Where next for the quality movement?

Citation

Douglas, A. (2007), "Where next for the quality movement?", The TQM Magazine, Vol. 19 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/tqmm.2007.10619aaa.001

Where next for the quality movement?

As another conference season draws to a close and quality practitioners and academics from across the globe return to their respective organizations and academic institutions the New Year is a fine time for reflection on where the quality movement is going.

There are now many quality conferences held annually around the world, but with a few notable exceptions (mainly the American Society for Quality Annual Congress) they are not well attended, indeed for some having 150 attendees is considered an achievement. Such conferences are attended by the same people year-in year-out and the quality message tends not to spread beyond the attendees. Again, with some notable exceptions, the attendees tend to be academics and their doctoral students, with very few industrialists or practitioners in attendance and it is these people that the quality movement needs to target because it is they who should be converting theory in to practice. Where are the industrial quality practitioners? Which begs the next questions, for whom are quality conferences put on? And what is their function?

Experience shows that conferences tend to be run by academics for academics. They provide a forum for networking, meeting old friends and for presenting research. They tend not to be about spreading the quality message and making known the latest research to quality practitioners and even worse they do not allow the quality practitioners to inform academics about what they are doing in their organizations and what does and doesn’t transfer well from theory to practice.

As far as the teaching of quality management in universities and colleges in the UK is concerned, specialist undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of study are few with some Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree courses closing due to lack of students or “market forces”. In Business Schools, Quality Management tends to be taught in modules as part of a Business Studies or Business Management Degree or subsumed in an Operations Management module that is part of an MBA course. Why has this situation developed?

Part of the answer must surely be the lack of leaders within the quality movement and particularly those with the big personalities such as Philip Crosby who could hold an audience of academics and industrialists spellbound as he expounded the principles of quality management. Leaders such as Crosby were exceptional marketers for quality management through their speaking, their industrial work and their books and now most are dead or are in their twilight years and the quality movement has yet to find their replacement, and until we do, our message will lack the sizzle required to get the quality message to those who matter.

Alex Douglas