Management Gurus and Management Fashions - Book Review

Administrative Science Quarterly, Sept, 2002 by Michael Macy

Brad Jackson. New York: Routledge, 2001. 208 pp. $29.95, paper.

Why would bright, well-educated managers under intense pressure to "get it right" line up like lemmings to jump on one sure-fire, can't-miss panacea after the other? The list includes TQM, Theory Z (and Y and X), Management by Objectives, Zero-Based Budgeting, MBWA, Matrix Management, Kaiban, One-Minute Managing, Business Process Reengineering, Excellence, Outsourcing, Empowerment, JIT, and Benchmarking, to name a few of the more prominent "flavors of the month." Brad Jackson charts the familiar trajectories: an electric rise to prominence followed by progressive decline and often vitriolic backlash. Despite the contagious enthusiasm these movements seem to inspire, numerous surveys show that about three out of four managers end up disappointed with the results. What is most puzzling is that this disappointment only seems to whet their appetites for the next hot innovation.

The puzzle is compounded, Jackson notes, by the curious reluctance of academics to look carefully at what most disdain as so much snake oil, as if taking these "silver bullets" seriously as a research topic might suggest that one takes them seriously as prescriptive innovations. As a consequence, while management gurus and the fads they inspire have "received considerable media attention . . . they have not been subjected to any form of sustained and systematic academic analysis" (p. 5), with the exception of Abrahamson and his collaborators, whom Jackson cites extensively.

Jackson's major goal is to demonstrate the theoretical richness of this empirical material when subjected to a carefully detailed inspection and analysis. More precisely, he aims to uncover the infectious appeal of ideas that turn out to be simplistic and contradictory in ways that make them risky to implement. His secondary aim is to equip academics to "intervene in this process to make it a more technically useful, collective learning process" (p. 6). He is vague here (perhaps intentionally) as to whether the objective is for academics to figure out how to inoculate managers from these contagions or how to turn the epidemics into something more benign, if not therapeutic.

Jackson identifies four basic approaches to explaining management gurus and fashions: (1) the rational approach, in which competitive pressures force managers to watch for better mousetraps and, if not adopt early, at least avoid being the last to sign on (which fails to explain the downside of the fashion cycle, a problem Jackson overlooks); (2) the structural approach, in which economic, political, and cultural currents intersect to open and close opportunity space for consultants to fill; (3) the institutional approach, in which organizational decision makers must rely on "best practice" to navigate uncertainty, creating biases toward isomorphism and self-reinforcing cascades of adoption and abandonment; and (4) the charismatic approach, in which "gurus" provide reassurance and affirmation to executives confronted with debilitating uncertainty and spiraling competition. This last approach differs from the first three in emphasizing psychological rather than ecological or sociological factors that account f or the rapid diffusion of innovative organizational technologies. Jackson criticizes all four approaches, however, for tending to equate the emergence of gurus and the diffusion of fashions. His theoretical innovation is to argue that the dynamics that underlie the career trajectories of a Michael Hammer or Stephen Covey or Peter Senge are very different from the processes that explain the adoption and abandonment of "Re-engineering" or "Effectiveness" or "Organizational Learning." The appeal of gurus is quite distinct from that of hot business practices. This point alone makes the book important and worth assigning to students and is likely to force reconsideration of theories of fashionable innovation.

Using "fantasy theme analysis," a dramaturgical mode of rhetorical criticism, Jackson then focuses on the rhetorics used by three movement entrepreneurs (Hammer, Covey, and Senge) to engage the attention and affective commitment of a managerial following. Ironically, Jackson's explanatory strategy illustrates the confirmation bias that may explain lemming-like behavior among intendedly rational managers focused not on popularity but performance. The business press focuses on "success stories" far more than it features failures, unless the failure is truly catastrophic. Similarly, Jackson generalizes from a set of consultant superstars. The three gurus he studies all utilize highly effective and very similar rhetorics. The problem is that hundreds of other consultants are also highly skilled at tickling the insecurities of potential clients, but only a few come to rival rock stars and televangelists in their ability to electrify. Jackson succumbs to the cognitive bias that traps journalists and popular comment ators who assume that superstars must really be special. Yet, for every Britney Spears or Robert Schuller there are hundreds of garage bands and stump preachers out there who could just as easily occupy the spotlight. The power law of celebrity does not reflect the skewed distribution of talent any more than the power law of organizational size reflects the skewed distribution of the ability to grow. Stardom is not just about the star, it is also about the emergent properties of a self-organizing firmament whose interdependent elements influence and affirm one another's beliefs and decisions (often indirectly, inadvertently, and unconsciously) in response to the influence they receive.