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The secondary income phenomenon Reflect for a moment on the following situations with which most readers will be familiar:

To say that ‘quality’ has become a fashionable word in the British National Health Service would be something of an understatement. It would be fatuous to claim that those in the NHS only took an interest in ‘quality’ as a result of the publication of the Griffiths Enquiry Report. It is however, fair to say that since the emergence of that document many more individuals have been assigned a specific brief for the topic. People with ‘quality’ in their job title, often also holding a nurse management portfolio, are a feature of the current NHS landscape.

The steady growth in the number of British people covered by private health insurance and the associated growth in hospital beds in private facilities, prompted a study of the perceived differences between NHS and private health care facilities. The data were collected via a detailed questionnaire which was eventually completed by 196 respondents, of whom 162 were not covered by private health insurance. The items featured in the questionnaire were , to some extent, based on the work of previous researchers, this work being reviewed here . However, the topics included also reflected earlier research which had been focused on patient satisfaction with their hospital stay. In addition other names were developed on the basis of a series of interviews. The eventual questionnaire features 72 items and this paper is concerned with the first 48 of these which, in addition to soliciting differential assessments of aspects of the two different environments, also sought an assessment of the importance attached to that topic. The results presented here show not only the simple response patterns, but also the results of a factor analysis which identified six readily interpretable factors. The scores on these six factors were found to differ significantly between groups of respondents.

Explores the history of quality management, commenting on the work of many of the quality “gurus”. Considers the relationship between quality management and the management science of operational research.

Defines sexual harassment and discrimination in law before covering the effects which these issues bring. Considers the traditional culture of the fire service and the barriers the industry may still possess. Gives recent examples of discrimination in today’s service and outlines steps for prevention covering areas such as education and training, recruitment, and policy. Looks at ways to combat issues when such procedures fail.

The experience is reported of a recent study tour of US companies which are known for their outstanding levels of customer service. A number of themes for success are highlighted which relate to human resource issues, operational considerations and marketing, together with some of the performance indicators which are central to the provision of excellent service.

In the service sector literature, both marketers and organizational behaviourists emphasize the importance of the internal dynamics of the organization in terms of a network of customers and suppliers interacting together to satisfy customers. Reports on the progress of an ongoing project aimed at identifying and measuring those factors which determine how hospital ward staff perceive the quality of the support they receive from other units in hospitals.

Benchmarking within the service industry is not as easily definable as in manufacturing, where there are many processes common to companies in businesses which are different from one another. Many of the key elements of service quality are more nebulous. Describes the study forms of some of the US′s most renowned service providers by groups of UK executives. Asserts that this type of benchmarking is more than just corporate tourism, detailing the areas of best practice which were around.

Quality concerns for management was one of the key themes of the Fifth Annual British Academy of Management Conference which was held in Bath in September 1991. This brought together a number of writers from a range of disciplines including production management, marketing and industrial relations. The sessions were chaired by Barbara Lewis from Manchester School of Management, UMIST, and papers were a mixture of reporting empirical findings and those being more conceptual in their approach. This short review summarizes the papers based on the abstracts with the aim of encouraging those interested to contact the authors concerned and also make a few general remarks on the state of TQM research.

In this paper, we examine the effects of legitimation and delegitimation of female leaders in male- and female-dominated organizations on leader behavior toward their subordinates. Drawing upon status and legitimacy theories, we argue that delegitimation represents one event that makes gender stereotypes salient in different organizational contexts, and by this means affects leader–subordinate interaction. Gender stereotypes will be more salient in male- than in female-dominated organizations, but only when female leaders are delegitimated. Specifically, we hypothesize that deauthorized female leaders will exhibit more deferential and less directive behavior than authorized female leaders, and this effect will be stronger in male- than in female-dominated organizations. Authorized female leaders, however, will express a similar amount of deferential and directive behavior, regardless of organizational sex composition. To test these hypotheses, we created a laboratory experiment with simulated organizations. Results are mixed. Deauthorized leaders are marginally more deferential than authorized leaders, and this effect is stronger in male-dominated organizations; authorized leaders express similar amounts of deferential behavior in both types of organizations. Yet, leaders are more directive in male- than in female-dominated organizations, whether they are deauthorized or authorized. We discuss the implications of these results and future directions for this research.