The manufacturing TQM and service quality literatures: synergistic or conflicting paradigms?
Rhian Silvestro
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Warwick, UK
Introduction Although most of the exponents of TQM explicitly claim that TQM is transferable to services, the precepts and practices have been derived from the experience of consultants and practitioners in manufacturing. Both the US and Japanese “gurus” focus and address their work primarily to manufacturers, with application of TQM in services only given secondary attention. As Albrecht (Albrecht and Bradford, 1990) puts it, these contributors “were born in a manufacturing era, and they have a predominantly manufacturing mindset at their foundation”. Yet, despite its manufacturing origins, both academics and practitioners have, over the past 15 years, been concerned to apply and transfer TQM principles and practices to services. However, the inadequacy of the literature in guiding service managers and transferring the TQM principles, management tools and techniques to service environments has become a familiar theme (see for example, Albrecht and Bradford, 1990; Feigenbaum, 1988; Ghobadian and Speller, 1994). Many of the tools and techniques are quantitative and have limited application in service environments where the deliverables are often intangible, heterogeneous and their consumption and delivery simultaneous. In part no doubt to address this deficiency, the service quality literature has evolved over the past 15 years mainly in the fields of service marketing and operations management. Although influenced by TQM thinking in manufacturing, it has been developed separately, by a different set of contributors. Indeed according to Dale (1992), “there appears to be little close collaboration with the group of academics investigating service quality and marketing aspects of TQM and those