Cultural and Industrial Values in Change: Creating Structural Changes in a Municipality Through the Use of TQM

By:
Dr Birgitta Bergvall-Kåreborn
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Cultural and Industrial Values In Change (CIVIC) is a unique trans-national project that uses Total Quality Management (TQM) theories and tools in order to come to terms with structural changes in a society in general and on the local labour market specifically. Even though TQM traditionally have been applied in organisational and business contexts to increase factors such as process effectiveness or customer satisfaction there are more recent examples of TQM use in new segments of society, such as governmental organisations, states and municipalities. There is however no previous examples of a study that aims to restructure whole societies with the help of TQM.

Through applying a quality perspective on local development work in combination with an innovative model for environmental scanning, the project aims to present a highly innovative and attractive way to handle changes in municipalities and regions that have been effected – or are at risk of becoming effected – by future structural changes on the local labour market. The necessary management in order to bring about a positive development process is decentralised in a natural way, which in turn will increase the reliance and facilitate the anchoring of the process among the citizens. The aim of this paper is to describe the methods used in Jokkmokk to create structural changes as well a first indication of the results of the methods


Keywords: Total Quality Management, Social Change, Evaluation
Stream: Change
Presentation Type: 30 minute Paper Presentation in English
Paper: Cultural and Industrial Values in Change

Dr Birgitta Bergvall-Kåreborn

Assistant professor, Dep. of business administration and social sciences
Devision of information systems sciences, Luleå University of technology
Luleå, SWEDEN

Birgitta explores the effects on internal processes and internal organization, so called ‘back-office’, of providing e-services in public administration and in e-government to citizens. Using interactive evaluation methodology to both value and develop the situations under study, she investigates the impact of ICT usage on professional work processes, in terms of the systemic relationship among social roles, norms, and behaviors.

Ref: M06P0465