The first theorisation of quality: Deutscher Werkbund

Abstract

The Deutscher Werkbund association was born in Munich, Germany, in 1907 with the scope of promoting a new culture of ‘industrial labour’ in which the costs of production, craftsmanship, methods and production time of each product would be carefully studied, in order to produce goods of the highest possible quality, given the materials available and the economic constrictions present. Its main focus, then, was on a standardisation of products, production and quality. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the Werkbund anticipated modern day standards of quality, as specified in the ISO family and the SA 8000, and that it was the first real theorisation of the concept of quality management. A comparison is made between the Deutscher Werkbund principles of quality, as formulated in 1907, and the quality management standards of the ISO and the social accountability standards of the SA 8000 series as formulated in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The many important similarities that emerge from this comparison show that the Deutscher Werkbund was an important historical and cultural antecedent to the ISO 9000 and SA 8000 series.

Keywords:

• history of quality
• Deutscher Werkbund
• ISO family

Notes

Philosophical conceptualisations of quality can be traced as far back as Aristotle who gave a definition of quality that is exemplary for its exhaustiveness. This definition was then adopted by the Scholasticism movement. Included among the Aristotelian qualities are: properties, faculties, affections and geometric forms (exterior). The Aristotelian order of categories locates quality in second place, after substance and before quantity.

An indication of this change is to be seen in the elimination of the word ‘quality’ in ISO 9001:2008 and its substitution with the word ‘conformity’.

Information regarding the founding and early work of the organisation is taken from the official website http://www.iso.org/iso/about/the_iso_story.htm.

In 1909 Dresden furniture manufacturer Karl Schmidt chose the countryside around the town of Hellerau as the new location for his ‘Dresden Handicrafts Workshops’. He wanted to create a ‘garden city’ as the setting for his business and a community of workers to escape from the inhuman living and working conditions in the city. See http://www.hellerau.org/english/hellerau/history/the-garden-city/.

Concurrent engineering is an organisational and managerial approach to production in which all of the tasks related to a product's life cycle are considered together so that user requirements impact directly on product specifications and the product planning develops alongside of the actual manufacturing process (Nevins, 1989).