We witness today a tremendous intensification of global competition that turns to be and to become an obvious reality for new and old businesses, for the companies that meet complex challenges in every phase of corporate management. Among the management areas that should come under a careful examination, quality management is one of those that must be examined afresh when economies, markets and industries operations become global.

As practice proved, quality management concept evolved from the engineering and statistical concepts, centered on the statistical quality control, to the large view of the concept that encompasses broad organizational issues and scopes. Today, the quality concepts are under the domination of Total Quality Management(TQM). Concepts standing out as main factors in TQM implementation are these days well established and used: customer value satisfaction, continuous improvement, total organizational involvement.

Though TQM is successfully used by many firms, many conceptual and practical questions remain unanswered while global markets and industries are a fact of economic reality.

In this context, Global Quality Management (GQM) is a new and emerging area of quality management practice but, despite its frequent use, it is not yet defined, analysed and researched. This paper makes GQM its research focus in order to contribute to the understanding of the concept, and to establish a track for new and future research.

quality, management, total quality management, global quality management