1

History of Quality
Giovanna Culot

1.1. What is Quality all About?

We have posed the same question many times entering a new class on
quality management. How can quality be defined? The answers – be it
from undergrads, master students, or executives – tend to converge on a
production-oriented kind of understanding, “conformity” and “specifica-
tion” the words coming up more frequently. Every now and then, some-
one would try out a different answer, bringing up ideas such as “product
performance,” “customer satisfaction,” or even the “way you do your
daily activities.”
Conventional wisdom collocates quality in the field of operations man-
agement and related engineering disciplines. Reality is that there is no
single truth behind the concept. Most certainly, many methods and tech-
niques have been developed in connection with the challenge of manu-
facturing products without defects. It is also true, however, that quality
is an overarching concept which has applications both in the business
environment and in everyday life.
The term “quality” is commonly used to mean a degree of excellence
in a given product or activity. Most of the people would agree with that.
Philosophers have argued that a more precise definition of quality is not
possible: building on discussions initiated by Socrates, Aristotle, Plato,
and other thinkers in Ancient Greece, quality is understood as a universal
value that we learn to recognize only through the experience of being
exposed to a succession of objects characterized by it (Buchanen, 1948;
Piersing, 1974).

1
 In a business setting, such a general understanding is, however, not
sufficient. Where does quality end and non-quality begin? Are there dif-
ferent degrees of quality? If so, is it possible to measure quality? These
are only some of the questions that have been raised in academia
and in industry, and the answers have been very different (Reeves &
Bednar, 1994).
To begin with, quality might refer both to a product (or service) or to
the process that generates it. In terms of product quality, there are mul-
tiple possible dimensions or elements (Garvin, 1984). Some of these
elements refer to the quality of the technical realization of the product
and are usually objective and measurable, such as conformance. Other
elements are instead less objective, as the preferences of the customers
might vary in relation to them: they can be measurable, such as product
performance or durability, or purely qualitative, as in the case of aes-
thetics. This last set of elements might be understood as the degree by
which the product (or its initial prototype) is fit to customer expectations
or the quality of the idea. A similar line of reasoning is also applicable
to services.
In operations management, the most attention has historically been
placed on the quality of technical realization, described as conformance of
a product to a design or specification (Crosby, 1979; Gilmore, 1974), and
the cost of attaining it with respect to the price the customer is willing to
pay (Feigenbaum & Vallin, 1961). Vice versa, economists and marketers
understanding has mainly been focused on the quality of the idea, seen as a
precondition to customer satisfaction. In this respect, the main questions
have been revolving around the characteristics or attributes a product
should have (Abbot, 1955; Leffler, 1982), and their appraisal considering
different individual tastes or preferences (Kuehn & Day, 1962; Maynes,
1976; Brown & Dacin, 1997).
Several efforts have been made over the years to combine these two
perspectives into all-encompassing conceptualizations and practical
approaches. However, even nowadays, it is not unusual to see com-
panies where this dialectic evolves into acrimonious meetings: design-
ers, marketing, and sales executives on one side, production managers
on the other. In fact, the relevance of the quality of the idea and the
quality of technical realization (and the understanding of their underly-
ing elements) varies significantly within each company, depending on
the responsibilities and goals of each function (e.g., product develop-
ment, production, and sales), stage in the product life-cycle, and, if
present, positioning of the different product lines. The definition of

2 Giovanna Culot
quality varies significantly also across companies, even in the same
industry, based on their value proposition. There are many examples
of this. In the piano industry, for instance, Stainway & Sons has built
its reputation as quality leader based on the uniqueness of the sound
and style of each handcrafted product. On the other hand, Yamaha has
also developed a strong reputation for quality emphasizing totally dif-
ferent dimensions more related to reliability and conformance (Garvin,
1984).
The definition of quality shall, however, not be limited to the final
product. Again, different dimensions in terms of process quality have been
investigated over the years. On the one hand, the question has been how
to ensure the final quality of the result (Reeves & Bednar, 1994). On the
other hand, a more comprehensive view has suggested that quality is
related not only of processes efficacy (i.e., producing quality products),
but also to their effectiveness (i.e., cost and time minimization). Process
quality has been investigated by several disciplines, including but not
limited to operations management (e.g., Anderson et al., 1995; Flynn et
al., 1994; Saraph et al., 1989) and organizational behavior (Ivancevich,
Matteson, & Konopaske, 1990).
Finally, in recent years, quality has also been related to sustainability
and the effects (or, in economic jargon, externalities) of a company’s
decisions and activities on a broad set of stakeholders, including the
society, the environment, and future generations. This dimension is
referred to here as quality of impact.
Overall, quality is a multi-faceted concept, whose definition is complex
and fundamentally context-dependent (Reeves & Bednar, 1994). Fig. 1
illustrates how the different meanings of quality explained above unfold
into concentric circles. At the center, product quality in its two dimensions:
quality of the idea (prototype or design) and quality of the technical realization
(conformance). Around it, process quality, in terms of effectiveness (qual-
ity of the result) and efficiency (time/cost minimization), which should be
considered both at firm and supply-chain level. Finally, the outer circle
embraces all previous dimensions of quality and represents the compa-
ny’s and its products’ impact.
Today, we tend to have a comprehensive understanding of quality.
Even though functional (in companies) and disciplinary (in academia)
differences in terms of focus and priorities remain, we are aware that
a one-dimensional view on the topic is not sufficient. As this historical
review will show, however, this has not been the case for most of the
modern history.

