Total Quality Management: Dead or alive?

Abstract

When Critical Systems Thinking (CST) was articulated in the 1980s, aiming to combine systems thinking with radical politics, there was interest in applying it to im-plement Total Quality Management (TQM) through action research. Total Quality Management (TQM) had emerged as a holistic management philosophy that focused on issues like customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and social impact, mirroring certain aspects of CST. However, due to being perceived as a management fashion, academic interest in TQM peaked around 1993 and then faded, which made CST scholars start looking elsewhere to find ways of experimenting with CST-driven organisational change. However, as argued in this paper, TQM is probably more alive and relevant for CST today than ever before, meaning that there are vast opportunities for systems scholars to push the CST agenda by engaging in TQM research.