Some
words about the word quality
by
Steve Spangehl
People use quality loosely, with many different meanings. Sometimes they use it to refer an unspoken neo-Platonic ideal, and base their judgments of various real things on how what they perceive and experience differs from their idealized conception. It is unlikely that the mental models of two people who argue about a higher education institution's quality will ever match. Since we cannot easily enter Plato's cave and compare these mental ideals directly, nor can we force everyone to adopt a single ideal, discussions about quality carried on in this framework are generally unrevealing. Arguments like these do not lead to consensus among those with different judgments, nor do they provide strong foundations for talking about improvement.
The "quality movement" takes a different approach, defining a quality
or a high-performance organization as one that succeeds in satisfying
its stakeholders' expectations by meeting or exceeding their
needs. By this thinking, there exists no ideal organization
against which to measure real ones, nor is it possible
for an organization to reach perfection, since that would
imply that an ideal did exist. Instead, quality
becomes a journey, a search for better ways to understand
the changing needs of an organization's stakeholders and for
better ways to meet their needs. Since we can measure the
performance of the various processes an organization uses
to gauge and meet its stakeholders' needs, improvements are
measurable -- although quality itself is not. The size and
regularity of those improvements testify to an organization's
quality culture. Used this way, quality ought always to be
an adjective, never a noun. Quality describes an organization
that behaves in certain ways -- it focuses upon processes,
bases decisions on facts and measurements, looks at itself
as an integrated system designed to achieve its ultimate mission
and purposes, and so on.
Closely related to this word usage is the often-quoted definition (of Juran,
Deming, and others) that quality means fitness for use.
Perception of the quality of a product or service depends
on what a user wants it for. In
effect, quality judgments make sense only in light of the
specific purpose a product or service performs for a particular
person.
Education also serves different
purposes for students, parents, employers, and many others.
These differences inevitably inform and shape each qualitative
judgment of an institution. Generally, individual students seek higher
education to satisfy multiple purposes. And most institutions
serve disparate groups with dissimilar goals. Thus an institution's
educators must work hard to understand their stakeholders'
diverse purposes, to decide which ones are essential and which
are merely desirable, and to evaluate carefully how to best
fulfill each need. Typically an institution will be perceived
as high quality for satisfying one purpose, low for another.
Ranking one institution as having higher overall quality
than another is what makes cumulative rankings, like those
in US News and World Reports, so offensive. Global, abstract
talk about quality is neither logical nor useful. If thinking
about quality is to lead to improvement, it's critical we
remember for whom and for what purpose we do
what we do.
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Continuous Improvement