Quality Management and Literature: An Evaluative Reading of John Galsworthy's "Quality"

During the last three decades, the Western world has devoted much more efforts to the spread of the value of “quality” and its “management”, at all levels and in all fields within a given community. Most enterprises not to say organizations seek the ISO 9000 family of quality management systems in order to meet customers’ and other stakeholders’ needs within statutory and regulatory requirements related to a product or service. A certification of such a set of standards helps ensure improvement or promotion, referred to nowadays as "excellence" (Dale et al: 4-7). However, this entails a wide campaign of advertising products/services to enhance the sales rate, hence increase profits, and boost gains. Other businesses, nonetheless, small as they may be, provide a quality product that meets the principles of quality management (customer satisfaction and efficiency), regardless of the costs incurred or the profits gained. Literature, being a process of creation par excellence, can map out a sketch of the previous two business strategies. It can be geared towards a good understanding of the work strategies, with a view to reflecting their successes or failures. Literature is not only writing technique, plot, theme and message, but it is also a combination of character development, situations structure, decision-making, choices and consequences. This research paper, therefore, aspires to break through untrodden areas of critical study, by blending the quality management principles with a literary genre, which has its own set of evaluative ethics. By this, I mean the art of short fiction, represented in this research by a short story, “Quality” (1912), authored by a notable Englishman-of-letters, John Galsworthy. The narrative aspects of day-to-day activities, characters and their repartees are here employed as a practical guide to quality management criteria of the ISO 9001 Model. This will include the design clause of a product, although the ISO Series had not then been issued and published. This will also take into account the Kaizen's philosophy of continuous improvement. By quality, it is worthy of note, Galsworthy does not only mean the product quality, represented by shoemaking, but also the soul quality of the shoemaker himself. Such a shoemaker’s commitment to hone beautifully designed and fitted shoes, displayed as artworks, costs Mr. Gessler everything, including his own life.
I here also rely on my first lived experience in 1995 as an ISO standards translator and internal auditor, then as a quality assurance manager and reviewer in higher education today.