Review

Prophets at a loss

TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR
C Morgan and S Murgatroyd
Open University Press, 1994

This book is aimed at ‘those coming to total quality management for the first time’ and its purpose is to help ‘readers from the public sector to adopt and adapt TQM to their own working environments’. My initial wary reaction was tempered slightly by this promise of a ‘critical understanding’ of the ‘relevance’ of TQM to the public sector. I read on.

The book is split into two parts. The first is a Cook’s tour through some of TQM’s essentials (with mandatory lists for designing a vision, a team empowerment contract, a value-added audit, and so on). The second follows some TQM tales from four public sector services — health, education, government and social services — many of them from the US.

In the first part, Morgan and Murgatroyd suggest that the crude transfer of the manufacturing slogan ‘right first time’ to public sector services is likely to produce a ‘tissue rejection response’ among staff. Offering a fashionable, though rather unclear, solution they suggest that process rather than product management should be the focus of eliminating variable quality in public sector services. Other sleights of hand are deployed to dispense with possible objections to the application of TQM to the public sector: asking whether there is a market for public services, whether funding and pay should follow ‘performance’, whether the pedestal power of doctors and others high in status pyramids be ‘subverted’, and stating that the customer is not a problematic concept for public services and that the ‘real cost’ of non-quality is being revealed through market testing. They conclude, unsurprisingly, that the public sector is a suitable case for the TQM treatment.

I found the second part of the book, perhaps because it is a series of tales and examples, much more interesting and useful. There are snippets of many experiments being conducted in the four service areas they choose. For example, ways to tackle redundancy of effort in social services, to develop standards in education and to improve the physician-nursing relationship in health care are cited.

The authors eventually arrive at (another) list of ‘core components of TQM’: vision and strategy; policy deployment; measurable goals; quality structure; empowered work teams; data-based decision-making; managerial commitment and communication; rewards and recognition alignment; meeting the needs of primary stakeholders; and investment in training. Which all sounds suspiciously like the reinvention of good management practice.

Good management is about creative swiping — picking out the best ideas for your organisation — and lots of interesting ideas have come out of TQM. But to benefit from those ideas it is not necessary to join the church and denounce all false prophets. The book’s value is that it provides local examples of how public sector managers have used aspects of TQM to further their specific agendas. Had the authors stuck to their interesting tales and provided more opportunities for creative swiping, rather than trying to construct a public sector model of TQM, the book would have better achieved its aim.