The Oxford Handbook of Management Ideas 9780198794219, 0198794215

Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of MANAGEMENT IDEAS
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
The Editors
The Contributors
Researching Management Ideas: an introduction
Introduction
Organizing Ideas (and Practices)
The Rise of Research on Management Ideas
A Pluralistic or Fragmented Field?
Handbook Structure
The Contributions
Understanding Management Ideas
Actors
Processes
Contexts
References
PART I: UNDERSTANDING MANAGEMENT IDEAS
Chapter 1: The system of management ideas: origins, micro-foundations, and dynamics
Introduction
Systems of Management Ideas
The Notion of a ‘System’
Systems of Management Ideas in the Literature
Micro-Foundations as a Partial Gap in the Literature
An Evolutionary Model of the System of Management Ideas
Criticisms of the Evolutionary Approach
Dynamics and Consequences of a System of Management Ideas at the Organizational Level
Two Streams of Literature
Innovation and Fashion
Conclusion
References
Chapter 2: The Lifecycle of Management Ideas: innovation, diffusion, institutionalization, dormancy, and rebirth
Introduction
Stages in the Lifecycle of Management Ideas
Stages in the Lifecycle of Innovations
Early-Life CNFs Causing Transitions to the Innovation Stage
The Mid-Life CNF Causing Transitions to the Diffusion Stage
Stage 3: The Late-Life CNF Causing Transitions to the Institution Stage
Stages 4 and 5: The Dormancy and Rebirth CNFs to the Dormancy and Rebirth Stages
Management Ideas
Rhetorics
Management Models
Management Innovations
The Lifecycle of Abstract Management Ideas
The Innovation and Diffusion Stage in Abstract Management Ideas
The Institutionalization of Abstract Management Ideas
The Dormancy and Rebirth of Abstract Management Ideas
The Lifecycle of Specific Management Ideas
Early-Life CNF Causing Transitions to the Innovation Stage
Mid-Life CNF Causing Transitions to the Diffusion Stage
Late-Life CNF Causing Transitions to the Institution Stage
Rebirth CNF Causing Transitions to the Rebirth Stage
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: The Philosophy of Management Ideas
Introduction
Management Ideas
Positivism
Interactionism
Actualism: Actor-Network Theory (ANT)
Social Constructivism
Critical Realism: An Ecumenical Philosophy?
A Critical Realist Definition of Management Ideas
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Methods for the Study of Management Ideas
Introduction
Methodology and Sample Size
Large N Research
Moderate N Studies
Small N Studies
Case Studies
Bibliometric Studies and Discourse Analysis
Bibliometric Research
Discourse Analysis
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References
Chapter 5: Management Techniques
Introduction
Management Techniques as Best Practices
Management Techniques and Firm Performance
Management Techniques as Symbols of Rationality
Management Techniques as Intertwined with Management Practice: A Practice-Based Perspective
Translation Studies
Formal Techniques in Organizations
Facilitating Knowledge Creation and Sharing
Creating Confidence and Motivation for Change
Formal Techniques in Individual Managers’ Work
Conclusions and Directions for Future Research
References
Chapter 6: Instrumental Understanding of Management Ideas
Introduction
Theoretical Positioning
A Modernistic–Rationalistic Perspective
A Social Constructionist–Symbolic Perspective
A Pragmatic Perspective
The Intricate Roads to Instrumentalization
Instrumentalization as Translation
Illuminating Winding Implementation Paths
An Instrumental Translation Theory
Translation Competence and Instrumentalization of Management Ideas
Concluding Remarks
References
PART II: ACTORS
Chapter 7: Thought Leaders and Followers: the impact of consultants and advisers on management ideas
Introduction
Management Consultancy: Innovation and Legitimation of Management Ideas
Codification and Colonization of Management Knowledge
Consultancy, Fashion, and Management Careers
Shaping Policy and Political Economy
Challenges to Consultants as Providers of Management Ideas
Management Scepticism and Resistance
New Models of Consultancy
New Challenges and Uncertainties
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Business Studies and Management Ideas
Introduction
Institutions of Academic Business Studies
Content of Business Studies
Business Studies as Providers of Ideas
Business Studies as Producers of Ideas
The Role of Practice, Consultants, and Media
Business Studies under Scrutiny
The Role of Internationalization
Accreditations
Rankings
Research Evaluations
Alternatives to Academic Business Studies
Non-Academic Training
Corporate Universities
Conclusions
References
Chapter 9: Multinational and Transnational Organizations: the role of globalizing actors
Introduction
Globalizing Actors in the International Management Literature
Knowledge Transfer in MNCs
International Assignments
Global Elites
Bringing Context and Person Back Into Focus
MNCs in their Professional and Institutional Context
Intra-Organizational Dynamics of Idea and Norm Adoption
The Role of Individuals in Corporate Decision-Making
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Business media: from gatekeeping to transmediality
Business Media: From Gatekeeping to Transmediality
Business-Media Research
Historical Development of Business Media
Business-Media Impact on Organizations
Business Media as Carriers and Co-Producers of Management Ideas
Towards a Media-Theoretical Framework
What is Media Logic?
