Quality in health care

Explores the notion that the introduction of total quality management (TQM) in the public health‐care sector indicates a conceptual break with a tradition in which the authority to define and interpret the meaning of medical practice has been located solely within the medical profession. It also serves to shift the focus of medical practice away from its contextual and interactional character towards numerical representations and codification in monetary terms. Further, it is argued that the realization of management ideals in everyday practice is dependent more on the availability of pre‐existing technologies and standard procedures than on the ingenuity of particular organizational and institutional actors. These arguments are illustrated with the reutilization for TQM purposes of “local incident reports” in a Swedish hospital organization.