On Quality Ontology

Quality is present everywhere nowadays. It is the word that appears in discussions for almost anything. It is often used as a synonym for perfection. In this chapter, we confront its meaning critically and explore its origin. Drawing upon Nietzsche, we argue that Quality emerges from the decline of moral values across historical time. Religion, predominantly Christian religion, played an essential role in radically inverting existing moral values and incorporating them into its doctrine. Quality was an intrinsic part of the old moral values, lost its connection to its roots, became autonomous, and followed a technical road that displaced its nature ultimately and became an instrument of control. We further observe Quality through Foucault’s lens to stress the control-Quality relationship. We elaborate on the argument that Quality became a control instrument to impose new morals and ways of work into Enterprises through the Trojan horse of conformance. For that purpose, we look beyond the Quality paradigm for competitiveness in the industrial turn of the twenty-first century.