Checking Out Service: Evaluating Excellence, HRM and TQM in Retailing

Abstract

We evaluate a number of the claims made in the debate between the prescriptive and critical literature that surrounds `excellence', with a particular focus on human resource and quality management. The critical literature contains two positions, broadly a traditional control perspective and the other concerned with the structuring of meaning. The empirical basis of the paper is an investigation of an HRM and quality initiative in a leading supermarket company. The initiative embodies many of the prescriptions of the gurus of excellence. We present both qualitative and quantitative data collected from shopfloor and managerial staff. Our findings lend little support to the traditional criticism that, if management objectives are realised, they are achieved through some combination of sham empowerment, work intensification and increased surveillance. Our evidence lends more support to the optimistic view that modern techniques of quality and human resource management can benefit employees. We suggest that the alternative concern with the way meanings are constructed has more plausibility, because the new managerial discourse of quality has affected the attitudes of a significant number of employees towards customer service. However, there was considerable variation in how employees received the programme's message and thus its effects are by no means uniform. Moreover, we encounter an unanticipated and previously unremarked consequence of managerial discourses, that employees use these as resources in their struggles with managers in order to bring managers into line with workforce expectations.

Training customers: an organizational experience

“…In this sense, the variables around which an employee training plan is organized have been widely treated in the literature. Thus, for example, Korsten (2003) Hill and Peccei (1997), among others, have referred to issues like sales force training, raising employee awareness to meet customer needs, and the way in which customer satisfaction or "loyalty" toward the firm and its products can be improved.…”

“…In this sense, the variables around which an employee training plan is organized have been widely treated in the literature. Thus, for example, Korsten (2003) Hill and Peccei (1997), among others, have referred to issues like sales force training, raising employee awareness to meet customer needs, and the way in which customer satisfaction or "loyalty" toward the firm and its products can be improved.We are not going to discuss the undeniable importance of customers and the ways in which they influence firm management schemes in this paper. We only want to remind that Barnard (1938) Although specific training is undoubtedly important in order to achieve a customer-oriented culture (both in technical skills and in motivation), our aim in this paper is to go one step further in the field of training techniques: we are interested in training the actual customers, an idea that has hardly ever appeared in the literature so far.…”

“…Thus, Burden and Proctor (2000), Innis and La Londe (1994), Landale (2004a), Mouawad and Kleiner (1996), Mulder (2001), Prager (2003), and Rosenthal, Hill and Peccei (1997), among others, have referred to issues like sales force training, raising employee awareness to meet customer needs, and the way in which customer satisfaction or "loyalty" toward the firm and its products can be improved.…”

Bringing emotion to work

“…Taken as an intellectual development within the managerial literature, EI can be understood as part of a broader neo-human relations movement which focuses attention on the emotional conditions of labour: how we feel at work; the extent to which our work is pleasurable and entertaining ---a focus on how well we handle each other. When applied in practice, such ideas invite an 'emotional customer-service' orientation to intra-organisational exchanges whereby employees are increasingly compelled to act simultaneously as 'consumers' and 'producers' (Gabriel & Lang 1995;Du Gay 1996;Rosenthal et al 1997;Sturdy 1998). …”

Managing culture at British Airways: hype, hope and reality

“…In these, the management of culture is depicted as something rather more complex than a 'magic wand', "successes" are more than counter-balanced by initiatives with mixed or negative results and interventions are not assumed to be permanent 'fixes' (Kunda, 1992;Grugulis et al, 2000;Collinson, 1992;Storey, 1992;Hamper, 1992;Rosenthal et al, 1997;Legge, 1994Legge, , 1995Watson, 1994).…”