History of Quality 3
 Fig. 1:  The Different Meanings of Quality.

1.2. Approaching Quality in History

The history of quality extends for millennia, spanning over different
geographies and socio-political systems. Throughout the evolution of civ-
ilization, many of the methods and tools that constitute the foundations
of the current approach to quality have been developed, such as qual-
ity warranties, standardization, interchangeability, inspections, and laws
for consumer protection. Already in ancient times, trained craftsmen not
only provided clothing and tools, including equipment for armed forces,
but also built roads, bridges, temples, and other masterpieces of design
and construction, some of which endure to this day. Managing for qual-
ity is by no means a product of the modern Western world (Juran, 1995).
Industrialization was, however, a real game-changer as, differently
than in the past, a more fragmented division of labor and the use of
machines made virtually impossible to account the responsibility for the
quality of a product to a specific individual (Weckenmann, Akkasoglu, &
Wener, 2015). New solutions needed to be found, and this is where, experts

4 Giovanna Culot
believe, quality management as a discipline was born. This historical
review also starts from here.
Since then, many progresses have been made, and quality management
practices become mainstream. Many prominent thinkers have punctuated
this evolution; however, a review of their publications would not give a
realistic view of how quality has been developing over the years. It is
not about “inventions.” It is rather about how and when these inventions
have been adopted consistently with the challenges faced by companies,
policy-makers, and individuals at any given time. On this basis, in the fol-
lowing paragraphs the history of quality is presented taking into account
the changing context of international competition, customer expecta-
tions and technical opportunities. Since the various approaches to quality
have been implemented in a different timeframe according to country- or
industry-specific situations, the five phases described below do not pre-
sent a linear evolution, but rather a chronological progression in which
contrasting approaches, often in response to different challenges, might
have occurred at the same time.

1.3. Quality at Time of the Industrial

Revolution(s): Quality Inspection
In the age of craft production, there was a comprehensive understanding
of the meaning of quality. Artisans, and merchants for their part, had strong
ties to their local communities and often a personal knowledge of their
customers. Laws would enforce the fulfillment of basic demands concern-
ing society, whereas at least since the Middle Age, guilds promoted stand-
ards to ensure product quality punishing any deviation considered as
fraud. Honor and personal accountability would complement the typical
approach of craftsmen to quality. As the precondition for economic trade
to be profitable is to meet customers’ expectations and do it effectively
in terms of time and cost, they also acknowledged that quality needed
to be pursued at all levels, from product design to realization and deliv-
ery. Both aspects of product quality (the idea and its technical realization)
were important, even though the latter was not strictly understood as
conformance: details would make a product unique.
This picture changed dramatically with the advent of mechaniza-
tion. First, between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth century, steam power and the development of machine
tools impacted a first cluster of industries, mostly raw materials and

History of Quality 5
semi-finished products, including textiles and iron making. One cen-
tury later, in what is commonly known as Second Industrial Revolution
or Mass Production, electrification was introduced to a broader range of
industries. New technological opportunities gave rise to a series of mana-
gerial innovations, first and foremost, the implementation of the moving
assembly line by Henry Ford in 1913 and the conceptualization of scientific
management by Frederick W. Taylor (1911).
On the demand side, a new class of industrial workers was born. After
the many drawbacks in terms of working conditions and living standards
brought about by the First Industrial Revolution, the paradigm changed
significantly after the 1910s as workers were now ensured decent-enough
wages to make them become potential customers (De Grazia, 2005). In
order to serve this increasing customer base better than the competition,
companies needed to provide goods fast, in volume, and at a low price.
In this scenario, the meaning of quality was entirely related to the prod-
uct technical realization, now decoupled from the quality of the idea. As an
effort to reduce costs, and thus the price to the customer, companies pur-
sued a low product variety: customer needs were hardly considered and
product properties were defined by the will of the organizations (Weck-
enmann et al., 2015). The words of Henry Ford are famous in this respect:
“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as
it is black.”
The game was thus all played in production and related operations.
Here, while the division of labor was not a new concept, mechanization
and especially the moving assembly line had led to an increasing speciali-
zation of the workers, now focused on single repetitive tasks. Workers in
such settings failed to see the contribution of their activities to the quality
of the final product, and it was no longer possible for managers to trace
individual accountability.
In order to ensure the quality of products and avoid complaints from
customers, companies started performing activities of quality inspection
(QI). Again, QI is not a new concept, being part of every kind of organ-
ized production from Ancient China’s handicraft industry and mediaeval
guilds to quality acceptance inspections of raw materials and semi-fin-
ished products at the time of the First Industrial Revolution (Nassimbeni,
Sartor, & Orzes, 2014). However, as production volumes were growing to
unprecedented levels, traditional QI was not up to speed with increasing
labor productivity. Often defective products were delivered to custom-
ers and replaced with new ones only after complaints. A new systematic
approach to QI was needed in order to reduce cost and complexity. Many
companies established thus a separate inspection department: following

6 Giovanna Culot
Taylor’s (1911) recommendations, designated employees would check
the quality of the products at the end of the production process in order
to verify their compliance with specifications. Should any defect be
observed, then the defective component would have been replaced. This
was possible thanks to the interchangeability of parts, a practice piloted
in Europe since the first years of the nineteenth century and becoming
mainstream in the era of mass production: large volumes of individual
parts were manufactured and tested within tolerance, ready to be assem-
bled (and re-assembled).
Although QI still plays an important role in current quality practices,
its stand-alone application led to several issues. Since the goal was to pre-
vent defective products from leaving the factory, but not to decrease the
defect-rate in producing them, there was usually no feedback loop to pro-
duction managers or workers about failures, and no analysis was carried
out about their root causes. Moreover, the repair or replacement of defec-
tive components at the end of the process resulted in high waste rates and
significant losses of efficiency as many tasks in production needed to be
first done, and then redone. In many cases, “hidden factories” operated to
correct the output of the obvious factory (Womack, Jones, & Ross, 1991).
As competition was becoming fiercer, a change of pace was needed to
ensure that the quality of the final product was met at a reasonable cost.

