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.

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

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

The Roots of Quality Control

• Ways of improving product and productivity through (quality) management intervention can be traced back to Henry Ford’s 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

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

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”

Benefits of Quality Control

• Quality doesn’t 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!

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 O’Leary, 1994 - 2007)

• MotorCo and the ‘politics of production’ (Worthington, et al, 2005/ 2008)

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

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).

Contesting the Panoptic Prison Metaphor

Other writers contest Foucault’s 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’

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)

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

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

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

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!

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

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

Those Who do the Quality Stuff!

• QAA is supposed tobe 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

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

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!”

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

• “I’ve 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!

Shirking Responsibility is a Problem

• Shirking involves failing/ covertly refusing to produce QAA documentation or comply with requirements

• Failing to attend / excusing one’s 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!

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”

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.

Quality Opportunists!

• Some academics have sought career advancement and financial gain from QAA

• Opportunists often withdraw support unless quality offers personal gain

• “Quality is management’s problem not mine. I’ll do what I have to do for when the inspectors are here, but I’m not spending every minute of every day thinking about it.

• I leave that to those in the department who’ve took it on. If they’re daft enough to worry about it, when it’s the university management who as far as I’m concerned are paid to worry about it, then that’s their problem.

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 citizen’s 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).

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

UK NHS, Modernization and Control

• Dent shows that the current attempts to re-negotiate the medical profession’s 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 profession’s 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.

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

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

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….

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

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.

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’,

•

Questions?

• Questions

• Comments

• Criticisms