Obscuring But Not Reducing Managerial Control: Does TQM Measure up to Democracy Standards?

Abstract

Despite TQM's (total quality management) stated emphasis on more cooperative employee-management relations, we argue that TQM, as it is presently conceived and practiced, obscures but does not reduce management control over workers. Based upon examination of the foundational TQM texts and of 25 implementation guides, we show how the language of 'empowerment' and 'self-management', central to the TQM mission, is often used in equivocal ways that compromise the meaning of these concepts as they were originally developed and used by radically egalitarian grassroots organizations. We also show in several respects how TQM's organizational changes may further perpetuate inequality among workers. By distilling the key ideal-typical features of the total quality organization and comparing them with the ideal-type characteristics of the machinebased bureaucracy and of the egalitarian-democratic organization, we bring into sharp relief how they are not the same. In bringing to the TQM literature the practices and standards developed over a 150-year history by genuinely egalitarian cooperative organizations, we are able to show the profound differences in form that prevail despite their parallel language. Should TQM practitioners wish to adopt the substance of these shared control methods, they would do well to learn from the examples of the grassroots organizations that pioneered these empowerment methods.