Total quality management and reconceptualising management in Africa

Could Total Quality Management (TQM) provide the "reconceptualisation" of management required in Africa? TQM is a coherent, established management framework, and the collectivism and high power distance culture of African countries might match the internal customers' teamwork of TQM's quality circles and senior management's overall responsibility in a TQM organisation. Thus this paper addresses the research problem: is TQM a culturally appropriate way to reconceptualise management in African enterprises? A review of TQM leads into a justification for our choice of 11 themes of TQM as the basis of our analysis. Next, frameworks for understanding African cultures are reviewed and then compared with those frameworks developed for understanding relationships between culture and economic growth in other countries such as Japan, the United States and Australia. With this background, the cultural appropriateness of Africa for each theme of TQM is judged using content analysis. It appears that TQM could be a more culturally appropriate management framework for Africa than for the United States and Australia, but some important parts of it will be difficult to install, especially those relating to aspects of Confucian dynamism.