Management Fashion: Lifecycles, Triggers, and Collective Learning Processes

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

Research question #2: Does the lifecycle of discourse promoting a fashionable management technique coevolve with the lifecycle of its diffusion across organizations?

Triggers

In Abrahamson's (1996a, 1996b) theory of management fashion, forces both exogenous and endogenous to the management-knowledge market can trigger and shape fashions. The theory does not clarify, however, whether either or both types of forces affect management fashions, and how they might interact to do so. We assume that under general norms of rationality and progress, specific beliefs exist that certain components of organizations--their employees, structures, or strategies, for instance--must be controlled using progressive and rational techniques designed explicitly to manage these components (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). These beliefs create what we call management fashion niches in management discourse: recurrent sources of demand for new discourse promoting fashionable management techniques for rationally managing particular types of organizational components. The niche for fashionable employeemanagement techniques, for example, is a recurrent source of demand for discourse promoting purportedly new and impr oved rational techniques for managing employees, such as quality circles. One discourse niche can accommodate a succession of fashionable management techniques serving varied technical, social, or political purposes. The employeemanagement fashion niche, for example, has accommodated fashionable techniques for union avoidance, higher productivity, and better quality, to name a few.

Exogenous explanations suggest that forces originating from outside the management-knowledge market either create or destroy management fashion niches or trigger demand for new types of techniques within an existing niche. Endogenous explanations suggest, instead, that under general norms of progress, knowledge entrepreneurs repeatedly refill existing niches with purportedly new and improved management techniques, regardless of exogenous forces. It is possible that both processes could coexist, exogenous forces opening up or destroying fashion niches and endogenous forces refilling niches as long as they persist.

Endogenous triggers. We assume that each fashion niche has a finite carrying capacity in terms of the number of fashions it can sustain, because knowledge consumers can only attend to a limited number simultaneously. We also assume that alert and competitive management knowledge entrepreneurs rapidly refill management fashion niches to near maximal capacity because of the great financial returns from being among the first knowledge entrepreneurs to do so. It follows that at least two subtypes of endogenous triggers can set off a management fashion. First, collapse triggers, whereby the collapse within a fashion niche of demand for a fashion because it does not work or because it has become passe, free space within that niche into which vigilant knowledge entrepreneurs can launch the next fashion. So, the collapse of one fashion triggers the next. Second, are elimination triggers, wherein a purportedly new and improved fashion forces out or eliminates an older fashion in the niche.