Companies, irrespective of size or sector, often use ISO 9000 and TQM as a route to world class status. The aim of this paper is to show if this has had any impact on or contributed to raising their competitiveness. This paper gives brief details of a large‐scale UK benchmarking study on the...

Over the past decade, the public sector in the UK has made great effort in adopting business excellence thinking. To what extent have such practices taken root and what has been their impact? Presents some of the key results from a recent empirical study of 119 public sector organisations in...