1.4. From Inspection to Control: Quality After

World War II
The years following World War II were marked by an unprecedented
speed of economic recovery, combined with an impressive strength
and scale of international cooperation. This particularly high and sus-
tained growth was experienced in several countries, including the United
States, Western Europe, and East Asia, so much that expressions like
“boom,” “miracle,” and “Golden Age” are often used to describe this
period. Both demand and productivity were steadily increasing. In the
United States, demographic growth and the rise of the middle class, cou-
pled with easier access to consumer credit, gave rise to the phenomenon
of “mass consumption” (Ciment, 2007). As a consequence of the Marshall
Plan, US companies had secured access to European markets, where again
demand was growing. Productivity was benefitting from the commercial
adoption of a backlog of technological innovations developed between
the two World Wars, including some automation technologies, and the
overall infrastructural development.

History of Quality 7
 In this context, the competitive levers were related to how cheap and
how fast products could reach yet unserved consumers. Quality was still
perceived as a residual dimension in the product, mainly related to its
technical realization.
The hitherto dominant approach of QI presented several draw-
backs in terms of effectiveness (problems were addressed only
after they occurred) and cost (products were repaired at the
end of the process, generating scraps and loss of efficiency).
These drawbacks were also clear in the eyes of Walter Shewhart as in
the 1920s, fresh from a Doctorate in Physics, he joined Western Electric
to assist their engineers in improving the conformance rate of the hard-
ware produced for Bell Telephone. His solution, statistical process control
(SPC), was to consider not only the final product conformance, but also
how variations in the production process affected the quality of the result.
In fact, building on mathematical and statistical theories, he concluded
that (Shewhart, 1931):

The object of industry is to set up economic ways of satisfying

human wants and in so doing to reduce everything possible
to routines requiring a minimum amount of human effort.
Through the use of the scientific method, extended to take
account of modern statistical concepts, it has been found pos-
sible to set up limits within which the results of routine efforts
must lie if they are to be economical. Deviations in the results
of a routine process outside such limits indicate that the rou-
tine has broken down and will no longer be economical until
the cause of trouble is removed.

In practice, the approach involved the implementation of control charts

in order to detect any variation in the production process affecting prod-
uct conformance. Samples were taken at various stages of the process and
the quality variable of interest plotted on a chart. The pattern of the data
points was analyzed with respect to the in-control mean of the parameter,
considering an interval of three standard deviations from it, with the aim
of isolating variations assignable to a specific cause, as opposed to the
ones which are naturally part of a process. Compliance of all products
was statistically inferred from the sample.
At the outbreak of World War II, SPC was adopted by the United
States for military equipment manufacturing, but spread to the industry
only in the late 1940s. Starting from here, a variety of methodologies have
been developed over the years under the umbrella of quality control (QC),

8 Giovanna Culot
including the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, a four-step management method
made popular by W. Edwards Deming following his collaboration with
Shewhart (Deming, 2000), or the application of the Pareto principle (also
known as the 80/20 rule) in a business context as suggested by Joseph M.
Juran. At the same time, statistical design of experiments was introduced in
the industry to facilitate the efficient identification and adjustment of input
parameters.
Even though QC represented a major step – change with respect to
QI in terms of cost and effectiveness (problems could be detected before
the final product was made), it still had significant limitations due to its
reactive and technically driven nature (the problem needed first to be
detected, then corrective actions were developed). Some American qual-
ity experts, Deming and Juran in the first place, already in the early 1950s
started working on possible solutions. However, in a climate of overall
economic prosperity, QC seemed sufficient for the business community
not to be worried about the “just enough” level of quality required to
serve an increasing consumer base.

1.5. The 1960s: Different Markets and

Different Approaches
Overall, the rapid economic expansion of the early post-war years largely
reflected a process of “catch-up growth,” that is, reconstruction, industry
reconversion, and war-time technology deployment (Eichengreen, 2006).
Once these early opportunities were exhausted, new avenues in terms of
innovation and efficiency needed to be pursued.
In the 1960s, in the United States, the quest for growth had soon
become an obsession because of a climate of rising international tension
due to the Cold War (Ciment, 2007). However, quality was not seen a
mean to fuel this growth. As far as the domestic market is concerned, for
many consumer products, for example, in the rapid developing high-tech
electronics sector, demand was still exceeding supply. Companies were
operating under limited competitive pressures, as pre-existing corpora-
tions were merging into larger, more influential conglomerates. The situ-
ation was similar also in Western European countries, as they followed
the American productivity lead by emulating its technology and business
organization. No major improvement in quality was needed to win the
consumer’s preference.
In this timeframe, in the West the main innovations in terms of qual-
ity came from the defense sector as mainstream operationalization of

