Doctoral TQM research: A study of themes, directions and trends

This paper reports the main findings of a study of a sample of UK Doctorate Theses with a research focus on TQM. Amongst the main findings is that the research outputs are mainly in the form of guidelines and frameworks and little attempt is made to build upon previous research to create a meta model of TQM. It is also pointed out that the work undertaken is primarily retrospective and there is little attempt to speculate on what the next generation of quality tools, techniques, and paradigms will look like.