Managing Responsibility: What Can Be Learned from the Quality Movement?

by Sandra Waddock, Charles Bodwell


  PDF
Fall 2004

Volume 47
Issue 1


Full Article Browse Issue

 

Abstract

For global companies that are implementing their codes of conduct within long supply chains, managing responsibility is increasingly starting to resemble managing quality, which most companies have done for many years. This article compares emerging systems of (total) responsibility management (TRM), to (total) quality management (TQM) systems. This comparison illustrates how managers can think systemically about managing responsibility in the emerging competitive and activist environment by making an analogy to quality management. In the wake of recent corporate integrity scandals, responsibility management is becoming an increasingly critical issue to multiple stakeholders, much as managing quality became an issue for customers in the 1970s and 1980s.

California Management Review

Berkeley-Haas's Premier Management Journal

Published at Berkeley Haas for more than sixty years, California Management Review seeks to share knowledge that challenges convention and shows a better way of doing business.

Learn more
Follow Us