History of Quality 9
wartime practices, in particular those related to quality assurance (QA).
The impact was essentially in business-to-administration and business-
to-business, with initially just a limited impact in the business-to-con-
sumer segment.
First experiments in terms of QA were made during World War II in
the United States, as the Navy surveyed its most reliable manufactur-
ers to compile a best-practice list, and in Britain, where the Ministry of
Defense decided to implement a set of standards for the management of
procedures and inspect their suppliers for adherence. In both cases, the
underlying assumption was that technical analyses were not sufficient
to prevent defects, but organizational practices needed to be called into
question. Standards and procedures were identified as the solution for a
preventive approach to quality. Government procurement requirements
were established first in defense, then in aerospace, energy, and teleph-
ony, this in turn contributed to the spread of QA along the respective sup-
ply chains. By the end of the 1960s, most large US corporations had a QA
function in place (Weckenmann et al., 2015).
In practice, QA involved two different steps: first, management stand-
ards ensuring product and process outcomes (i.e., quality management
system) were defined, second, inspections (i.e., audits) were performed.
Initially, audits were carried out by company experts within the organi-
zation (first-party audit). Later during the 1970s, in front of increasing
product complexity, QA was extended to suppliers (external QA) in order
to establish basic requirements to be used as the basis for contractual
agreements.
As a side effect of external QA, innovative methodologies for preven-
tive analysis developed in a military context spread also in the private
sector, such as in the case of the Failure mode and effect analysis, the Fault
Tree Analysis, and the Event Tree Analysis.
QA was complementing QC and QI practices in an overall approach
that was more cost-effective. However, besides the time and resources
absorbed in the auditing process, the scope of the meaning of quality was
still limited to a product technical realization, thus the process was tackled
only insofar it contributed to ensuring the final quality result. This was
not an issue in the regulated markets where QA originated, nor in sub-
contracting, as technical specifications were defined upfront by the client.
It was also not an issue in the growing, essentially domestic consumer
market of the 1960s.
In the 1970s, the situation changed dramatically. In an economic con-
text severely hit by the oil crisis and the fall of the Bretton Woods system,
the US companies were exponentially losing out market share to Japanese

10 Giovanna Culot
competitors, first in motor vehicles, later also in household appliances
and electronics. As a matter of fact, Japanese products were more reliable,
cheaper, and had better performances than the ones manufactured by the
US-based companies, and thus were preferred by the American consum-
ers. The different path to quality taken by Japan since the end of the 1950s,
total quality control (TQC), was paying back.
At the outbreak of World Word II, most of Japanese capital, best man-
agers, engineers, and materials were employed to sustain the country’s
imperial ambitions. Only residual resources were left to the consumer
exports, building the reputation of Japan as a low-quality and low-cost
producer (Juran, 1993). After the end of the conflict, with industrial pro-
duction dropping a little over 10% of the pre-war standard, there was
increasing awareness among the Japanese political and business lead-
ership that a step-change was needed in order to regain a meaningful
position on the international chessboard. The United States was also sup-
porting an early stabilization of the Japanese economy, seen as a precon-
dition for preventing future remilitarization. As part of this effort, one of
the leading American quality experts back then, Deming, was summoned
in the 1950s in Japan to lecture on QC. While he was in the country, he
was also contacted by the newly established Japanese Union of Scien-
tists and Engineers (JUSE) to talk directly to local business leaders. Four
years later, the JUSE contacted Juran for the same purpose. Both thinkers
discussed not only the state-of-the-art of QC as it stood in the 1950s, but
starting from the limitations they acknowledged in the approach to qual-
ity back then, also their innovative ideas on management and organiza-
tion. Ideas that had largely gone unheard in the United States as they
were challenging the role of quality within the organization as a support
function. In Juran’s (1993) own words:

What I told the Japanese was what I had been telling audi-
ences in the United States for years … I suggested the Japanese
to find ways to institutionalize programs within their compa-
nies that would yield continuous quality improvement. That is
exactly what they did.

These seminars jump-started an innovative approach to quality in

Japan sustained by the role of the JUSE in involving foreign experts,
developing local solutions and disseminating best practices within the
business community. A fundamental step in this respect was the estab-
lishment in 1951 of the Deming Prize to reward companies for quality
improvements.

History of Quality 11
 The JUSE-led quality movement got a label as well as further inspira-
tion from the work of another American, Armand V. Feigenbaum, who in
1961 coined the term TQC to describe the systematic integration of qual-
ity development, quality maintenance, and quality improvement efforts
of the various groups in an organization (beyond production) in order to
pursue customer satisfaction.
Besides the influence of American experts, many Japanese thinkers
played a prominent role in shaping the Japanese TQC foundations, leav-
ing the mark also on the West later in the 1980s and 1990s. This is the case
of Kaoru Ishikawa (1985), credited to be the father of the fishbone cause
and effect diagram and the seven basic tools of quality management (Q7)
as well as evangelist of the QC circles, Genichi Taguchi, famous for his
loss function and the off-line QC approach (Taguchi, Chowdury, & Wu,
2005), and Shingeo Shingo (1986), leading expert on the Toyota Production
System and theorist of the zero QC and the poka yoke system.
Overall, the Japanese approach was revolutionary in that it radically
extended the meaning of quality. As far as the product is concerned, while
conformance was still important (or even more important, as zero defects
was the target), the quality of the idea became more relevant: defect-free
products could still remain unsold, unless they created value for the cus-
tomers at a price they were willing to pay. To this end, process quality was
the key: all possible performance dimensions were now in scope for qual-
ity, including cost and time minimization.
In terms of impact on the organization, quality was not managed
exclusively by a department or a function. It became a mindset (forma
mentis) and a way of doing things (modus operandi) across the organiza-
tion, involving all functions (production, marketing, sales, etc.) at all lev-
els (from chief executive officers, CEOs, to line workers). No final target
was set, but continuous improvements programs were setting the pace.
In a nutshell, following Ishikawa’s (1985) own definition, TQC is

to develop, design, produce and service a quality product

that is most economical, most useful and always satisfac-
tory for the consumer. To meet this goal, everyone in the
company must participate in and promote quality control,
including top executives, all division within the company
and all employees.

