Quality management Available to Purchase

Quality is a word frequently on the lips of top executives, managers, employees and consumers. However, it may be one of the most used and least understood words of the 1980s. Philip Crosby, in his book Quality is Free (McGraw‐Hill, 1979), demonstrates the confusion over the term. He shows how some talk of quality as goodness, or use the word to indicate relative worth such as in the terms good quality or bad quality. The word quality is even now being used to refer to entire value systems such as in the term quality of life, and to new relationships between labour and management as in quality of work life (QWL). Crosby points out that if quality is to be managed in the business setting it must be defined precisely, and suggests the definition conformance to requirements.