“Quality”… It is a term that has claimed prominence throughout the world of technology, business and consumerism. Hardly a day goes by where one is not offered a ‘guarantee of quality’ or ‘quality service’ or products made ‘to standards of quality’. So often is the word used that its cousin term Quantity is seeing indirect competition within what is supposed to be its realm.

Yet what is the true meaning of Quality? Is it a wondrous plateau of achievement to aim for? Is it a term of prestige and class that may be obtained? In order to understand the true meaning of Quality perhaps it is best to consider the meaning of Quantity.

Quantity simply refers to the number of of units where a unit refers to any distinguishable whole physical or conceptual item. Basically put, the more units of an item one has the more quantity we have. For the purpose of example let us consider an apple to be representative of 1 unit.

Quantity is one way of measuring an aspect of prosperity. A person with 5 apples is likely to be more prosperous than a person with only three apples. Even so, there is another factor to consider and, in the context of apples, this is the ripeness of the apples in question. If the apples of the person with a quantity of 3 units are in better condition then the person may be of even or superior position to the person with 5 apples of worse condition… and this is where Quality comes in.

Quantity represents the number of units while Quality represents the unit itself. Therefore, and with this I shall pause, Quality is representative of the relationship between the actual unit and one’s concept of the ideal unit. The closer the relation, the more ‘quality’ a unit has.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 5:14 pm and is filed under A matter of perspective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.