Knowledge transfer of the Western concept of ‘quality’

This paper addresses one of the issues in contemporary globalisation theory: the extent to which there is ‘one best way’ in which business can be done and organisations managed. It uses Czarniawska’s ‘Travels of Ideas’ model as an organising framework to present and understand how the concept of ‘Quality’, so important in contemporary approaches to manufacturing & services, and their management, travelled to, and impinged on, a newly opened vehicle assembly plant in Poland. The extent to which new meanings were mutually created in the process of translation is discussed, using ethnographic reporting and analysis techniques commonly used in diffusion research. Parallels between the process of translation as an idea becomes embedded into a new cultural location, and the processes which contemporary research has identified as important to organisational learning, are briefly discussed in conclusion.