Alien or Ally?. TQM, Academic Quality and the New Public Management
| Published date | 01 December 1994 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000003968 |
| Date | 01 December 1994 |
| Pages | 33-39 |
| Author | R.W. Harris |
| Subject Matter | Education |
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review
asks us to “consider today’s increasingly fuzzy
notion of total quality management. The Ernst &
Young and American Quality Foundation study
surveyed 584 companies and found that they used
a total of 945 standardized programmes, each
promoted by different “experts”. In such an
environment, managers find themselves adrift in a
sea of competing ideas, increasingly insecure
about whether the right approach will ever be
found” (Nohria and Berkley, 1994). The authors
then proceed to advocate the importance of
pragmatic management, adapting ideas to a given
context.
The cynical academic might argue that TQM in
UK higher education has a similar, short-term,
flavour-of-the-month feel to it, and that it will
soon be replaced by the next big thing (business
process re-engineering, perhaps, which proposes
workplace reorganization to exploit the benefits
of information technology better) to get people to
work harder and more efficiently. But the
principles underlying TQM are important and
enduring and, irrespective of the label they are
given, are the sorts of things we ought to be doing
in higher education anyway. It is also appropriate
that periodically we should re-examine the
efficacy of the tools we apply to the management
of students’ learning experiences, particularly at a
time of unprecedented pressures on resources –
human, financial and physical – and at a time
when the whole of the public sector is enjoined by
the Government to adopt new managerial
practices.
TQM in Higher Education
There are three generic approaches to the
technique of total quality management as it is
currently practised in higher education in the UK.
The first has a customer focus, where the idea of
service to students is fostered through staff
training and development. This results in an
institutional culture which regards the needs of
students as paramount and which promotes
student choice and autonomy. Attention in these
institutions will be given to the flow of
information to students and other clients, and to
the helpfulness with which individual members of
staff respond to their requests and suggestions.
The institutional vocabulary will be liberally
sprinkled with words such as flexibility, market
and responsiveness.
The second approach has more of a staff focus,
and is concerned to value and enhance the
contribution of all members of staff to the
effectiveness of an institution’s operation, to the
setting of policies and priorities, and to
continuous improvements in institutional
effectiveness. It entails a flatter management
structure and the acceptance of responsibility for
action by defined working groups. It has certain
affinities to Investors in People, which places
emphasis on shared organizational values, good
internal channels of communication and the
establishment of institution-wide staff
development programmes as an entitlement for all
staff. A characteristic of this second approach is a
corporate disposition to be open about challenges
and problems facing the institution.
The third approach takes a service agreements
stance, and seeks to ensure conformity to
specification at certain key measurable points of
the educational process. Thus, for example, it
would be possible to determine that lecturers
should mark and return all student coursework
within a certain number of days of the date due
for handing in, and to monitor that this
prescription is being implemented as agreed. Or,
to take other examples, all first-year students may
be offered places with the expectation that they
would be housed in university-managed student
VOLUME 2 NUMBER 3
1994
33
Alien or Ally?
TQM, Academic Quality and the New Public
Management
R.W. Harris
Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 2 No. 3, 1994, pp. 33-39
© MCB University Press, 0968-4883
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