Quality management in services: is the public sector keeping pace?

Quality management has been in vogue within manufacturing for over a decade. Service industries have more recently been making heavy investments in this area. Also there are major initiatives from the public sector to improve quality. Investigates the take‐up of quality management techniques in the public sector, their perceived effectiveness and the consequent impact on the managers running the programmes (private sector services are used as a basis for comparison). Results of survey responses from 394 service organizations show that the uptake of quality management techniques is now similar between public and private sectors, as is the perception of the impact on managerial work. A major difference occurs in terms of perceived effectiveness and results of the quality programmes. In this latter area the public sector fares somewhat worse.