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Activity‐suited buildings create effective processes in a business. Building adaptation has a limited time perspective; suited premises need to change over time, in order to keep up with the processes in using a building. In an ideal situation, owners, clients and users, based on a demand for effortless adaptability, would be able to transform the building when it is needed. This puts high demand on the adaptability in a building, i.e. flexibility. The purpose of this paper is to provide other decision‐makers with a tool to validate information regarding flexibility.

The paper identifies “flexibility factors” and investigages how the factors are influencing the adaptability. In order to validate the importance of the factors, they are placed in order of precedence and processed using factor analysis.

From a municipal and socio‐economic viewpoint, there are advantages in more flexible buildings. To build and administer sites over the total building life can increase the flexibility of buildings and, used widely, should increase the opportunity to use the nation's property more effectively than from an ordinary viewpoint.

The results will be relevant for the whole construction sector.

The purpose of this paper is to look more closely at incentives for a landlord to use individual metering and charging of heat and water. This paper also aims to look at the possible reasons for the differences in use of individual metering and charging between Sweden and Germany.

The research in this paper is based on a questionnaire and interviews with landlords, in Sweden, using individual metering and charging.

The two main incentives for the landlords in the survey to use individual metering are the possibility to save energy and the possibility to create a fair allocation of heating cost between tenants. Sweden has a long history of heat and water included in the rent leading to a possibly tougher transition to individual metering.

To see the overall picture and understand the purpose of individual metering is important to avoid conflicts between landlords and tenants. The paper aids this process.

The two‐fold purpose of this paper is identifying areas of difficulty in managing the needs of end‐users in the course of the design and delivery of construction projects and suggesting possible solutions.

The focus of the paper is the interaction between three principal parties: end‐users, project leader (a selected end‐user) and facility planner (a facilities professional). The context is two projects in the public sector: a university and a hospital. The end‐users of both are known from the start and participate in the whole process. The paper is based on a case study comprising 12 interviews – seven end‐users and five professionals.

The research shows that during the project's design and delivery, communication and attitudinal problems have to be managed alongside the inherent difficulty of understanding end‐users' real needs. To help in managing these issues, facility planners relied heavily on pedagogical and behavioural skills, rather than formalised methods as found in the literature.

The findings highlight areas of difficulty for managers and planners and how these areas were handled in practice. Suggestions on how to resolve some of the areas are presented and discussed.

Much of the research related to managing end‐users focuses on how to extract value from the construction process, for instance providing greater flexibility and improved air quality. This paper concentrates on relations between parties who are central to the briefing, design and delivery process

Total quality management (TQM) has been recognised and used during the last decades by organisations all over the world to develop a quality focus and improve organisational performance. In spite of this, TQM implementation is still problematic for many organisations. In this perspective important factors to succeed with the organisational change that TQM implementation implies will be discussed in this paper. Also presented is a multiple‐case study of TQM implementation processes in small organisations with a focus on core value aspects. An overarching implementation model is presented based on the multiple‐case study analysis and the theoretical frame. This model implies that TQM implementation will start with core values committed leadership, everybody’s commitment and customer orientation.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ongoing development of quality management, and whether the concepts being discussed can be agreed – and what influence this might have on the quality movement and quality practice.

Literature review and meta‐analysis of current trends has been used to create a conceptual basis for current quality management questions.

A large part of the development of the quality concept and quality management has taken place without much consideration of what quality management really is or should be. Over time their definitions have been widened to incorporate wellbeing of society, the environment and future generations. Whereas top managers need to address all parts of business, there is a need to separate quality issues from other issues. It is believed that there is a need for quality experts and a discipline of quality management. Quality excellence with a strong customer focus should be one prerequisite to attain true business excellence. There are of course legitimate reasons to address issues as organizational and global sustainability, human rights, financial stability and environmental protection. To properly address these issues, concepts such as business management or stakeholder management might be more appropriate.

In the paper, the point is made that there is a need for quality management focusing on its core purpose: management of quality to provide customer satisfaction. In relation to current trends of adding aspects into quality management to develop concepts that are mere dialectal variants to the original, this “back‐to‐basics” approach is novel.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the development of the quality movement in Sweden since the mid-20th century. The authors are convinced that a summary of the Swedish quality journey so far will offer important lessons for further quality improvements in Sweden and elsewhere.

The authors study how the quality movement has been included in the industrial agenda and how it has been adopted in student curricula and in research. The authors have a focus on how business leaders have learnt, adopted, adapted and innovated with respect to quality development. often in collaboration with academia.

Although the quality movement has fit well with the Swedish culture and that successful corporate leaders have successfully used the specific cultural characteristics there is still a lot to be learnt with respect to the public sector, where the ideas from the quality movement have problem to overcome institutional barriers.

The study is limited to the Swedish context.

There is a serious need to revitalize the public sector by getting leaders and politicians to understand the need for systematic quality improvement.

If future Swedish achievements with respect to healthcare and other social welfare elements are to once again become world-class, the public sector needs to be open-minded and collaborate with the industrial sector and academia to find cost-effective strategies for making quality improvements. However, the private sector must also be alert not to be overtaken by some highly active Asian countries.

Swedish large companies have been very successful in applying quality leadership – however, in the public sector, this has not been the case. Suggestions for improvement are made.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

The application of a process view, as complement to the traditional functional division, is often a way to highlight organisational improvement potential. This paper examines the process of providing university level education in quality management, using Sweden as an example. The purpose is to assess the performance of university education as part of the supply chain of providing quality management to a society. This has been done by studying the actual offering compared to a notional benchmark of best performance. Preliminary results indicate that there could be a significant improvement potential in both providing more education of the right type and in the right way. A lot of similar basic courses are given but with varying names, possibly reflecting difficulties in defining the area of quality management and its constituents. An important reason for the detected improvement potential seems to be the lack of ownership of the studied supply chain of providing university level quality education to the Swedish society.