The consequences of the different route to quality taken in the United

States (and in Europe) compared to Japan came to light in the 1970s.
Whereas American companies had not invested in upgrading their

12 Giovanna Culot
approaches, Japanese firms, eager to reverse the opinion of them being
shoddy goods producers, entered the US market with a value proposition
strongly centered on quality.
This caught US executives completely off-guard. All other possible
explanations were given to account for the Japanese success, for exam-
ple, dumping, low wages, access to preferential financing, exploitation
of suppliers, and improper governmental support. Whereas some of
these were relevant, yet quality was hardly mentioned. On the one hand,
an objective evaluation was hindered by a strong bias against Japan,
considered a second-tier producer. On the other hand, quality was over-
all not considered a competitive variable as, even in academia, it was
perceived as a purely technical topic. American CEOs were lacking the
instruments on their dashboard in terms of customer satisfaction, com-
petitive quality, and performance analysis to fully grasp the issue. A
good example is Xerox (Juran, 1993). In the 1970s, their machines mal-
functioned or broke down regularly. Executives, aware of this situation,
created a top-notch service team to fix the machines. However, as they
did not have tools to measure customer satisfaction, they did not realize
that their clients did not want timely repairs, but machines that did not
break down in the first place. This situation set the stage for the entry of
Japanese competition.
Overall, as noted by Robert Cole (1999):

[…] it is hard to exaggerate the impact of the Japanese quality

challenge upon American management. The Americans were
truly blindsided by the strong Japanese attack on their prevail-
ing understanding of competitive activity. Whole industries,
like color TVs, were lost before U.S. managers even compre-
hended the major factors contributing to these outcomes. At
the very beginning they simply denied quality as a competi-
tive issue and denied the possibility that the Japanese had
bested them in those dimensions of quality that mattered most
to consumers. [...] Only after managers recognized the quality
gap as a major competitive factor, could they take action to
address this deficit. […] Only after they stopped blaming their
own employees for the problem could they begin to address
their own responsibilities.

Only in the 1980s, it became clear to the US companies that, if they

wanted to stay competitive in the market, their approach to quality had
to change.

History of Quality 13
1.6. The Development of the Western Quality
Movement Since the Early 1980s
The Reagan Era was starting off with the goal of reaffirming American
superiority in terms of international relations, by rolling back the influ-
ence of the Soviet Union, and economic growth, requalifying the United
States as leading high-quality producer against the Japanese stronghold
and the emerging export-oriented Four Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Sin-
gapore, South Korea, and Taiwan). The ongoing question was, echoing a
1980 NBC broadcast that made history, “If Japan Can … Why Can’t We?”
Teams of engineers and researchers were sent to Japan to understand
what was happening. They came back with a new way of approaching
quality (TQC) and production in general (the Toyota Production System).
As quality was making the front page in the news, the American busi-
ness community was (re)discovering the work of a number of thinkers
(the so-called “quality gurus”) who influenced the Japanese evolution,
such as the Americans Deming, Juran, Feigenbaum, and Crosby, but also
Japanese experts like Ishikawa and Imai. In front of the growing excite-
ment, many consulting companies were also entering the debate, each
promoting their own “unique” approach (Brown, 2013). Similar trends
were also present in Europe and Australia.
Besides individual differences, the various models and principles
emerging in this phase are collectively known as total quality management
(TQM). Overall, America was rebranding the Japanese TQC, which inci-
dentally was renamed TQM at the beginning of the 1990s by the JUSE to
show consistency with the increasingly popular Western label.
As the popularity of TQM was growing, however, inflated expectations
were often matched with over-simplistic practical responses. Since the
early 1980s several companies had adopted analytical and visualization
tools or some of the new organizational solutions (e.g., quality circles),
not embracing the profound organizational and cultural changes needed
(Dale & Lascelles, 2007). Responsibility for quality was usually delegated
to middle management and CEOs, who would have the levers to inter-
vene more radically, were not directly involved. Moreover, some cultural
and context-related elements of the Japanese approach could hardly be
replicated in a different context. Against this scenario, there was the need
to engage business leaders in defining a sustainable “American way.”
An important step in this direction was taken with the establishment
in 1987 of the Malcom Baldrige National Quality Award, an initiative of
the US Congress managed by the National Institute of Standards and

14 Giovanna Culot
Technology. Following the example of the Deming Prize in Japan, compa-
nies were evaluated not only on the results, but also on how they managed
quality. Seven dimensions were used: leadership, information and analy-
sis, strategic quality planning, human resources utilization, quality assur-
ance of products and services, quality results, and customer satisfaction.
The goal was relevant and ambitious. In the words of the late Secretary of
Commerce Baldrige (reported in Steeples, 1992, p. 9):

We have to encourage American executives to get out of their

boardrooms and onto the factory floor to learn how they prod-
ucts are made and how they can be made better.

