AI & Soc (1997) 11:273-280 �9 1997 Springer-Verlag London Limited A I 8t S O C I I g I ' ] ~

Open Forum

The Language of Quality: Sharing Meanings

Chris Cox 1 and Richard Ennals Steppingstones Ltd t and Kingston Business School, Kingston University, Kingston, UK

Abstract: This article considers the results of a global survey into quality terminology, which suggested that quality professionals are not making use of their own standards. Discussion of quality is located in the context of partnership and networks.

Keywords: Globalisation; Networks; Quality; Standards; Terminology

Introduction

As more and more companies move from their past experience of local, regional and national markets, to meet the challenges and pressures of global markets, a fundamental reappraisal is required of their work organisation. In particular, how is a company with experience of success in meeting the quality requirements of one market to adapt to possibly different requirements at a continental or global scale?

It has been suggested that part of the answer may be found in the development of a definitive international language, assured in applications, enabling the terminology in which quality standards are expressed to be unambiguous? This would locate quality professionals as successors to accountants. The accountants' claim has long been that their figures tell the objective story, while similar claims are now being made for quality standards. Given that quality standards are typically applied to the processes by which products and services are produced (see Ainger et al 1995,

274 C. Cox

Ennals 1995), meeting these aspirations would be an ambitious project, covering a kaleidoscopic range of activities and organisations worldwide.

This paper is based on the results of a global survey of the language and terminology of the 1994 ISO 9000 standards, conducted in association with SGS Yarsley International Certification Services Ltd. The survey was of quality managers and qualky professionals in the United Kingdom and internationally, and provided a rich resource of quantitative and qualitative information, which has been published in a management report issued by SGS Yarsley (Cox 1997a), reported to ISO (Cox 1997b) and in a technical report from Kingston Business School (Cox and Ennals 1998). Our intention here is to locate the results of the survey both in the philosophical context of the later work of Wittgenstein, and in the business context of the European Green Paper "Partnership for a New Organisation of Work" (Larsson 1997), which is concerned with improving European competitiveness.

Our intention is not simply to challenge orthodox views of quality, but to point to practical ways forward in the new Europe, where communication on matters of quality assumes increasing importance. We seek to identify the nature of discourse on quality, locating it at the heart of the development of partnership and dialogue in the workplace and of international technical and commercial understanding. We suggest practical ways forward for quality and its terminology, as a vehicle for safer practices of sharing meanings between consenting partners.

Quality Standards

In recent years there has been an explosion in concern for quality, as even small businesses find that they require quality certification in order for contracts to be secured, and marketing departments find that appropriate quality accreditation can be effective as a means of gaining competitive advantage. Associated with a concern for quality has been the belief in the utility of published standards, which provide an official benchmark against which individual performance can be measured. Having prescribed a standard, the issuing organisation has created an effective public filter mechanism to classify the performance of different organisations or individuals. A set of quality performance indicators can easily be combined to produce a league table, and outcomes can be audited over time. Data on quality is thus given apparent quantitative rigour.

There has been some academic debate concerning quality and quality assurance, and the appropriateness of different models for particular kinds of activities: for example, models derived from manufacturing industry may be less than appropriate for healthcare and community services. The momentum of change has been such that few areas of modern life, at least in Britain, are now free of 'league tables' of performance, yet few questions are asked about the basis on which the underlying judgements are made. It is somehow assumed that standards are in some way objective and scientific, not open to challenge. A new profession has developed around quality assurance, whose integrity and standing might be seen as threatened by challenges to the underlying philosophical foundations on which the increasing elaborate edifice of quality has been constructed, and by the distortion of quality messages for commercial and political reasons.

The Language of Quality: Sharing Meanings 275

Quality assurance has joined accountancy, auditing and educational inspection as a professional activity which is seen by those in authority as appropriately conducted by consultants. Where many have little or no direct personal practical experience of the field on which they are pronouncing judgements, this has the effect of redefining the practical nature of professional accountability, so that instead of an obligation to live up to the principles of the profession of which one is a member, one is instead encouraged to avoid criticism at the hands of external assessors. We have yet to experience the full consequences of this current outsourcing of accountability. Assessors and members of certifying bodies should be regarded as quality professionals, but their reputation has been damaged by the activities of consultants who, through anomalies in current legislation, are themselves empowered to issue quality certificates under, for example, ISO 9001, without themselves being certified or accredited.

