What makes quality assurance interesting as a sociological topic is that, although it is politically secure, and taken for granted as the only way to manage the public services, there are still widely differing views about this new form of regulation. On the one hand, there are the certainties of government, as illustrated in speeches during the late 1990s by Tony Blair, about the need for constant improvement in the delivery of public services, and the matter-of-fact, institutionalised character of quality assurance described in Chapters Four and Five. Then there are the frustrations experienced by professionals on the ground considered in Chapters Three and Six and the broader criticisms of academics summarised and discussed in Chapter Seven, which are partly cultural criticisms of the role of science and regulation in the modern world.

As Herbert Blumer (1971, p 299) noted in the early 1970s, ‘the vast over-organisation that is developing in modern society’ is not generally viewed as a political issue. Right-wing parties and business groups complain about over-regulation, but accept the need for a strong state. Progressive thinkers, including sociologists who write books about the problems of modernity, are worried about growing levels of economic inequality and insecurity within and between nation states, as well as damage to the environment and the cultural problems of rampant individualism. Few social critics since Max Weber have, however, focused on the growth of bureaucracy and regulation as a political, social or cultural problem.

Nevertheless, there is a debate taking place about quality assurance. This partly relates to whether we trust professionals, like doctors, teachers or lawyers, or believe that they require greater regulation. More fundamentally, however, it raises difficult issues about whether ‘continuous improvement’ (the great dream of the modern period) is possible, and whether one can measure everything using scientific procedures. This concluding chapter reviews the two sides of the argument (quality assurance and its critics) and considers the extent to which evidence of the kind supplied about what measuring quality actually involves, and how it is experienced by professionals and organisations, can resolve this kind of political or moral argument.