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1. Introduction
Total quality management (TQM) has during the past decades evolved to become one of the most widespread management approaches/strategies for improving products, services and processes, to achieve higher organisational competitiveness. The roots of TQM can be tracked back to the first quarter of the 20th century with quality inspection and quality control. Quality gurus – such as Crosby (1979); Deming (1982, 1986); Feigenbaum (1961), Ishikawa (1985); and Juran (1986) – laid the foundation to evolve TQM from different perspectives, but they did not contribute with any definition of TQM, but rather, TQM “building blocks.” For example, Feigenbaum (1961) first defined total quality control (TQC) as:
An effective system for integrating quality development, quality maintenance, and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organisation to enable production and service at the most economical levels that allow for full customer satisfaction (p. 1, 12).
Feigenbaum comments this definition as:
Since this activity is one of the major responsibilities of management, quality control must be classified as a management tool, along with similar tools such as production control and budget control.
While Feigenbaum’s definition of TQC did not define TQM, it indicates where quality management has moved in its evolution since Shewhart’s (1924, 1931) pioneering works on statistical control charts. However, in his 1961 book, Feigenbaum named part one of his book Business Quality Management – a term indicating which direction he at that time wished and expected TQC to move in the future. We know today that he was totally right on that!
The quality gurus named above as well as other researchers and consultants contributed to the same and never ending discussion on how to improve and manage quality to achieve a competitive advantage (Aquilani et al., 2017), but the suggested strategies and methods naturally differed depending on the quality guru’s background, experiences and beliefs. It is important to understand that the same variation can be observed today, when experts suggest change programs under “the TQM label.” Despite these suggested strategies and methods vary depending on the experts’ background, experience and beliefs, it is found that the principles are relatively common or stable when comparing different experts’ understanding and definitions of TQM.
Dahlgaard et al. (1997) stated that TQM has...