Languages and Worlds

As the process of globalisation of economic activity has been gaining pace, it has also been fashionable to seek to develop international quality standards covering both business processes and products. There has been an aspiration to achieve some kind of universal language in which these standards could be expressed, facilitating their implementation and enforcement. The English language has been an obvious contender for the role, strengthened by the rigour of international standards teams, working on consensual definitions. However, natural speakers of English do not use the language according to the book, and many would argue that the language of Shakespeare is a remarkable tool for preserving ambiguity, useful for the maintenance of dialogue, but immensely frustrating to those using language for scientific definitions. Dictionaries and grammars of English have always been produced as retrospective descriptions rather than, as with French, prescriptions. The use of language is in turmoil.

It could be argued that a similar phenomenon can be observed in music. Theoreticians of classical music lay down the rules for a sonata or symphony, by which you can recognise the work of the masters, but typically these rules are set out after the death of the great composers, based on their work, rather than forming the basis for it. During each phase of musical change, people seek to identify the rules in order to make sense of the innovation.

Advocates of quality standards as an answer to business problems have been challenged, especially by small businesses, who argue that their world does not correspond to the world of the standards. They point out that documenting inadequate procedures and checking conformance with the resulting documentation does nothing more than produce consistency in the inadequate performance. All too often an external consultant has been brought in to document the procedures, avoiding distracting attention from important work, but also missing the opportunity for collective reflection and improvement on procedures before they are set in stone.

This kind of debate is likely to increase in intensity as international standards take over from national standards.

276 C. Cox

Changing Forms of Life

Similar arguments have been used over the introduction of management information systems. Should we automate existing procedures, or start with the development of a richer picture of the desired processes, and then proceed to automate, or assist, those'processes most suited to the needs of the organisation?

If standards are applied to processes, they tend to be mediated through formal descriptions of procedures, which may then be automated as management information systems. Subsequent quality inspections can monitor the extent to which processes comply with stated procedures. The burden is thus placed on the expression of procedures, rather than on the working of the organisation, the form of life, itself. This drops out of consideration, whereas the question is of changing the organisation of work. It is argued in the Green Paper "Partnership for a New Organisation of Work" that it is not sufficient to test outcomes, or even to inspect procedures, but attention must be given to the nature of work organisation, which will imply changing processes and procedures, with implications for quality and standards approaches possibly on the way. In a context of unremitting change and the demand for innovation, to enforce conformity with the previous official description of procedures may not always be helpful.

The Global Survey

The global survey was conducted in 1997. 6,250 questionnaires were sent to 90 countries, with the following outcomes:

�9 quantitative analysis was made of 1,650 responses received by 30th May 1997, a response rate of 26.5%;

�9 qualitative results were taken from comments on questionnaires received by 30th May 1997;

�9 comments on specific 'quality" terms were received by October 1997, including over 200 late responses;

�9 additionally there was comment on the use of terminology in publications;

�9 a linguistic review was undertaken, based on English, French, German and Polish texts of ISO 9001.

For full details, see [Cox (1997a, 1997b), Cox and Ennals (1998)]. The overall conclusions of the survey were as follows:

�9 Organisations, particularly in the UK, have implemented documented systems for product quality assurance, but with no outward sign of the accompanying management systems elements needed to help sustain such a rigorous standard.

�9 Organisations in the UK have typically opted for a purely product assurance oriented management system.

�9 The drive for quality implementation and customer expectation for third party suppliers has dropped off in the UK, while increasing internationally.

�9 The terminology standard, ISO 8402, has failed to provide an accompaniment to

The Language of Quality: Sharing Meanings 277

the certification standards ISO 9001, ISO 9002 and ISO 9003. This includes a resistance to what is seen as 'jargon'.

�9 ISO 8402 has failed to effect the two main overlapping purposes of an international vocabulary: harmonisation of terms and improvement of communications.

�9 The user friendliness of the language of ISO 9001 varies between translations.

�9 Authors of works on quality matters in English do not seem to be aware of the importance of consistent terminology for accurate communication.

�9 Senior management appear increasingly sceptical about the importance of sound terminology and quality management support for a quality assurance system.

The first author is an active member of the ISO terminology sub-committee for quality management of quality assurance standards, and we recognise that:

�9 The ISO sub committee charged with writing the vocabulary for the ISO 9000 / 2000 revision is among the first to have recently adopted the ISO guidance standards for terminology work which assure high-grade terminology.

�9 The ISO sub committee charged with revising the ISO 9001/2/3 and ISO 9004-1/ 2 standards are producing a new 'consistent pair' of ISO 9001 and 9004 standards, which will give any organisation whatever an even chance to implement systems for both certifiable assurance of improving product quality results, and the efficient management of those systems.

�9 ISO is planning a major launch of the consistent pair of standards.

