QUALITY IN HISTORY

There is no general agreement about the historical origin of

mankind concern with quality. Some consider the guilds and master
craftsmen of Europe's Middle Ages as the first 'organized' forms of
quality management, although there is ample historical evidence that
quality mattered in older civilizations. The history of quality is in fact a
complicated one: whereas logic would suggest a sustained interest in the
search for quality by all civilizations and epochs, the Industrial
Revolution and the two World Wars led to an 'accident of history', a two
hundred year-long era where maintaining quality became a delicate
matter for organisations.
What we know is that at the end of the Second World War,
industrial companies did not shy away from the fact that quality was a
secondary concern. In its own history, the Toyota Motor Corporation
acknowledges that the quality of its trucks was so poor that the show
vehicles would often break down on their way to car exhibitions. In the
1950s, Citroen was also well aware of the problems and breakdowns that
plagued its newly released models. In a post-war reconstruction economy
supply can undershoot demand and, thus, customers cannot afford to be
too 'picky'.
This state of affairs changed in the late 1970s when US
manufacturers found themselves at a growing competitive disadvantage
when their products were compared to Japanese imports. Europe should
have suffered the same fate, but the shock of competition on quality was
attenuated by protectionist policies. In the USA this quality challenge led
to a response, which has often been called the 'quality revolution'. This
response resulted in the development, growth and adoption of quality
management practices.
In the industrialized world, the days of thinking of quality as a
marginal and secondary concern are long gone. Quality is recognized in
most contexts as a key competitive dimension and organisations need the
capability to manage their performance along this dimension. However
there are still economies today where, due to various reasons (shortageof
goods, lack of knowledge, thriving opportunism, etc.), the quality
revolution has not taken place yet.