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The Yellow Brick Road: Total Quality Management and the Restructuring of Organizational Culture

School of Social and Professional Studies, University of Humberside, Hull, U.K.

This paper offers a critique of Total Quality Management. It is essentially in three parts: the first traces the rise of TQM through the western experience of Japanese development, the second examines the nature of TQM's promised cultural change and, finally, the very notion of 'quality' is questioned. Explor ing this development is likened — to use a metaphor from the work of Philip Crosby, one of the 'guru's of Total Quality — to a journey down the yellow brick road. As the development of TQM is rich in icons and symbolism, it is argued that it acts both to legitimate current changes in organization through the penetration of the market, and also as a market model of organization based on customer and supplier links. In contrast to the claim of TQM to challenge bureaucracy it argues that, while it might counter some of its dys functions, it can be located within a bureaucratization process.

Organization Studies, Vol. 15, No. 5, 727-751 (1994)
DOI: 10.1177/017084069401500505


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