‘Would you like fries with that, Sir?’ The evolution of management theories and the rise and fall of total quality management within the American federal government

Abstract

This article examines the introduction, domination, and diminution of Total Quality Management (TQM) and its allied managerial strategies in the United States federal bureaucracy over the past two decades. It makes a distinction between its use in the later 1980s and early 1990s to spur government productivity and its application by Bill Clinton through the National Performance Review to increase American appreciation for federal governance. It traces the creation of the intellectual threads that comprise TQM from the 1920s and shows how Statistical Quality Control, Hawthornism, Freudian psychology, and the Human Potential Movement fused around 1980 to yield what we have come to know as TQM. It argues that TQM was adopted by American business and ultimately the federal bureaucracy as Americans, concerned in the 1970s and early 1980s about what they saw as the Japanese economic boom, created and applied an Americanized version of those methods.