This chapter starts with some general observations about the problems involved in understanding the origins of something as all pervasive but diffuse as quality assurance. It then considers how this new occupation or industry has developed in Britain and America, looking at both manufacturing industry and the public sector. It will become apparent that Britain has been substantially influenced by ideas developed in America, and in particular by the quality movement promoted by W. Edwards Deming and his associates in the early 1980s. However, the influence is by no means one-way, and the chapter aims to show that Britain still has a distinctive approach to assuring quality in the public sector based on central regulation and control. The second half of the chapter will examine how quality assurance has expanded through constructing professional work as a social problem. It concludes by offering an overview of those institutions and processes that seem sociologically interesting and are considered in more detail in later chapters.

The origins of quality assurance

One disconcerting, and yet comforting, feature of human societies is that governing ideas and values change relatively quickly, so that what to one generation seems self-evident and unquestionable can be challenged and then completely forgotten within a period of years. For the victors, it is tempting to write up history as a narrative of inevitable triumph of enlightenment over ignorance. Michel Foucault’s archaeological approach to intellectual history (1967, 1977) brilliantly shows how this is never true of what actually happens. Similarly, Thomas Kuhn (1962) showed how scientific revolutions only really succeed when the old order retires and can no longer block the dissemination of new ideas. In fact, all careful history shows that the triumph of some cause can take many years, often depends on unexpected or contingent events, and did not seem at all inevitable at the time.