Management Fashion: Lifecycles, Triggers, and Collective Learning Processes

Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec, 1999 by Eric Abrahamson, Gregory Fairchild

This theory-development case study of the quality circle management fashion focuses on three features of management-knowledge entrepreneurs' discourse promoting or discrediting such fashions: its lifecycle, forces triggering stages in its lifecycle, and the type of collective learning it fostered. Results suggest, first, that variability in when different types of knowledge entrepreneurs begin, continue, and stop promoting fashions explains variability in their lifecycles; second, that historically unique conjunctions of forces, endogenous and exogenous to the management-fashion market, trigger and shape management fashions; and third, that emotionally charged, enthusiastic, and unreasoned discourse characterizes the upswings of management fashion waves, whereas more reasoned, unemotional, and qualified discourse characterizes their downswings, evidencing a pattern of superstitious collective learning [*]

Organizational theorists who study management discourse--what is said and written about management-related issues--have focused on discourse promoting techniques for managing organizations and their employees (Abrahamson, 1989, 1997; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Guillen, 1994; Shenhav, 1995). This focus has originated in part from the claim that managers use discourse about management techniques to communicate to organizational stakeholders that their organizations conform to institutional norms mandating the use of these techniques (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). More recently, the importance of such management discourse has been further underscored by the proposition that it also enables the diffusion of management techniques across thousands of dissimilar organizations (Abrahamson, 1991). It does so by reinforcing the belief that these organizations are similar in ways that would cause them to benefit equally from adopting a management technique (Strang and Meyer, 1994). For example, discourse claiming that all U.S. o rganizations, like all Japanese organizations, would benefit from using so-called Japanese management techniques may have impelled the widespread diffusion of these techniques across thousands of disparate U.S. organizations during the 1980s and early 1990s. The notion that management discourse matters because it shapes the diffusion of management techniques has also drawn attention to the knowledge entrepreneurs who produce such discourse--management consultants, for example--and to their interests in disseminating discourse promoting certain management techniques in order to trigger their diffusion (DiMaggio, 1988; Abrahamson, 1996a, 1996b; Jackson, 1996; Meyer, 1996; Lamertz and Baum, 1998).

Research on management discourse focused originally on what has been called rhetorics: widely spoken and written discourses justifying the use of families of related techniques for managing employees (Abrahamson, 1989, 1997; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Guillen, 1994; Shenhav, 1995). The scientific management rhetoric, for example, promoted a family of related management techniques, such as time and motion studies, rate setting, job analysis, piece rate, and work measurement. In this article, we examine the parts of such rhetorics that promote a single technique. We focus on management fashions, relatively transitory collective beliefs, disseminated by the discourse of management-knowledge entrepreneurs, that a management technique is at the forefront of rational management progress. [1] We study the often-noted waves in the popularity of discourse that promotes single, fashionable management techniques and can cause their transient use by thousands of organizations.

We examine management fashions for two reasons. First, the focus in previous research has been on institutionalized organizational forms and techniques, rather than on understanding the rise and fall of uninstitutionalized or weakly institutionalized organizational forms and techniques. As Zucker (1988) noted, Hughes (1936: 180) defined institution as the "establishment of relative permanence of a distinct social sort." Initially, this and other definitions focused neoinstitutional theorists on the relatively permanent stability of institutions, deemphasizing the study of institutional change (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991; Hirsch and Lounsbury, 1997). As Scott (1995) noted, neoinstitutionalists have begun studying change in terms of how institutional permanence emerges or fails to emerge (e.g., Rowan, 1982; Cole, 1985, 1989; Brint and Karabel, 1991), how it diffuses and is reproduced despite environmental shocks (e.g., Tolbert and Zucker, 1983), and how it breaks down through a process of deinstitutionalization (e.g., Oliver, 1992; Davis and Thompson, 1994). The focus has remained, however, on changes influencing relatively permanent stability in institutionalized practices, rather than on relatively constant transience in practices that are not institutionalized, such as the relatively constant transience in the popularity of fashionable management discourse promoting various management techniques (Abrahamson, 1991; Tolbert and Zucker, 1996).