Leadership in authoring the quality management literature

To fully understand quality management, as well as its subtopic total quality management, it is important to know the background of its authors. This work goes beyond the contributions of the few well-known authors to examine the authorship of the relevant periodical literature across twenty-one years. Statistical tests based on 2512 abstracts of quality management articles were used to compare publication patterns by time, authorship, and quality management subtopic.

Our results show that the non-academic literature is about five times larger than the academic literature, but when size is ignored the publication patterns of academic and non-academics are strikingly similar. Statistically speaking, when controlled for total quality and non-total quality components, the two groups had undistinguishable patterns, although the non-academics appear to have been the first to make a substantial literature contribution, which started about 1984. Both groups are now showing signs of sharply turning away from writing about TQM, although the quality management literature in general shows no such sharp decline. The implications of a decline in the TQM literature are discussed.