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o investigate, from a statistical point of view, the extent to which the quality climate of Chinese companies is influenced by the respective national culture, namely Chinese cultural values. It is also hoped that the study will highlight the cultural dimensions, which are in congruence with TQM principles and the likely impacts of such congruencies. The attempt is thought to be beneficial for Chinese TQM companies to rediscover their own cultural origins, so as to reinforce a cultural approach towards TQM implementation. Furthermore, the study suggests and tests a theoretical proposition of cultural influence on TQM, which serves as a foundation for further generalizations in other national cultures.
Quality climate and national culture
In analyzing the association of national culture and TQM, perhaps it is useful to draw on the sociological theory of an action system (Parsons, 1951). According to this theory, the object world is composed of three classes of social objects namely, the “social” referring to the actor or the collectivity, the “physical” referring to entities which do not interact with the actor, and the “cultural”, referring to symbolic elements of the cultural tradition not internalized as constitutive elements of the actor’s personality (Parsons, 1951, p. 4). A culture emerges and becomes part of an action system when symbolic systems mediate communication between actors (Parsons, 1951, p. 5). Thus a social system or a “partial” social system functions when a collectivity of individual actors interact with one another through a set of commonly understood and shared cultural symbols. A value is therefore defined as an element of a shared symbolic system, which serves as a criterion or standard for selection among alternative orientations intrinsically open in a situation. Through such a mechanism, value orientation is thus a device to articulate cultural traditions into an action system (Parons, 1951, p. 12).
Applying such an understanding of value orientation to the context of an economic organization, Parsons (1956) further elaborated that the value orientation of the organization is always defined by that of the social system, or the super-ordinate value system. Unless the organization is deviant from the super-ordinate system, it must imply basic acceptance of the more generalized values of the super-ordinate (Parsons, 1956, p. 67). In turn, the organizational value system formulates the operative codes, which govern the making of policies, allocative decisions, and coordination actions. Simply speaking, the everyday organizational activities are, to a certain extent, governed by such underlying value orientations.
In any organization, based on the transcendent view on quality (Garvin, 1988), quality is created by a quality culture. A quality culture has been defined as an “organizational value system that results in an environment that is conducive to the establishment and continual improvement of quality and it consists of values, traditions, procedures, and expectations that promote quality” (Goetsch and Davis, 1994, p. 122). The role of management is to act as a middleman to concretize the transcendent view on quality and to transform TQM principles into outward culture elements, solidifying them into structures and actions such as quality processes, quality methods, and quality results (Bounds et al., 1994). In this process, it is likely that national cultural elements deeply embedded in the members本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。