The recommendations were as follows:

�9 Standardisation bodies should recognise the need for bringing together all the relevant sciences. The subject field science contained within the standard is generally well represented. Terminology science and linguistic science are generally not represented at all. Work on terminology should be maintained on a continual improvement cycle.

�9 Users of ISO 9001 should be helped to understand that the elements are concerned with the management of quality assurance, not management of the management of quality assurance.

�9 Governments and purveyors of the standards must not issue misleading claims concerning the standard.

�9 All governments should be encouraged to apply the new ISO 9001 in conjunction with ISO 9004 and ISO 9000 as part of a total quality approach to the implementation of socially and ethically accountable management systems.

�9 ISO and national governments should plan how the encouragement can best be implemented. The economic consequences of a failure to implement must be recognised.

�9 All users of the ISO 9000 family of standards, but particularly users of ISO 9001, should treat the vocabulary section of the new ISO 9000 for the year 2000 as normative. This poses questions regarding costs of standards as charged to small businesses, who may regard vocabulary standards as superfluous if they are too expensive.

�9 The accreditation and certification bodies must lead the field in doing so.

278 C. Cox

ISO and others need to plan new methods for assuring user awareness of the importance of normative terminologies for harmonised global effectiveness of management system standards.

Survey Conclusions

It appears from the global survey that quality professionals are confident with what they are doing, and able to communicate with other quality professionals without difficulty. However, they find difficulty in communicating with both managers and employees, which is not encouraging if we are seeking to develop harmonisation and communication of standardised quality assurance systems, and implies considerable economic consequences.

We can provide a philosophical context, in terms of the use of language, in which this conclusion is unsurprising. As was noted by Marx, in his Theses on Feuerbach "Philosophers have interpreted the world: the problem, however, is to change it". These are not alternatives. Change without understanding and interpretation will have little chance of sustainable success. This appears to be the emerging situation with respect to the language of quality.

Quality and Language Games

Wittgenstein (1953) provided insights into the workings of organisations in his account of language games. His view of language was broader than that of the grammarian, and he would talk of the grammar of a sentence as including the organisational context of use. In his later writings he was more concerned with language in use, than with analysis of truth values of propositions. Language games are played in forms of life, and new entrants need to learn to follow the rules, and arrive at the situation where they know how to go on.

In his discussion of 'redness', Wittgenstein demonstrated some of the problems of providing precise description. He introduced the idea of family resemblances, and the notion that what links different items that we call 'red' is that we choose to use the same word in each case, not some underlying universal characteristics.

Grranzon (1990, 1995), Toulmin (1991), Janik (1990) and Johannessen (1990) have explored the use of language in organisations in the context of a research programme in Skill and Technology, and have elucidated the nature of rule- following behaviour within the culture of an organisation, or form of life. Their conclusions have highlighted the limits of technology, including the linguistic technology of specialist terminology, and the limits of our capacity to represent the knowledge of skilled professionals. There is a continuing residue of tacit knowledge which cannot be captured in technical terminology, but which forms part of the defining characteristics of a professional. The role of terminology is not to dictate the terms of all discourse, but to deal with ambiguity and the removal of unhelpful synonyms: terminology serves as a system of signposts in the area of discourse.

Wittgenstein tells the story of a group of people, each of whom has a beetle in a box, but where each can only see their own beetle. Thus, when there is a conversation

The Language of Quality: Sharing Meanings 279

about beetles, each talks by reference to the beetle in their own box, to which they have privileged access. We refer to common standards, but aspects of our practice remain private. Exhaustive description will have its limit.

Participative Dialogue

The attempt to impose terminology from outside the culture of professional practice in organisations has been unsuccessful. The problem has been exacerbated by the development of a separate profession of theoreticians, devoid of practical experience and outside the process of professional accountability. Quality is a matter of language: it should be a living language of use, not the equivalent of Latin or Sanskrit, spoken only by an elite few, or left to specialists. The focus on documentation at the expense of practice is equivalent to a preference for archaeology over life, and may provide the subject matter for industrial archaeology.

The conventional management model, and the development of an external quality assurance consultancy and assessors function, has been inconsistent with the alternative approach of partnership. In the partnership model, the language of quality provides the framework for ongoing participative dialogue in the workplace, in the professions, across supply chains, through learning networks, across regions, and then at international level. Language is organic, and its meaning must be seen in its use. The same is true for the language of quality. If senior managers have outsourced the quality assurance function, together with auditing of financial figures, then the language of quality will not enter the dialogue of the workplace and the boardroom, and the external certifications of quality standards will mean little or nothing. Somehow the reflective professional activity of considering quality issues must be locally owned, but must also be expressed in terms that can have some currency in other organisations. This makes dialogue through networks an essential precondition for the maintenance and enhancement of quality.

