Checking Out Service: Evaluating Excellence, HRM and TQM in Retailing

We evaluate a number of the claims made in the debate between the prescriptive and critical literature that surrounds `excellence', with a particular focus on human resource and quality management. The critical literature contains two positions, broadly a traditional control perspective and the other concerned with the structuring of meaning. The empirical basis of the paper is an investigation of an HRM and quality initiative in a leading supermarket company. The initiative embodies many of the prescriptions of the gurus of excellence. We present both qualitative and quantitative data collected from shopfloor and managerial staff. Our findings lend little support to the traditional criticism that, if management objectives are realised, they are achieved through some combination of sham empowerment, work intensification and increased surveillance. Our evidence lends more support to the optimistic view that modern techniques of quality and human resource management can benefit employees. We suggest that the alternative concern with the way meanings are constructed has more plausibility, because the new managerial discourse of quality has affected the attitudes of a significant number of employees towards customer service. However, there was considerable variation in how employees received the programme's message and thus its effects are by no means uniform. Moreover, we encounter an unanticipated and previously unremarked consequence of managerial discourses, that employees use these as resources in their struggles with managers in order to bring managers into line with workforce expectations.