Abstract
During the past two decades organizations in many industries have introduced management-style changes, such as employee involvement (EI) and total quality management (TQM). In the health care sector, one change has been the inclusion of TQM into the accreditation process. Using ethnographic and interview data, this case study examines the process of introducing TQM into a professional organization—a hospital—and shows how successful implementation of such new management styles in professional organizations requires complex negotiations of existing formal and informal power relationships. Some employees and middle managers embraced the TQM philosophy and techniques and successfully influenced the implementation and project-team design. In this case, administrators used TQM as rhetoric and justification for increased bureaucratic control, goals that are distinctly at odds with the ideological objectives of TQM.
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Manley, J.E. Negotiating Quality: Total Quality Management and the Complexities of Transforming Professional Organizations. Sociological Forum 15, 457–484 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007576410452
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007576410452