For this purpose, the award established a national framework for TQM
and motivated organizations to find their own solutions around it. In
particular, it succeeded in stimulating companies to attain excellence for
the pride of achievement; recognizing outstanding companies to provide
examples to others; establishing guidelines that business, governmental,
and other organizations could use to evaluate and improve their own
quality efforts; providing information from winning companies on how
to manage for superior quality (Congress of the United States of America,
1987). Preparing to submit a Baldrige application was no simple task, as
it required large investment of money and time; however, the number of
filings showed an exponential increase in the early 1990s. Its philosophy
and practices were adopted by many more companies, as firms were also
using the Baldrige framework for self-assessment without presenting an
application for the award.
Overall, by the end of the 1990s, the United States have shown the world
their ability to recover lost ground by leveraging on a new approach to
quality. Looking at Europe in the same timeframe, the evolution of quality
was relatively uneven. The concepts of TQM had gained significant popu-
larity here too and in 1992, on the heels of the Baldrige Award, 14 leading
companies (who had previously established the European Foundation for
Quality Management) introduced the European Quality Award (Conti,
2008). However, whereas large companies were increasingly embracing
this new vision of quality, many small and medium enterprises (SMEs)
were getting to know a completely different, in many respects outdated
version of quality and became more and more dissatisfied with it (Brown,
2013).
In fact, in 1987, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
had published the first version of the ISO 9000 family of standards and
many firms, especially in Europe due to the strong calls for accreditation

History of Quality 15
by the Union, were founding themselves in a situation of apparent con-
tradiction. On the one hand, the buzz around TQM was creating a hype
around the benefits of quality, on the other, the ISO version of quality was
limited in its scope (conformance of the technical realization) and levers
(aligning procedures rather than managing processes).
By definition, a standard does not “invent” anything new. It formalizes
shared know-how and best practices into guidelines and requirements in
a specific field. The field, in the case of the ISO 9000 standards, was not
TQM but external QA as it had shaped over the previous 20 years starting
from government procurement agencies and related business sectors (e.g.,
defense, energy, etc.). Here the issue was neither to fight back Japanese
players (national interest and high-entry barriers in terms of technological
expertise made these industries not an easy target) nor to understand cus-
tomer expectations in terms of product quality (which were formalized in
technical specifications), but to ensure a smooth supplier development in
terms of quality requirements. In the 1970s, government procurement stand-
ards had provided a first answer to the issue. However, as products were
becoming more complex and the number of specialized subcontractors was
growing, the cost of managing these standards had grown exponentially:
each vendor/procurement agency had to perform periodic inspections on
their several suppliers, conversely each supplier needed to prove compli-
ant to as many standards as the number of customers/contracts. With the
aim of making the whole process more cost-effective, several industry-spe-
cific standards (defense, nuclear plants, electronic components, etc.) had
been developed. Furthermore, in response to the request made by the Brit-
ish Ministry of Defense, the British Standard Institution published in 1979,
the first management system quality standard applicable across industries,
the BS5750. The broad success it obtained right from the outset proved that
a standardized approach to quality in supplier relationships was needed
and paved the way for the formulation in 1987 of the ISO 9000 standards.
The focus on conformance of the first edition was in line with its origi-
nal background in defense. Since then, the ISO has worked on several
revisions (in 1994, 2000, 2008, and 2015) to ensure relevance and appli-
cability; however, there was no shift in the underlying assumption about
the meaning of quality until 2000, when a broader understanding (more
in line with TQM) was finally embraced.
The ISO 9000 standards have been extremely important in institution-
alizing the role of quality in the customer–supplier relationship and in
disseminating some principles of quality management to a large number
of companies, including SMEs. However, especially in their early days, as
certification was used to enter a particular market, tender for government

16 Giovanna Culot
contracts or serve large organizations, many companies developed a “cer-
tificate on the wall syndrome” not backed up with actual result improve-
ments (Brown, 2013). This, in turn, led to negative publicity around the
concept of quality itself calling for a deep reorientation of expectations
and approaches in the following decade.

1.7. Quality at the Turn of the Millennium:

A Polarization of Perspectives
The most important legacy of the 1990s in terms of quality management is
the lessons learnt from when it failed: once quality goes beyond a purely
technical domain (as in QI or QC), there is no universal recipe for success.
At the turn of the millennium, many believed that quality was a “fallen
star” (Dale, Zairi, Van der Wiele, & Williams, 2000). Alongside many suc-
cessful companies having adopted TQM models/ISO 9000 standards, a
significant number of managers were increasingly disappointed by the
returns of the time and resources invested to implement them. The lack of
success was probably not due to major flaws in the concept, but rather to
the way it had been introduced and used by organizations: ISO 9000 as if
a certificate alone could change the way a company was operating, TQM
as some tools and practices with a one-off application. The effects on the
overall reputation of quality were magnified as Japan, the champion of
the quality-driven approach to business, found itself in the midst of a
severe economic recession after the burst of the 1989 bubble. The whole
Japanese Economic Miracle was now reinterpreted by revisionists critics,
who were suggesting that a number of management myths, including
quality, have been created around the country (Crawford, 1998).
Against a decreasing popularity of the concept, many consulting compa-
nies moved away from quality-related services, or rebranded them under
new names. The same CEOs that had been bandying around a “quality
strategy” were now afraid to use the term as an exhausted fad. Even quality
awards progressively stripped out references to quality, becoming “business
excellence models,” first in Europe (1999), then in the United States (2010).
Despite the disappointment of many scholars and experts of the qual-
ity movement, this change in terminology reflected the fact that the more
the scope of quality widens, the less it can be understood in isolation. In
a company, it is part of its way of doing business, across functions, pro-
cesses, and hierarchical levels. From a conceptual point of view, its devel-
opment shows significant interdependencies with advances in many
other managerial disciplines or, more broadly, social sciences, so much

