Information Technology and the Quality Gap

Abstract

During 1990, one of the largest service sector companies in the UK was in the process of implementing major change. Top management believed that total quality management (TQM) was an appropriate vehicle for such change. However, the research suggested that the quality objectives of the organization were contradicted in practice. This contradiction resonated with an apparently entrenched bias in the literature towards objective and realist philosophies of TQM implementation. It was concluded that the inability of TQM theory to handle cultural aspects and employee concerns had been translated into a critical gap between espoused philosophy and implementation techniques. Analyses empirical material by applying semiotics to the work process. Highlights that so‐called “quality methods” distance individuals from their acts of labour. Human resource concerns become subsumed beneath heavily objectified techniques which separate the individual from the software product itself. By reference to the work of writers in the TQM field, demonstrates how a general gap has been created between desire and deeds which allows quality to drain away. For the company under study it was an ironic impasse: it had introduced methods to promote quality which instead acted as barriers to its achievement.

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