The Quality Culture

1
The Quality Culture

• Do quality systems actually ensure quality
• and what impact do they have on the quality of
  product service for the end user?
• Frank Worthington
• University of Liverpool Management School

2
Aims of the Presentation

• An overview of the roots and development of the
  concept of quality in industry and public sector
  organizations
• A look at the application and implications of
  quality in academia
• Academics responses/ resistance to quality
  auditing
• QAA - RAE - Periodic Review
• Quality Audit as Panoptic Control and
  Surveillance

3
The Roots of Quality Control

• Ways of improving product and productivity
  through (quality) management intervention can be
  traced back to Henry Fords motor manufacturing
• Ford / Taylor and Scientific Management
• Time-study and the first class worker!
• Key Aim of S.Mgt measure and monitor
  performance
• Quality has therefore always had an element of
  control to it

4
The Japanese Connection

• Total Quality Control as continuous improvement
  / kaizen ..
• Employee empowerment involvement and autonomy
  in decision-making
• In-process TQC was essential to Just-in-Time
  production
• Now called lean or agile - and sometimes
  cellular production
• The road to Nissan (Peter Wickens) A tripod of
  success
• Quality
• teamwork flexibility

5
The meaning of Quality Control in Context

• The aims of quality - as the terms suggests -
  signifies something that is self-evidently good
• Something incontestable, something no one would
  seriously object to
• At the same time it is vague unquantifiable - not
  easily tied down
• Yet, robust enough to apply to everything! -
  products, innovations, service standards and the
  calibre of people
• And everyone employed in organizations! ..
• every one can do something about it and feel
  the benefit of having made a difference having
  produced a first class product or first class
  service

6
Benefits of Quality Control

• Quality doesnt refer to exceptional high
  standards
• it is about developing systems that ensure
  products or services are of a consistent and
  reliable standards that conform to customer
  requirements and meet customer expectations
• Improvements in productivity by reducing
  component defects and waste
• Improve product reliability and customer service
  (customer retention)
• Organizational re-engineering (e.g. de-layering
  and down-sizing)
• Empowering employees and Improving the quality of
  working life!

7
Globalization, Quality and Economic Regeneration

• The Oil shocks and Japanese challenge (1979)
• Fordism - post-Fordism and (local) Globalization
  
• Learning from Japan (Ford and the After Japan
  Project)
• The preferred supplier concept and the Q1 award
• Just-in-time price, quality and delivery
  standards
• Caterpillar Inc and The Politics of the Product
  (Miller and OLeary, 1994 - 2007)
• MotorCo and the politics of production
  (Worthington, et al, 2005/ 2008)

8
Quality as Panoptic Surveillance

• Several writers have asked how different quality
  interventions differ from Taylorist interventions
• Barker (1993), Delbridge (1992), Zuboff (1988)
  and, in particular, Sewell and Wilkinson (1992)
  have heavily criticized quality control
  techniques as being surveillance based
• McKinley and Taylor (1998), on self-managing
  teamwork at Phone-Co
• Team-based self-monitoring of
• Output and productivity,
• Target attainment,
• Waste and defect rates
• Time-keeping
• Attitude

9
Quality as a Panoptic Prison Tower

• Michel Foucault, panoptic control and penal
  reform in 18th Century.
• The original panopticon comprised of a central
  observation tower around which subjects / inmates
  where housed in individual cells
• Each cell could be observed by prison
  administrators without the prison inmates ever
  knowing at any given moment whether they were
  actually being observed or not.
• The central tower of the prison panopticon, as
  Foucault puts it, was introduced specifically for
  surveillance purposes
• To house the administrative function of
  management, the policing function of
  surveillance, the economic function of
  controlling and checking, the religious function
  of encouraging obedience and work
• . from here all orders would come, all
  activities would be recorded, all offenses
  perceived and judged (Foucault, 1977 174, cited
  in Townley, 2005 317).

10
Contesting the Panoptic Prison Metaphor

• Other writers contest Foucaults gloomy reading
  of Quality
• Showing how TQM has lead to greater employee
  involvement
• Increased delegation of decision-making at all
  levels
• Job-enrichment greater employee commitment and
  job-satisfaction
• Greater rewards training, education and career
  development
• Changing management attitudes away from treating
  employees as cultural dopes
• Greater levels of trust, reduced restrictive
  practices
• A rise in cultures of co-operation

11
Paul Thompson on Quality

• On the other hand Thompson argues from his
  research that managers and workers only buy into
  quality for what it offers them
• but this does not necessarily lead to them
  becoming committed to, let alone identifying
  with, quality aims and values,
• People merely conform to what they are required
  to do in the name of quality
• According to Thompson, more often than not
  workers employ strategies of blind behaviour
  compliance to appear committed but remain
  privately cynical
• My own research (with others) suggests this
  applies to the professions / the rise of the
  audit culture (e.g. in medicine and
  education)

