ABSTRACT
The present paper is ambitious in scope, and therefore, inevitably, somewhat wanting in detail. The central objective is to explore the potential of various approaches to quality improvement for the world of the personal social services and community care (hereinafter abbreviated to PSS). The approaches under scrutiny can be classified into two main groups, business approaches and professional approaches. The “business approaches” are those which, during the last two decades, have become widely used and widely discussed in private sector manufacturing and services. They comprise ISO 9000/EN 29000, Total Quality Management (TQM), benchmarking and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR).
