining quality. This approach has been relatively popular during the craft manufacturing period but has lost its significance during the mass production era and thereafter. Hence, it is of little relevance to contemporary organizations and remains confined to the drawers of management history.

The manufacturing-based approach

This managerial approach defines quality as the degree to which a specific product conforms to a design or specification (Gilmore, 1974). Crosby (1979), for example, defines quality as conformance to requirements. Process and design variation are seen to be a constant thread to achieving conformance to requirements. While according to some commentators, variation can be totally eliminated (see, for example, Crosby’s ‘zero defects’ philosophy), for others (Deming and Juran), only a certain type of variation is controllable, others are not. Both camps agree, however, that if the design and the production process are stable and reliable, quality is inherent. To achieve consistency in design, companies can employ Taguchi methods of design engineering that assume that any deviation from the centre, no matter how small, increases a product’s ultimate cost, including warranty, liability, lost customer goodwill (for a more detailed discussion of the Taguchi method see Chapters 3 and 4). In the production stage, statistical process control (SPC) enables workers to tell the difference between avoidable errors (due to special causes) and unavoidable ones (due to random causes) and track down the causes of controllable problems (see Chapter 7). Source inspection (or poka-yoke) is another technique that ensures that errors are caught at the outset before they materialize into defects (see Chapter 3). This approach to quality is engineering driven and relies on the application of statistical methods to controlling variation in design, processes and final products. The idea of controlling variation statistically sprang from agricultural research carried out by statistician R.A. Fisher at the beginning of the twentieth century. To speed up the development of crop-growing methods, Fisher perfected scientific short cuts for sifting through mountains of data to spot key cause–effect relationships. Fisher’s work inspired W.A. Shewhart, a physicist at AT&T Bell Laboratories who transformed Fisher methods into a quality control discipline for factories. Such methods of quality control were first implemented on a large scale in Japanese factories after the Second World War and then spread to the rest of the world.

Strengths and weaknesses of the manufacturing-based approach Quality as ‘conformance to specifications’ has numerous advantages for managers and consumers but less so perhaps for employees. Most technical advances in quality are due to standardization and mass production. The very first technical advances in quality were achieved in the US armament industry. The crafts approach that had been dominant in Europe in the nineteenth century did not allow for quantity production, leading major American firms to adopt a version of mass production where the key to quality was conformance to specifications: if parts did not conform to specifications then the whole production system would fail. Given that inspection was too expensive, there was a need to make the processes more predictable and error freer: quality control techniques were thus introduced. While standardization benefited the managers, the shareholders and to a large extent the consumers (through more affordable prices and less defect prone products), workers were reduced to mere extensions of the machinery. The mass production regime led eventually to the deskilling of work and a decreasing role for workers and trade unions in organizing the production process. Moreover, taking all necessary s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and Table
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON QUALITY
• PART 2 PRACTICAL APPROACHES TO QUALITY
• PART 3 CONSEQUENCES OF QUALITY
• PART 4 CASE STUDIES ON QUALITY MANAGEMENT
• Final remarks
• Bibliography
• Index