Introduction: quality management in the public sector

Abstract: In Part 1, Chapters 1-4 of this book, the quality management approaches in the public sector are discussed. The reader is also given a short history about the evolution of the ISO standards, quality management and quality management in libraries.

Key words: quality management; Libraries; Standards; ISO 9001

Quality management ideology began to have an impact on the public sector during the 1990s (see Poll and Boekhorst, 1996, which is a good summary of the development in academic libraries). Some of its principles, such as changes in the management of and evaluating and setting goals for results, were adapted from the private sector. A clear example of this was the so-called 'new public management' movement, which started using private sector instruments within the public sector:

.instruments of such policy interventions are institutional rules and organizational routines affecting expenditure planning and financial management, civil service and labour relations, procurement, organization and methods, and audit and evaluation. (Barzelay, 2001: 156)

These instruments can also be found in the descriptions of quality management in the Finnish public sector published by the Ministry of Finance (Sorri-Teir et al., 1998: 8). They list the pressures for the public sector actors as:

 economic situation and continuing demands for savings;

 results management: the need for development and goals set by the ministries;

 ministries have demanded quality improvement from civil service departments;

 budgeting has changed from sub-item specified to framework budgets;

 clients require quality services and are eager to provide feedback;

 civil service departments have become more independent and thus they have become more able to improve quality;

 there has been a strong emphasis on TQM (total quality management) during the 1990s.

In addition to the developments triggered by the policymakers, there has also been a major change in how scientific information is disseminated that has affected university libraries and changed their ways of 'doing business'. The traditional, reactive way of building and owning collections has, at least partly, changed to a more reactive way of intermediating the printed and electronic resources as part of the university's learning and knowledge-creating processes (see, e.g., Huotari and Iivonen, 2005). On the other hand, libraries can be seen to be moving to become the knowledge management centres of their parent organisation (Parker et al., 2005).

Today, libraries face vast challenges as they move into the digital environment. There are a huge number of publications available, especially within bio- and health sciences; they are often the most expensive scientific journals. Increasingly, publishing of hard science is seen as a business and it has been claimed that commercial pricing bears little relation to production costs and is relatively immune to competitive pressures (see, e.g., Morgan Stanley, 2002; La Manna, 2003).

In the digital world, the library also faces competition from other providers of information, all competing for the same clientele. Clients have become more quality conscious and they want to participate in the development of information services within the campus. Information technology not only enables the interaction between clients and libraries but also provides opportunities to engage the active client in developing innovations (see, e.g., Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2000).

Management also faces novel challenges in this modern result- and profit-oriented culture. It has been quite difficult to define what is meant by a 'result' when one is trying to evaluate a university library. The results need to be quantifiable, but this is clearly problematic when one considers learning and the creation of new knowledge (see, e.g., Poll and Boekhorst, 1996; Quinn, 1997).

On the other hand, the consumer culture ideology can create inequality among users. Libraries have always defended the idea that all individuals should be able to utilise the library's resources and services. However, they are now confronted by the fact that more and more digital resources are drifting away from open to restricted access. Goodman and Cohen (2004: 76) have defined two types of inequality: stigmatising inequality that exists in a direct, less ambiguous and more transparent manner, and anonymous inequality, the kind that is indirect and not the result of any deliberate intention. The digital revolution has clearly increased this anonymous inequality.

Unequal access poses major challenges for the management of university libraries. On the one hand, we live in a culturally more open and international environment that needs sophisticated and varied services, but, on the other, public sector decision-makers seem to want to reduce this sector as a participant in the economy and open almost all services to competition. Thus, in order to compete for resources, libraries need to create competitive services and base their evaluations on hard facts, which means that the workforce must be flexible, committed to lifelong learning and be highly trained. To sum up: more and better services have to be achieved while financial support is being reduced.

Universities are currently redefining their roles, taking into account both the market ideology (the concept of university which turns out a product) and the academic ideology (the seat of learning and the preserver of cultural values) (Vartiainen, 2004: 51). One outcome is that universities as well as their libraries will be under stricter control: measuring and evaluation is now and will be a continuous process. It should also be remembered that the evaluation can be viewed from different points of view. The following approaches have been used (ibid.):

 evaluation of outcomes and goals;

 evaluation of costs;

 evaluation of implementation processes;

 client-oriented evaluation;

 stakeholder evaluation;

 consumer needs evaluation.

At present, one can see that auditing policies are nudging the system in the direction of stakeholder evaluation and consumer-need evaluation - both clearly adopted from the private sector. Pressure from the growing global educational market could well lead to the creation of some kind of certification in the near future leading to accreditation, without which an education institute will not be able to attract students and faculty.

Many academic libraries have been active in quality management during the past 20 years, but the pace has accelerated over the past few years because of the developments described above. In order to be able to compete for national and international funding and status, one must be able to demonstrate one's quality. One also must be critical of the evaluation rhetoric. As stated earlier, there are a great many instruments, concepts and values in use, many taken from the private sector, even from manufacturing industries with their techniques for optimising the production of goods. Furthermore, according to Koenig's bibliometric analysis (2005), there is a tendency for business management fads to become popular for a time and then to fade into obscurity, being replaced by some new model - e.g., articles about total quality management (TQM) peaked at the beginning of the 1990s and have decreased radically in number since that time. Thus, one crucial question must be asked: are these instruments suitable, per se, for the university environment and how can they effectively be implemented in the daily work being done on campus and in the library?

The other major change in the working environment of universities is globalisation, especially the birth of the global higher education market. For example, in the European Union the member states have decided to create a European Higher Education Area (EHEA), a process that started in Bologna in the summer of 1999. This led to the establishment of European policies and decisions on how these should be implemented in the member states. A similar development has been going on throughout the world. More and more emphasis has been put on the quality of higher education and its institutes as well as on their ability to compete for the best students and most prestigious academic staff.

The role of universities has also been expanded during the past decade. Universities are seen by local and national governments as key actors in the birth and growth of the knowledge-based economy and a major actor in combating social exclusion. This sets new demands for management, as Shattock (2003: 3) states: 'In a competitive environment, management needs to be able to define success and ensure that performance is geared to achieving it.'

Shattock (2003: 175-6) has defined the most important factors in managing modern universities:

 Teaching and research represent the core business of universities.

 There are no...