Schools of Thought in and against Total Quality

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. …