ABSTRACT
Joseph Juran, a naturalised American, died in 2008. He commenced his initial career as an Engineer in 1924, subsequently working as an executive, civil servant, professor, arbitrator, director andmanagement consultant. His strong professional background supported his first work in the quality field, the Quality Control Handbook (1989), which is seen by some as having led to his international pre-eminence in the field of quality (Bendell, 1989: 8). Along with Deming, Juran worked extensively with the Japanese in the 1950s when the focus of his work was with middle and high ranking executives, since he considered that ‘quality control should be conducted as an integral part of management control’ (op. cit.). He received numerous awards for his work including, again like Deming, the ‘Second
Order of the Sacred Treasure’ by the Emperor of Japan in recognition of his contribution to Japanese Quality Control and friendship with America. Juran is described by Bendell (op. cit.) as charismatic, by Bank (1992: 70) as ‘perhaps the
top quality guru’ and by Logothetis (1992: 62) as having made ‘the greatest contribution to the management literature of any quality professional’. Juran has published twelve books which have been translated into thirteen languages. Perhaps the most relevant of these is the work entitled Juran on Planning for Quality (1988). This is seen as the definitive guide to his thinking on company wide quality planning.
