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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the evolution of top management’s understanding of product quality in Bulgaria since the end of communism. The study examines three specific areas: top management’s understanding of the term “quality”; top management’s understanding of the relationship between quality and business performance; and top management’s understanding of the impact of job position on quality.

The paper relies on a quantitative research approach by using data from a survey of 186 companies in Bulgaria.

The paper suggests that senior managers in Bulgaria continue to base their understanding of “quality” on a single approach (*a characteristic of the communist era), with the product-based and the user-based approaches currently being the two most common ones. At the same time, surprisingly enough, this study claims that senior management in Bulgaria is currently well aware of the importance of quality as a dimension of firm’s competitiveness, and is also highly conscious of its roles’ impact on product quality.

The results of this study are exclusively based on the case of Bulgaria and must be treated with caution in the case of other former communist states from the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region.

This paper has relevance for both managers and companies doing business in Eastern Europe.

This is the first paper to provide detailed analysis of the evolution of the understanding of “product quality” in CEE since the end of communism. Moreover, this paper applies, for the first time, Garvin’s five approaches to defining quality within a practical context.

The authors extend the literature on decoupling by analyzing the microlevel effects of institutionalized practices within the framework of international standards. This study investigates the specific informal management practices that decision-makers embrace in order for organizations to achieve ISO 9001 certification without all regulations being adopted and followed according to the standard's original design and purpose.

As the basis for its research framework, this paper adopts the neo-institutional theory. The research employs the comparative case study method and draws its data from a sample of 21 ISO 9001:2008 certified organizations in Bulgaria.

The results show ambivalent behavior toward the ISO 9001 standard's formal requirements. This behavior is expressed through targeted noncompliance with (certain) regulations and procedures regarding top management commitment, as well as documented information which are formally adopted within the organization and certified as complying with the standard.

The study has implications for future research into decoupling, organizational learning, and standardization. In terms of limitations, the authors examined the process of decoupling from a micro perspective in Bulgaria only. Noncompliance with international standards such as the ISO 9000 may exhibit specific regional or national characteristics.

Findings from this research encourage the International Standards Organization to respond to previous calls for revising the formal structure of ISO 9000 and other international management standards by considering a more flexible and liberal point of view.

As opposed to previous studies which have explored decoupling from a macro perspective, this study focuses on how the internal constraints imposed by the standard's universal requirements are being mitigated at a micro level. That is, the authors provide a detailed account of the specific informal management practices which managers (deliberately) adopt in order to achieve certification without fully integrating the formal criteria imposed by international standards (e.g. ISO 9001).

The purpose of this paper is to address a perennial question regarding the importance of soft total quality management (TQM) as part of the TQM implementation process – a topic that has been significantly understudied. Specifically, the authors address previous calls in the literature for stressing the soft aspects of TQM and for drawing a critical success factor (CSF) list that is formulated on the basis of empirical research instead of theory.

This is a comparative qualitative case study of three manufacturing SMEs combining empirical data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a large variety of stakeholders – from top managers to shop-floor workers, site visits and observations.

The study identifies 12 soft CSFs, and while most of these factors have been well-documented in the literature (e.g. top management involvement and leadership), the authors show evidence for the existence of other soft constructs that have not been considered or have been given little importance previously (i.e. middle management involvement and support, reward and recognition, CSR focus).

The study fills two major gaps in the (T)QM literature. First, it enriches the understanding of TQM implementation among Japanese SMEs. Second, it addresses the importance of soft TQM as part of the TQM implementation process.

This paper provides company owners and managers with valuable knowledge that may assist their organisations in the pursuit of business excellence including higher product quality and employee satisfaction.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first (international) study to investigate TQM implementation within the context of Japanese SMEs.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the following three questions: what influence has the centrally planned economy and Soviet-style manufacturing had on the evolution and implementation of quality management practices in Bulgaria’s manufacturing sector since the end of the communism; have Bulgaria and its businesses been able to embrace modern quality management philosophies such as TQM, which at times preach the exact opposite philosophies of the Soviet-style manufacturing; and if so, how advanced is the quality mindset of Bulgarian manufacturing businesses today – 24 years after the end of communism?

The paper relies mainly on qualitative research methods. The authors have opted for exploratory approach. Besides an array of articles from scholarly journals, books, and conference proceedings, the authors have relied on five in-depth, semi-structured interviews and one case study in the form of plant visit and observations. The authors have used a framed analytical approach for interpreting the empirical data.

The paper argues that the slow and painful transition from a centrally planned to market economy has impeded the evolution and implementation of QM practices in Bulgaria. More precisely, haphazard reforms in education, lack of highly qualified individuals due to the brain drain in the early 1990s, and the workers’ strong resistance to change have been among the main obstacles in the case of the quality movement.

The work presented in this paper is just the beginning of a series of studies on the quality management initiatives in Bulgaria. To go deeper into the topic, the authors realize that further research in a number of different directions is required. The first direction is related to the degree of relevance of Management Sovieticus in the twenty-first century, which somehow has been completely neglected as a research topic in the last decade. The second direction lies in the aspect of the attributes of Bulgarian managers and their perception toward the importance of the role of quality today.

Countries with similar, political, economic, and social backgrounds – former Eastern Bloc members – can profit a great deal from the authors’ work. More than 20 years since the end of communism, both researchers and entrepreneurs, especially those from the West, have been neglecting the legacy of the centrally planned economy, which has been a major reason for the great number of business failures in the region. The authors’ work seeks to awaken those who still believe that two decades are sufficient to eradicate fully the unfortunate legacy of the command economy.

Little, not to say incremental, research on the quality initiatives in Eastern Europe (*except for Russia) has been conducted so far. As to Bulgaria, the investigation reveals no significant studies on quality management, especially ones published in English. Hence, the authors’ work is the first international study on the evolution and implementation of QM practices in Bulgaria.