I'm reviewing bibliography about quality but it all comes to quality from ISO or so, all authors mentioned define quality from a process perspective, but nothing about human condition or human behavior neither philosophy (not quality of life). Can we consider quality as a human value?
I feel Patrick has asked a pertinent question about important aspects related to human being. All the quality standards are in respect of some product or services and call for conformance to some established standards. I am not sure that the same logic is applicable to human behavior and human values. While human brain can be dissected and studied under microscope, human mind cannot be.
Human behavior is regulated by human mind which can be conditioned or trained to view the things positively which results in positive responses to the received signals. Positive or negative emotions are the consequences of positive or negative thinking.The type of thinking leads to type of perceptions about events, which results in performance or non performance.Human values are developed out of righteous way of dealing with fellow human beings.It is the outcome of conditioned mind which gives proper signals to the brain to dictate the human responses. Hence quality and human values or behavior may not be equated.
I am not sure this is the answer you are looking for, but the way I see it quality is a perseption of something. Quality IS never, it is percieved. The percieved quality is the gap between our beforehand expectation and the actual experience. If the actual experience exceeds our expectation we percieve hig quality and if it does not reach our expectations we percieve low quality. The human value you talk about might be a part of our expectations if that makes sense.
Hi Veronica, There's a huge amount of literature on Total Quality Management, relating mostly to customers perceptions and expectations (therefore values) and another huge related literature on marketing and service's value.
You can also find few scholars working on Human Resources Development linked to quality and performance management.
did you consider also OSH certifications such as OHSAS, ISO18000 etc, and national ones? this is a very interesting approach tackling your questions
I agree, Patrick. As you probably know, in Europe we developed CAF (Common Assessment Framework), from EFQM (therefore TQM).
In many of its "principles" you will find leaders/people values (for instance, principle 3 and 5, as well as criterion 1 (Leadership), 3 (People), 7 (People's results), 8 (Social Responsibility Results). As a direct and indirect consequence, Quality is a value.
You can find more here: http://www.eipa.eu/files/File/CAF/CAF_2013.pdf
Indeed quality is highly addressed in religion. There are many writings addressing quality concepts as related to human behavior, values and actions in Islam and christianity with quotes from the holy books.
By the definition of human values " as some thing of greater importance while evaluating things/events" it seems quality is human value.