Like the reports of Mark Twain's death, the demise of total quality has been much exaggerated. Periodic changes of direction and drivers have given it new life and impetus during the time it has been popularized by western organizations. Each renewal brings with it a new set of measures to...

For companies striving towards total quality management and continuous improvement it is important to be sure that employees are receiving the right messages. A new non‐scoring audit tool, developed in work with UK companies, assesses whether human resource policies are integrated with quality...

Over the past decade, the establishment and growth of quality awards has stimulated organizational self‐assessment using the award models. Four new methods developed from fieldwork in the UK can be used not only to support the gathering of data required by the models, but also in stand‐alone...

This deliberately provocative paper challenges the replacement of quality and total quality management by the term “excellence” in the EFQM excellence model. It also claims the current emphasis on “points scoring” is detracting from the fundamentals of quality management.