ABSTRACT
Quality has emerged and remained as a dominant concern of management and in management thinking for over 60 years and there continues to be a need to sustain product quality in manufacturing. A new focus began to emerge in the 1980s on quality in services, especially for the post-industrial and information-based economies. While there has been some progress in this regard, it seems that most organisations are still rooted in a manufacturing model of quality and consider achieving service quality to be about process and technique rather than about people and behaviour. Hence true quality of service continues to be elusive for many. For me quality, especially in a service context, should be about the outcome for the customer, not the standardisation of the service output. The initial ideas in the qualitymovement arose fromAmerican theorists and practitioners,
while early commercial applications were predominantly amongst Japanese companies. The need for enhanced quality was perhaps ignored or rejected as unnecessary in theWest where demand was growing faster than supply. Since the mid 1980s, when the success of Japanese companies began to impinge seriously on Western markets, commercial organisations throughout theworld have embraced, at least in part, the theories and practices of the quality movement. In 2016, many national governments continue to pursue quality initiatives, although these are often driven more by cost reduction desires than the genuine pursuit of service improvement. Governments are under increasing pressure to achieve service levels equivalent to those of
private organisations and have sought to modernise and enhance public offerings through the application of quality methods – sometimes in conjunction with private finance, privatisation or the creation of non-Governmental Executive Agencies. European governments continue to engage in ‘Best Practice’ and ‘Best Value’ programmes and active support of the Business Excellence Model as a framework for service quality improvement. This chapter is concerned with ‘why’ quality has achieved this apparent pre-eminence
amongst the concerns of so many managers. It presents three arguments for the pursuit of quality (the economic, the social and the environmental) before considering the specific challenge for service organisations. Finally the chapter considers the problems generated in
organisations by the use of the word ‘quality’ itself. Each of these is pursued through a systemic perspective on management and achievement of quality.
