ABSTRACT
The pursuit of quality as a distinct theoretical and practical organisational discipline has been a dominant concern of management practitioners and academics since the 1940s yet the need to comprehend, develop and sustain service and product quality has never been greater. Quality, in any context, must be about the achievement of the outcome desired by the customer simply the standardisation of the output, whether product or service. Initial ideas in the quality movement arose from American theorists and practitioners while early commercial applications were adopted by Japanese companies. The economic imperative for quality is essentially quite simple, it is survival for an organisation, industry and the local, national and global economies. The gurus promise that pursuing quality will reduce costs and improve productivity and many of the approaches can lead to those things. Operating without a sharp focus on quality is wasteful of finite resources.