History of Quality 17
that drawing a line between which concept/methodology is quality and
which one is not seems arbitrary.
So, what is quality all about? Since the late 1990s the answers to this ques-
tion, and thus the evolution of quality management, have been polarizing.
On the one hand, in front of the widespread criticism of more overarch-
ing models, “classic” statistics-based quality has been reborn under the “Six
Sigma” name, a methodology combining the basics of QC with continuous
improvement practices. Espoused by Motorola in the 1980s, it became popu-
lar only 20 years later after General Electric’s adoption. Six Sigma promotes
a down-to-earth approach to quality: employees are trained on the method-
ology at different proficiency levels (or “belts”), teams of such employees are
assigned well-defined projects having an impact on the organization’s bot-
tom line, Deming-like tools and approach to problem-solving are applied.
While Six Sigma took quality back to its operations management engi-
neering roots, the recent history of quality has seen also the opposite
trend, with thinkers and professionals of various backgrounds involved
in the debate. The increasing identification of quality as “business excel-
lence” brings into the picture all kind of managerial disciplines, including
organizational design, strategy, finance, and marketing.
Moreover, the fields of application of quality management have further
widened over the past 20 years. Quality has grown in importance in the
service sector as a consequence of increasing competition and following
modernization. The topic has been treated especially from a marketing
point of view in terms of methodologies to identify gaps between cus-
tomer expectations and service delivery, for example, the development
of the SERVQUAL tool (Parasuraman, Zeithami, & Berry, 1988), and of
practices of customer relationship management. More recently, quality
has become a topic also for public administration as a consequence of
calls for a more efficient use of public resources.
Finally, over the past 20 years the meaning of quality had shifted another
time to encompass also the impact dimension. By the early 2000s, several
corporate scandals and concerns over globalization gave a new start to
corporate social responsibility (CSR) and related concepts after the dis-
cussion was kick-started in the 1970s (Friedman, 1970). CSR, which again
is at the cross-road of many disciplines, seems a natural and progressive
extension of quality in its broader sense, and is increasingly part of a qual-
ity practitioner’s competences (e.g., by managing standards such as the
SA 8000 for social accountability in the workplace, the ISO 14000 family
of standards for environmental management) (Orzes et al., 2018; Orzes,
Jia, Sartor, & Nassimbeni, 2017; Sartor, Orzes, Di Mauro, Ebrahimpour, &
Nassimbeni, 2016; Sartor, Orzes, Touboulic, Culot, & Nassimbeni, 2019).

18 Giovanna Culot
1.8. Summary and Outlook
The history of quality in the past 200 years has been characterized by
“long periods of relative stability punctuated by short periods of turbu-
lent change” (Juran, 1995), usually determined by market dynamics (e.g.,
competition, customer expectations, etc.) or the advent of new technol-
ogy. Many of these changes are essentially context-specific with respect to
the country or the industry (but even to the firm itself).
Overall, besides the many differences in when (and how) any new
phase of quality manifested in practice, the evolution has been character-
ized by the shift from a narrow understanding of the meaning of qual-
ity (compliance of the technical realization) to a broader one, which sees
quality as mind-set and modus operandi to reach the company’s goals in
terms of profitability and sustainability. This in turn has led to the devel-
opment of a preventive (rather than reactive) and dynamic (rather than
one-off) approach to quality, involving no longer just the quality depart-
ment, but systemically the whole company and its partners.
The next phase of quality is on the horizon. The second largest econ-
omy in the world, China, has quality improvements high on the agenda
of its industrial policies (State Council of China, 2015). Meanwhile, a
new wave of technological innovation is shaping the economy and the
society (the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution). The practical impli-
cations for quality are yet to be seen, but there is no doubt they will
be substantial.

References
Abbott, L. (1955). Quality and competition. New York, NY: Columbia Univer-
sity Press.
Anderson, J.C., Rungtusanatham, M., Schroeder, R.G. & Devaraj, S. (1995).
A path analytic model of a theory of quality management underlying the
Deming management method. Preliminary empirical findings. Decision
Sciences. 26(5), 637–58.
Brown, A. (2013). Quality: Where have we come from and what can we
expect? The TQM Journal, 25(6), 585–596.
Brown, T. J., & Dacin, P. A. (1997). The company and the product: Corporate asso-
ciations and consumer product responses. Journal of Marketing, 61(1), 68–84.
Buchanen, S. (1948). The portable Plato. New York, NY: The Viking Press.
Ciment, J. (2007). Postwar America: An Encyclopedia of social, political, cultural,
and economic history. New York, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
Cole, R. E. (1999). Managing quality fads. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