There are lessons to be learned from medical ethics. It was realised that the role of the medical professional changes, once it is recognised that cure is impossible in terminal cases, and palliative treatment is required. This has led to the expansion of the hospice movement, and new criteria for quality of care, in terms of the quality of life for the patient in their remaining time. Similarly the language of quality when applied to business organisations has to take note of the human dimension: businesses do not operate outside society, but comprise people who are frequently under pressure. Quality must take account of the quality of working life.

Sharing Meanings

The impact of quality is recursive and by association: the quality of the practices of an organisation is affected by contacts with others, including through value chains and networks. The pattern of transmission is not top-down and controlled, and is not amenable to solutions that involve traditional vertical management approaches. The clearest analogy is with the spread of AIDS, for which there is no known cure, and to which the best response is a change of behaviour between consenting partners.

280 C. Cox

Here we are sharing meanings, not fluids. It is hard, if not impossible, to assure immunity from adverse practices.

Value chains and networks face serious new business challenges with the imminent Single European Currency, while at the same time coming to terms with the possible impact of the Millennium Bug, due to past weaknesses in programming of computers. One suggestion, therefore, would be to use the existing and evolving mechanisms of learning networks and development coalitions as means of conducting dialogue regarding such intertwined issues as the Single European Currency, the Millennium Bug, and the terminology of quality assurance. The language of quality would be reconfirmed as the means not just of sharing meanings, but of assisting the survival of organisations whose future cannot be assured by any other means. We move beyond the era of competitive advantage to one of co-operative survival. We hang together or we will be hung separately.

There is no technological fix that could simultaneously debug computer systems across the developed world, and add the capability of dealing with additional currency systems. We cannot rely on the technology of the software engineer, the figures of the accountant or the standards of the quality professional, as a substitute for responsible and informed management. We have to choose who to trust, who to believe. This is a fresh formulation of an old truth. Bankers have to decide to whom they will offer credit: and "credit" is based on belief, not on certainty. The good banker will reach a conclusion after extended dialogue with the client. The same is true of quality.

These are challenges for managers in their organisations, in partnership with their employees, and in dialogue with others. Partnership is the answer, not just for a new organisation of work, but in a real sense for the survival and continuance of the organisation.

References

1. Ainger A., Kaura R., and Ennals R. (1995). Executive Guide to Business Success through Human- Centred Systems. Springer-Verlag, London

2. Cox C. (1997a). ISO 9000 - Is Quality an International Language? Kingston Business School, Steppingstones Ltd and SGS Yarsley, Kingston.

3. Cox C. (1997b). Interim Report for 1SO TC176 SC1 on the Findings of a Global Survey on the Terminology of Quality Kingston Business School, S teppingstones Ltd and SGS Yarsley, Kingston.

4. Cox C. (1998). "ISO 9000 - All change for the year 2000 revision?" Kingston Business School, Steppingstones Ltd and SGS Yarsley, Kingston.

5. Cox C. and Ennals R. (1998) "The Language of Quality". Kingston Business School 6. Ennals R. (1995). Executive Guide to Preventing IT Disasters. Springer-Verlag, London 1995. 7. GSranzon B. (1995) (ed). Skill, Technology and Enlightenment: On Practical Philosophy. Springer-

Verlag, London. 8. Janik A. (1990). Tacit Knowledge, Rule-Following and Learning. In (eds) G6ranzon B and Florin M.

Artificial Intelligence, Culture and Language: On Education and Work. Springe.r-Verlag, London. 9. Johannesen K.S. (1990). Rule Following and Intransitive Understanding. In (eds) G6ranzon and Florin

M. Artificial Intelligence, Culture and Language: On Education and Work. Springer-Verlag, London. 10. Larsson A. (1997). Partnership for a New Organisation of Work. DG-V, European Commission, Brussels. 11. Toulmin S. (1991). The Dream of an Exact Language. In (eds) GOranzon B. and Florin M. Dialogue

and Technology: Art and Knowledge. Springer-Verlag, London. 12. Wittgenstein L.(1953). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell, Oxford.

Correspondence and offprint requests to: Chris Cox/Richard Ennals, Kingston Business School, Kingston University, Kingston Hill, I(ingston KT2 7LB. Tel: 0181 547 7214; fax: 0181 547 7026; email: chris.cox @ steppingstones.com; ennals @kingston.ac.uk