The Case of ISO 9000 Quality Management System Certification in a Faculty of a Turkish Public University: Triggers, Processes, and Consequences

Introduction

Quality management is one of the most popular management philosophies and techniques all around the world. In many studies (e.g. Abrahamson, 1996; Dayton, 2003; Ehigie & McAndrew, 2005; Packard, 1995), it has been discussed whether or not it is a management fashion, fad, or buzzword. Some studies (e.g. Pastor et al., 1998) have even preferred to use “metaphor of virus” to explain its extraordinary popularity. As a natural result of this popularity, countless books and articles on quality management have been published and many conferences have been held.

According to Vukomanovic et al. (2014), there are various approaches and standardized frameworks for implementing quality management such as quality award models (e.g. Deming Award, EFQM, Malcom Balridge Award) and ISO 9000 Quality Management System. Many studies in the literature were based on these quality management related frameworks. However, there are still only a limited number of studies that have adopted an integrative stance to quality management. The majority of this vast section of literature only examines the consequences of quality management and a very limited number of studies have focused on triggers and processes. For example, the studies that are based on quality awards principally focused on processes of awards. However, they didn’t assess that whether efforts to win these awards improve some indicators of organizational performance (consequences) or not (Grandzol & Gershon, 1998). In a similar vein, studies that focused on ISO 9000 Quality Management system seem to be more interested in consequences of these efforts. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to examine the triggers, processes and consequences of quality management all together in the context of the ISO 9000 Quality Management System certification process in a faculty of a Turkish public university.

With this aim, a brief review of the literature about quality management will be given in the first part, then, in the second part, the study method (data and sampling, data collection, reliability and validity, data analysis) will be explained. The findings of the study will be presented in the third section. At this point, the study seems to contribute the extant literature via emphasizing some less studied triggers (such as “to increase faculty reputation/image/prestige”, “to secure organizational justice”, and “to institutionalize faculty”) and consequences (such as “inspiration given to the other faculties”, “increased quality of new students”) of quality management. The study will end with a conclusion that summarizes the important findings and focuses on originalities and limitations.