Dreams and Designs on Strategy: A Critical Analysis of TQM and Management Control

Abstract

Any management discourse, such as Total Quality Management (TQM), has power effects that can transform individuals into subjects who secure some sense of their own identity through participating either as managers or employees in the practices it embraces. The central argument of this paper, however, is that despite these power effects, TQM is not nearly as effective or rational in controlling employees as its gurus exhort or its critics fear. These arguments are explored empirically through a case study of a major UK retail bank. In particular we illustrate how power and identity relations can intervene to undermine feedback to employees and prevent the upward flow of information to management necessary to ensure that TQM operates effectively. These dynamics are seen to reflect the cost conscious and short-term profit demands endemic within British industry. Just as these `bottom line' considerations have limited the effectiveness of management innovations in the past, they have also created problems for the TQM programme in our case study here. No doubt this will continue to be the case with future management innovations not least because organisational life is always `messy', given its political character. In the form of both career competition and opportunities for resistance to the totalising demands of TQM this paper provides further evidence of the political obstacles to effective innovation.