The development and international diffusion of total quality management (TQM) as a normative theory are examined. It is shown that the main concepts associated with TQM contain an implicit Darwinist view of society made up only of institutions struggling to survive against increasingly ruthless competition. It is also shown that their development was the result of a process in which universities, large corporations, and government interacted to develop a response to the increasingly serious economic challenge that Japan presented to the United States from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. The TQM paradigm was taken up by U.S. multinational corporations and the leading business and management schools of the United States and disseminated throughout the world. It is concluded that TQM has an ideological dimension designed to help diffuse to private and public service institutions throughout the world the dominant U.S. view of society and economy at the end of the twentieth century.

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To portray populism purely as a threat to democracy is to fail to recognise that it expresses widespread feelings of discontent with the current system, which is in systemic crisis. This has expressed itself through both anti-foreigner (nationalist) and anti-elites (class) sentiment. The left needs to focus on a class-based strategy, and to organise in particular among the new working class, which is ethnically diverse and composed mostly of well-educated service workers in London and the large cities. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn sought to mobilise these constituencies, as well as their more traditional constituencies, along class lines. Though they did not succeed electorally, in the longer run, the fact that the new working class is predominantly young and increasingly attracted by an alternative and socialist vision of economy and society may be a cause for some optimism.