Total Quality Management in the Swedish food industry

Sammanfattning: The purpose with this paper is to examine the quality discussion in the Swedish food industry during the period 1960-2008 to see where in the chain the focus has been and whether the discussion has missed any important attributes related to the different components of TQM. The material studied was Swedish food industry magazines from 1960-2008. At a total 1500 individual magazines were covered coming from ten different industry magazines. Articles were categorized according to where in the industry chain the discussion took place. An additional categorization was then conducted to interwine the empirical findings with the theories. The main theory in focus is TQM, however to be able to apply theories during the research period underlying theories are used. This is because TQM was not introduced until the late eighties. The come from the most influential quality management gurus. The authors found clear trends in the development of quality. In the 1960’s the focus was on the process and defects were to be managed eliminated. This changed over time, when the gurus and TQM got recognized. Quality then became a bigger concern, involving the whole organization and defects became something that was not going to be managed but eliminated.