Call for papers: "Total Quality Management and Sustainable Development"

For a special issue of the International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management.

Today the majority of companies are faced with intense pressure from global competition, and there is a need for these organisations to consider incorporating the idea of sustainability in total quality management (TQM) in order to sustain their competitive advantage and continuous improvement.

Business, through local and international trade, has a profound impact on the ability of a culture to provide for basic human needs and other goods and services. Therefore, commerce and how it conducts itself internally and interacts with its operating environment is axial to the success of sustainable development (SD).

Long-term business management requires the successful management of losses and gains; and so it is with sustainable development. Sustainable development can be defined as the management of losses and gains resulting from the degradation of environmental factors that affect the ability of life – any life – to survive, now or in the future. The "winners and losers" of environmental impact are often defined by the decisions made directly by those entities conducting commerce.

This special issue is open to researchers throughout the world who are interested in studying and applying advanced research in finding synergies between TQM and SD, in creating process models for implementing SD practices in a TQM management system and, more generally, in comparing and combining values, methodologies and tools from TQM and SD.

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Values, methodologies and tools for TQM and SD
• Process-based system models for enhancing TQM-SD synergies
• External and internal drivers and enablers for implementing sustainability oriented TQM
• Process-based change models for SD implementation
• Assessment of SD performance level of companies
• Incorporation of environmentally sound practices into the quality system
• Case studies on TQM and SD 

Important Dates

Deadline for submission of full manuscripts: 15 October, 2013

Provision of first round decision to authors: 15 January, 2014

Deadline for submission of revised manuscripts: 15 April, 2014

Provision of final decisions: 15 June, 2014