Research Trends in Quality Management over the years 2010-2011

Abstract: In current globalized and highly demanding markets, Quality does not constitute any more a competitive advantage for organizations. Instead, Quality represents a basic market entry requirement for organizations indistinguishable from the country or economic sector they belong to. Being conscious of the importance of Quality for all type of organizations, the purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the identification and better understanding of current trends in academic research on Quality Management. By analyzing a sample of 612 academic papers collected from five international Quality journals and two QMOD international conferences over 2010 and 2011, the author will study and reflect on the current trends of global academic research related to Quality Management. Literature review was used as research methodology for the thesis. Academic papers were categorized, classified and analyzed in order to identify current research trends on Quality Management. This work provides a snapshot of the current research trends on Quality Management. It benefits the educational sector, researchers, industry and practitioners by presenting an overview of the current research needs as well as potential future research topics. As a result of this study, five main trending research topics on Quality Management were identified: management systems standards, total quality management, service quality, customer related processes after delivering product/service and excellence models. China, India, USA, Sweden and UK were identified as the countries that have published the highest number of academic papers in international Quality journals during the studied period. Additionally, it was found a marked predominance of academic research on Quality Management towards the service sector. These results and the answers to five proposed research questions were discussed and solved in this report.