Uncovering the faultlines in quality management

Abstract The field of quality management (QM) captured the serious attention of industry in the 1980s. Despite this attention, it has ostensibly failed to establish itself as a genuine mainstream management paradigm. Why has this been the case? In this paper, some of the reasons for this predicament are explored. Literature, especially that which analyses QM from a more critical perspective, shows that QM as a field has some major difficulties and problems that remain unresolved. These include: its limited strategic value; credibility problems; deleterious intra-competition between the dominant approaches to implementation; problems owing to the non-falsifiable way in which it is presented; lack of a universally accepted unified theory; difficulties in successfully ‘imitating’ QM implementation; underestimation of the magnitude of change that is needed; morality problems; presence of contradictory dualisms; and, narrow intellectual bases of the field. The impact of these on QM as an internally consistent and coherent field is assessed in this paper.