Another item – a classic of the literature on quality (quick interview question: what is “quality”?) – is Robert Pirsig’s (1974) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (also interesting for its account of a father and son and its account of an adjunct lecturer trying to make it in academia). For Pirsig, quality is inherent in relationships with people and with the things of the world. Quality, rather than describing norms or criteria, is about the dissolution of the cartesian, subject-object (I-Thou) dualism in shared identity (at-one-with) with whatever the subject of inquiry might be. Similar to Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row.
rWorld2 