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The Quality Movement and Organization Theory edited by Robert E. Cole and W. Richard Scott. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000, 455 pp., $44.95, cloth [ISBN: 0-7619-1976-9].
Readers of this book are likely to come at it from numerous directions. And the reader's starting point is going to have a major influence on the perceived value of the collected works. My perspective is that of one who teaches Operations Management and who has included quality and related topics in my courses for a number of years. In addition, the majority of my research has been cross-functional in nature. Both of these facts are very relevant to this review.
From the perspective of one who has long taught quality as a core concept in introductory courses, this book is somewhat disappointing. For instance, the stated purpose of Part One is to provide "a set of foundational works that provides theoretical and historical background to the quality movement." While the four articles in this section do give the reader a reasonable understanding of the quality movement, readers could be better served getting the same information from the chapter on quality found in most introductory Operations Management textbooks. Perhaps more disappointing is the treatment of quality as a stand-alone phenomenon. Being capable of high quality is generally considered a necessary foundation to pursue other types of organization transformation such as moving to just in time (JIT) production or optimizing an entire supply chain. With the exception of Hamada (Chapter 12), who sees the quality movement morphing into an ecological movement in Japan, none of the authors explicitly examine linkages between quality and other types of organizational transformations. Finally the book suffers from being written mainly by organizational theorists. In fact the reader would be hard pressed to know that there are multiple journals related just to quality issues...