12
Strathern and The Audit Culture

• Strathern (following Power) argues that modern
  society has become obsessed with measuring and
  auditing performance
• And that the audit culture is global, confined to
  no single set of institutions, and no single part
  of the world
• Auditing (as opposed to accountability) is now
  used to determine the allocation of resources and
  to measure the performance and credibility of
  enterprises
• which has created a situation/ culture whereby
  people are enticed to become devoted to its
  implementation, goals and aspirations
• Continuous improvements in (value-for-money)
  service performance - and customer / consumer
  service

13
The rise and credentials of the audit culture in
HE is driven by

• Moral reasoning about the necessary/ required
  outcomes and use value of teaching and research
  for students, employers, economy and society
• i.e economic efficiency, good practice and
  opportunity.
• To provide business and the economy woth
  knowledge workers
• To enable national economies and businesses to
  meet new challenges posed by globalization

14
Outcomes of quality Audit and Accountability

• Professionals feel their autonomy in professional
  decision-making and self-regulation is under
  attack
• This has caused anxiety and resentment amongst
  many (see Morley, 2000, Howie 2006 and
  worthington and Hodgson, 2006)
• Key concerns academic freedom/ intellectual
  production
• Concern over required learning and teaching
  styles
• Concern over required total student guidance
  and support - student attitudes to learning

15
How does quality auditing find its mark, and why
is there no resistance?

• How has quality auditing become so all-pervasive?
• Should we / can we resist it, and if so, what
  would we be resisting against?
• The currency and power-effect of quality auditing
  has found its mark because of the lack of faith
  in the old-system, and lack of trust in
  professionals!

16
Research Process / Questions

• Interviews with 100 Academics in 18 Departments
  in 14 institutions in the UK, and elsewhere (Aus
  and NZ)

• View of QAA and RAE
• Involvement in QAA
• Resistance to QAA
• View of RAE

17
Views of QAA

• Trade unions
• University administrators (responsible for
  quality) and Vice chancellors
• (Critical) academics Have all questioned the cost
  and utility of QAA

• As a cause of job-dissatisfaction, angst and
  stress
• The costs and use of resources and its outcomes..
  
• Instrumentality in teaching and learning
• As subjugation to managerial priorities and
  league tables

18
Those Who do the Quality Stuff!

• QAA is supposed to
• be top down/ senior management led
• A Departmental responsibility
• At the same time as making each Individual
  responsible for quality?

• Actual involvement
• University and department administrators
• Not all academic staff
• Many junior/ more often female academic members
  of staff

19
Implications of Involvement

• QAA is extremely time consuming
• Stressful
• Poorly recognised
• Poorly rewarded
• Detrimental to research and career

• For those who do the quality, stuff QAA is
  panoptic!
• Individualizing effect
• Creates anxiety
• Mistrust
• Alienation
• Heightened sense of personal responsibility for
  outcomes/ score

20
Resistance by Distancing

• There is a widespread skepticism and in some
  cases resentment but lack of concern about
  long-term outcome
• Lack of recognition of its effects on those who
  do the quality stuff
• Research/ publications for RAE remins the first
  priority
• Its not that teaching and students come second,
  its that research comes first!

21
Distancing and research/ The RAE

• Research/ RAE as priority
• Research as status within the profession
• Research as career and identity project

• Research remains a priority / career concern
• Ive seen but not read your article in (top
  journal)!
• I love seeing my name in print!
• If (xxx) gets an article in (top journal), I
  want one in there too!

22
Shirking Responsibility is a Problem

• Shirking involves failing/ covertly refusing to
  produce QAA documentation or comply with
  requirements
• Failing to attend / excusing ones self from
  meetings, information briefings and
  intentionally failing to meet deadlines etc.
• This strategy is tactical recalcitrance a way
  of wearing others down who then eventually do/ or
  feel obliged to do the work!

23
Devolvers

• Devolving is a tactic deployed by departmental
  heads and / or senior academic members
• whereby junior (usually female) members of staff
  are given primary responsibility for QAA..
• Who are told it will be good for their status and
  career in the university!
• Yet Managers still maintain responsibility for
  the exercise, and claim credit for the outcome
• As one female interviewee pit it QQA was like
  preparing for a dinner party

24
Ditherers and Deceivers

• Dithering is a common tactic used to resist
  responsibility and involvement in SPR.
• Dithering is similar to what Ackroyd and Thompson
  (1999) refer to as tactical recalcitrance or
  learned incompetence,
• Playing the fool / the bumbling professor, by
  pretending not to understanding quality and what
  it requires of academics!
• That is, deceive others into believing that what
  is required of them is beyond their understanding
  and capabilities.

