Towards a Quality Culture Available to Purchase

Total quality management is often presented as a new and coherent philosophy of organization and management which looks holistically at organizations. Yet there would appear to be gaping holes between the necessary and sufficient conditions for TQM which rhetoric serves only to obscure. Concentrates on the culture issue facing organizations and warns against TQM “solutions” which operate at a surface level only within organizations. Highlights the culture trap of management whereby managers develop their own views of organizational reality which may bear no relation to the views held by employees.