Total Quality Management: Industrial Democracy Or Another Form Of Managerial Control?

Abstract

The currently fashionable management strategy. Total Quality Management (TQM), emphases quality assurance and employee involvement in securing continuous improvement in products and the meeting of customer requirements. In reviewing recent literature, the article considers whether TQM enhances industrial democracy or whether it is simply another managerial control strategy. The organisation of work in post-war Japan where TQM originated is briefly examined, and the popular notion of TQM as an example of ‘post-Fordist’ organisation of work based on flexible specialisation is contested. TQM is seen as a change in the organisation of work which is independent of changes in machinery or technical knowledge, and which is based on management's strategic choice.

TQM is located within the current discourses and practices centred on labour flexibility, workplace change and the project of enterprise bargaining which have arisen in the 1980s and 1990s in Australia. The notion of ‘numerical flexibility’ in the context of TQM is achieved through the development of a core workforce of (predominantly male) workers and a contingent workforce of part-time, casual and contract workers.

It is suggested that the adoption of TQM strategies reinforces managerial prerogatives in the workplace, with strategic control over decision making remaining with management. Operation decision making is decentralised to the core workforce at the shop floor, which is disciplined through the existence of the contingent workforce, and also through team pressures. Thus TQM is seen as a sophisticated technique of assuring managerial control, rather than as enhancing industrial democracy.