25
Quality Opportunists!

• Some academics have sought career advancement and
  financial gain from QAA
• Opportunists often withdraw support unless
  quality offers personal gain
• Quality is managements problem not mine. Ill
  do what I have to do for when the inspectors are
  here, but Im not spending every minute of every
  day thinking about it.
• I leave that to those in the department whove
  took it on. If theyre daft enough to worry about
  it, when its the university management who as
  far as Im concerned are paid to worry about it,
  then thats their problem.

26
Modernization and the Medical profession

• Research shows that doctors are not unreceptive
  to the claims that the NHS needs to modernize
• What doctors object to is
• the reasoning behind attempts to alter the
  regulation of medicine
• that is, to transform healthcare from being a
  citizens right into a customer service
• governed by quasi-market values and associated
  modes of accountability that render the medical
  profession open to what they themselves see as
  increasingly hostile government, management,
  media and public scrutiny (Dent, 1998).

27
Modernization and the Medical profession

• Their overriding concern is the way quality
  brings their professional autonomy into question
• The ways in which they are judged and subject to
  trial by media.
• In particular, clinicians resent the way change
  has led to demands for them to adopt a managerial
  attitude to healthcare
• - to think about cost and use of resources
• to meet government performance targets
• when, as they see it, they are already overworked
  and underpaid

28
UK NHS, Modernization and Control

• Dent shows that the current attempts to
  re-negotiate the medical professions
  relationship to the state is just the latest
  attempt in a long line of similar attempts
  stretching back as far as the advent of the UK
  post-war welfare state (Dent, 1995).
• To make the medical profession more accountable
  to final controls and performance indicators
• What has prevented the state from realizing this
  goal, has been the medical professions
  determination to maintain the privileged status
  of their professional right to clinical
  autonomy as the principle mechanism for
  governing the frontier of control (Friedman,
  1977) between
• doctors and the state
• doctors and managers, and.
• doctors and other occupational and professional
  groups supplementary to medicine within
  healthcare.

29
Quality auditing in Medicine

• The Medical profession Like accountants,
  lawyers, engineers and architects, doctors are a
  distinct self-conscious occupational group
• Their professional identity is forged through
  extensive professional training and education
  (Freidson, 1988).
• Training involves not only acquiring formal
  training and education and entry qualifications
  through examination, professional licensing and
  accreditation but also other informal rites of
  passage.
• New entrants are taught to act in ways deemed
  appropriate to a profession, to recognize and
  internalize its values, to observe its rituals,
  ceremonies and codes of practice and to protect
  the profession from interlopers.
• At one and the same time as they learn
  professional knowledge, skills and expertise they
  also learn how to behave towards client groups
  and others
• .including management and other non-management
  employees) not of their group or profession

30
Being and Doctor

• The medical profession has traditionally enjoyed
  professional autonomy from state control,
  management regulation and lay interference in
  medical matters
• This autonomy is not absolute. It is conditional
  and bestowed upon the medical profession by the
  state (and society)
• in return for their guarantee to ensure proper
  ethical professional conduct and self-regulation
  that puts patient care and public interest before
  individual or professional self-interest (Dent,
  1995).
• This gives doctors considerable professional
  power.
• The same applies in other professions

31
Doctor and other Health Workers

• In health care doctors command more respect and
  enjoy greater power, autonomy, status and
  privilege than nurses
• . who have traditionally been seen as their
  handmaidens. and other subordinate healthcare
  workers supplementary to medicine
• Culture theorists believe this need not, and
  should not, be the case.
• Traditional professional and occupational
  boundaries, along with hierarchical divisions of
  labour and task demarcation, are both
  dysfunctional and unnecessary.
• As the argument goes, traditional modernist
  organizational structures, stifles innovation.

32
Overall Outcomes of Quality Auditing

• People (ostensibly) subscribe to quality but
  mainly because they have no choice but to comply!
• Because of its self-evident truth effect
• In industry it is crucial to competitiveness /
  supply cains and customer expectations
• In academia given quality teaching and research
  league tables
• But also because of its career implications

33
Summary/ Issues

• Changes in the control and regulation of academic
  work are obviously taking place
• How, and to what extent, new modes of auditing
  and accountability are panoptic is open to
  question/ interpretation
• How, and to what extent they can be (are)
  resisted, is open to interpretation.

34
Key Critical Issue for Me!

• The nature of resistance to quality, for me at
  least, raises serious questions about what
  quality aims to achieve and how it is received
• Especially given how some members of the academic
  community willfully practice peer exploitation,
  

35
Questions?

• Questions
• Comments
• Criticisms