QUALITY, TECHNOLOGY, AND GLOBAL MANUFACTURING

It has been more than a decade since the quality movement was reborn in U.S. industry, and there is widespread dissatisfaction with the results of some of these programs. At the same time, product and service R&D is on the rise. These trends are incorporated here into an extension of the Utterback‐Abernathy model to examine the quality, technology, and performance relationship. Six hundred durable goods firms in 20 countries were surveyed and it was found that technology significantly moderated the association of R&D intensity and total quality management (tqm) with market share, controlling for industry category. In high technology firms, R&D intensity was significantly associated with market share; in low technology firms, tqm was significantly associated with market share. R&D intensity and tqm were significantly and inversely related, while R&D intensity and computer‐aided manufacturing (cam) were significantly and directly related.