History of Quality 19
Congress of the United States of America (1987). The Malcom Baldrige National
Quality Improvement Act. Retrieved from https://www.nist.gov/sites/
default/files/documents/2017/05/09/Improvement_Act.pdf
Conti, T. (2007). A history and review of the European Quality Award Model.
The TQM Journal, 19(2), 112–128.
Crawford, R. J. (1998, January–February). Reinterpreting the Japanese economic
miracle. Harvard Business Review, 76(1), 179–184.
Crosby, P. B. (1979). Quality is free. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Dale, B. G., & Lascelles, D. M. (2007). Levels of TQM adoption. In B. G. Dale
(Ed.), Managing quality (5th ed.) (pp. 111–126). Oxford: Blackwell.
Dale, B. G., Zairi, M., Van der Wiele, A., & Williams, A. R. T. (2000). Quality is
dead in Europe – Long live excellence – True or false? Measuring Business
Excellence, 4(3), 4–10.
Deming, W. E. (1982). Out of the crisis. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Center for Advanced Educational Services.
Eichengreen, B. (2006). The European economy since 1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Feigenbaum, A. V., & Vallin, A. (1961). Total quality control. New York, NY:
McGraw-Hill.
Flynn, B.B., Schroeder, G.G. & Sakakibara, S. (1994). A framework for quality
management research and an associated measurement instrument. Journal
of Operations Management. 11(4), 339–66
Friedman, M. (1970). The social responsibility of business is to increase its
profits. The New York Time Magazine, September 13. p. 17.
Garvin, D. A. (1984, October). What does ‘product quality’ really mean? MIT
Sloan Management Review, 26, 25–45.
Gilmore, H. L. (1974, June). Product conformance cost. Quality Progress, 7(6),
16–19.
Ishikawa, K. (1985). What is total quality control? The Japanese way. Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Ivancevich, J. M., Matteson, M. T., & Konopaske, R. (1990). Organizational
behavior and management (9th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Juran, J. M. (1993). What Japan taught us about quality. The Washington Post,
August 15. p. H6 or link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/
business/1993/08/15/what-japan-taught-us-about-quality/271f2822-
b70d-4491-b942-4954caa710f8/?utm_term=.2c3196cc2ff3
Juran, J. M. (1995). A history of managing for quality. The evolution, trends and
future directions of managing for quality. Milwaukee, WI: ASQC Quality
Press.
Kuehn A. A., & Day, R. L. (1962, November–December). Strategy of product
quality. Harvard Business Review, 40(6), 100–110.
Leffler, K. B. (1982). Ambiguous changes in product quality. American Economic
Review, 72(5), 956–967.
Maynes, E. S. (1976). The concept and measurement of product quality. In
N. E. Terleckyj (Ed.), Household production and consumption (pp. 529–584).
Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

20 Giovanna Culot
Mohr, L. A., Webb, D. J., & Harris, K. E. (2001). Do consumers expect compa-
nies to be socially responsible? The impact of corporate social responsibility
on buying behavior? The Journal of Consumer Affairs, 35(1), 45–72.
Nassimbeni, G., Sartor, M., & Orzes, G. (2014). Countertrade: Compensa-
tory requests to sell abroad. Journal for Global Business Advancement, 7(1),
69–87.
Orzes, G., Jia, F., Sartor, M., & Nassimbeni, G. (2017). Performance implica-
tions of SA8000 certification. International Journal of Operations and Production
Management, 37(11), 1625–1653.
Orzes, G., Moretto, A. M., Ebrahimpour, M., Sartor, M., Moro, M., & Rossi, M.
(2018). United Nations global compact: Literature review and theory-
based research agenda. Journal of Cleaner Production, 177, 633–654.
Parusaman, A. P., Zeithami, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1988). SERVQUAL: A multi-
ple-item scale for measuring customer perceptions of service quality. Journal
of Retailing, 64(1), 12–40.
Piersing, R. M. (1974). Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: An inquiry into
values. New York, NY: William Morrow.
Reeves, C. A., & Bednar, D. A. (1994). Defining quality: Alternatives and
implications. The Academy of Management Review, 19(3), 419–445.
Saraph, J.V., Benson, P.G. & Schroeder, R.G. (1989). An Instrument for meas-
uring the critical factors of quality management. Decision Sciences. 20(4),
810–92.
Sartor, M., Orzes, G., Di Mauro, C., Ebrahimpour, M., & Nassimbeni, G.
(2016). The SA8000 social certification standard: Literature review and
theory-based research agenda. International Journal of Production Economics,
175, 164–181.
Sartor, M., Orzes G., Touboulic, A., Culot, G., & Nassimbeni, G. (2019). ISO
14001 standard: Literature review and theory-based research agenda,
Quality Management Journal 26(1), 32–64.
Shewhart, W. A. (1931). Economic control of quality of manufactured products.
New York, NY: D. Van Nostrand.
Shingo, S. (1986). Zero quality control: Source inspection and the poke yoke system.
Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press.
State Council of China. (2015). Made in China 2025. Retrieved from http://
www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2015-05/19/content_9784.htm
Steeples, M. M. (1992). The corporate guide to the Malcom Baldrige National
Quality Award: Proven strategies for building quality into your organization.
Milwaukee, WI: ASQC Quality Press.
Taguchi, G., Chowdury, S., & Wu, Y. (2005). Taguchi quality engineering handbook.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
Taylor, F. W. (1911). Principles of scientific management. New York, NY: Harper
& Brothers.
Weckenmann, A., Akkasoglu, G., & Wener, T. (2015). Quality management –
History and trends. The TQM Journal, 27(3), 281–293.
Womack, J. P., Jones, D. T., & Ross, D. (1991). The machine that changed the
world: The story of lean production. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

History of Quality 21