The ABC of Qualimetry. The Toolkit for Measuring Immeasurable. Garry G. Azgaldov

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СКАЧАТЬ Qualimetry in Outline

      Over the years following the appearance of qualimetry, many new scientific related with this science resulted, but most of them are scattered over various small editions and remain virtually inaccessible to the broad reading public interested in quality assessment issues. The purpose of this section then is to give a systematic and fairly complete picture of the state of the art in the theory and practice of evaluation of the quality of various objects of a social or economic character.

      1.1. General Information about Quality and Quality Control

      1.1.1. The Essence of Quality and Quality Control

      The Concept of Quality and What Makes It Different from Other Similar Concepts

      As already noted in the Introduction, Quality Control is one of the main applications for qualimetry.

      Unfortunately, modern economic theory and economic practice alike, has unambiguous and common interpretations of the terms quality and control, leading to frequent misunderstandings with resulting in completely different approaches to many important issues. For example, “What really happens to an object (e.g., life quality), which, as often claimed, is being controlled?” Is the process indeed a control one? Is it indeed quality and not something else that is subject to control?”

      These are not idle questions. Unless we figure them out we cannot count on success in addressing the issue of quality. Therefore, let us clarify our definitions of the key terms, quality and control. At the outset we introduce some terms based on which it will be possible to define the desired term, quality control.

      Object, a thing or a process; as applied to the theme of these introduction:

      – An animate thing (e.g., a city dweller) or an inanimate one (e.g., a motor car);

      – A product of labour (e.g., a dwelling house) or a product of nature (e.g., a natural landscape around an urban settlement);

      – A physical object (e.g., an industrial enterprises) or an ideal one (e.g., an artwork made out in a book title);

      – A natural object (e.g., a landscape) or a man-made one (e.g., a set of landscape design structures);

      – A product (e.g., a piece of clothing) or a service (e.g., a medical service);

      – Items (e.g., motorways) or processes (e.g., life activities, which collectively form the quality of life).

      In what follows the term object will apply to an object (which can be called “singular”) such that its quantity, in common measurement units, equals one. Then, a city can be an object but not three cities taken together; likewise one airplane, one specialist, etc.

      Property. A feature, characteristic or peculiarity of an object, that becomes apparent during its consumption/operation/use/application (henceforth, all these terms are used interchangeably) according to the purpose of its use (e.g., the mean lifetime of a community).

      The mention of the condition “according to its purpose” is caused by the following considerations: Imagine an emergency situation in which indoor sports facilities have to be used as temporary shelter for the inhabitants of a city whose homes were destroyed in a disaster (such as caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005). The floor area of the interior, which can accommodate refugees, would seem to be a characteristic of a sports structure. The thing is that this kind of utilisation of athletic facilities is abnormal, out of keeping with their purpose. Therefore, a feature of a sport hall such as “the number of refugees it can accommodate” cannot be regarded as its “property” in a qualimetric sense.

      We draw the reader’s attention to one more circumstance, which, although mentioned in the definition of the term property, is sometimes neglected in practice. Properties are not just any features/characteristics/peculiarities of an object, but only those that occur during its production or consumption/application/use/operation.

      For illustration we give the following example (which for greater clarity relates to product quality). Any product made of a ferromagnetic material is known to possess the quality of magnetostriction, that is, the ability to change its shape and size in response to changes in the magnetic field.

      Let us consider two different kinds of products made of a ferromagnetic material: a mechanical chronometer watch and the track shoes of a caterpillar tractor. Obviously, magnetostriction is incident to both.

      In a chronometer magnetostriction shows in the way its accuracy is affected by exposure to a strong magnetic field. As for tracks, the phenomenon of magnetostriction in a physical sense does take place during their operation, but its impact (e.g., the magnitude of the absolute and relative changes in the linear and volumetric dimensions of the tracks) does not affect the performance of the tracks as part of a caterpillar belt. We can assume, therefore, that magnetostriction is not manifested in the consumption of these products (that is not in a physical but an economic sense.)

      It follows that for an object like a chronometer watch, the presence of magnetostriction is to be considered one of its properties, whereas for a caterpillar track it is not a property in the sense outlined above in the definition of property.

      Quality is a property representing a set of those and only those properties that characterise the consumption results of an object, both desirable and undesirable, excluding the cost of their creation and consumption. That is to say, this set includes only properties associated with the results achieved in consuming an object, and does not include ones associated with the cost of providing these results.

      Notice that:

      (1) The properties that constitute quality do not include those that manifest themselves in the course of production/creation/development/manufacture of objects (hereinafter, unless otherwise indicated we shall generally use instead of four terms – production, creation, development, manufacture – a single umbrella term, production);and

      (2) The entire life cycle of an object will be conventionally considered to consist of only two broad stages, those of production and consumption, with the consumption stage including what is known as distribution (which is only applicable to some objects, e.g., products of labour but not the quality of life).

      Thus, when we analyse the quality of an object we can – even must – ignore its manufacturing technique and its production and consumption costs and focus instead on the results, both positive and negative, achieved at its consumption stage.

      Cost Effectiveness. The totality of properties characterising the capital input into the production and consumption of an object. (In some cases cumulative costs can be represented by so-called reduced costs or full costs.).

      From the definitions and interpretations of the terms quality and cost-effectiveness it follows that the entire set of properties of an object can be divided into two disjoint subsets: the properties that form the quality of the object and those that form its cost effectiveness.

      As consumers are not normally only care for either the quality of an object ignoring its cost effectiveness or, alternatively, its cost effectiveness without regard to its quality, the science of qualimetry, naturally, felt the need for СКАЧАТЬ