Media Logic and the Evolution of Business Media
Traditional Business-Media Logics and Convergence
Sources and Postures of Legitimate Knowledge Claims
Shifting Business-Media Logics: Internet and Social Media
Business-Media Logics and Technological Convergence: Towards Transmediality
Towards a Renewed Agenda for Business-Media Research
References
Chapter 11: Management’s Gurus
Introduction
The Gurus of Management
Guru Theory
The ‘Guru Industry’
Concluding Comments
References
Chapter 12: The Consumers and Co-Producers of Management Ideas
Introduction
Consuming, Co-Producing, and Translating Management Ideas
Managers
Consultants
Researchers
Students
Citizens
Consumption across Boundaries: Managers Consuming and Co-Producing Ideas with Consultants
Conclusion
References
PART III: PROCESSES
Chapter 13: The Re-Adoption of Management Ideas: how they come, how they go, and why some come back
Introduction
The Adoption of Management Ideas: An Overview of the Field
Fashion
Function
Process
A Case Study: The Idea of Self-Management
Self-Management as Fashionable and Functional
Re-adoption Process of Self-Management: How it Comes and Goes
External Conditions
Internal Conditions
Technology
Employee Experience
Conclusion
References
Chapter 14: The Persistence of Management Ideas: how framing keeps ‘Lean’ moving
Introduction
Management Ideas
Interpretive Space
The Promise of Performance Improvement
Framing Moves
Framing and Reframing Management Ideas
Framing and Reframing Lean
Global Level
Toyota and ‘Japanese Manufacturing’
The Machine That Changed the World
Lean Thinking
Field Levels
Lean in Dutch Healthcare
‘Lean på norsk’ (‘Lean—the Norwegian Way’)
Conclusion: Routes of Survival?
References
Chapter 15: Evolving Managemen tIdeas
Introduction
The Mainstream Approach: A Classic ‘Chapter Two’ Approach to the Evolution of Management
The Embedded Approach: Management Ideas Embedded in Contexts
The Critical Alternatives Approach to the Evolution of Management Ideas
Continuing Historical Questions and Avenues for Future Research
References
Chapter 16: Popular Management Ideas
Introduction
What is Popularity?
Popularity as Collective Choice
Step 1. Appearance
Step 2. Visibility
Step 3. Raising Interest
Step 4. Differentiation
Step 5. Approval
Step 6. Adoption
Popularity as a Genre
Popularity as Ownership
Conclusion
References
Chapter 17: Professiona lstructures and practice change: institutionalization processes in accounting and strategy
Introduction
Institutionalization and Professional Structure
Practice Change in Accounting and Strategy
Conclusions
References
Chapter 18: Management Ideas as Standards
Introduction
Management Ideas and Standardization
Defining Standards in the Context of Management Ideas
Degrees of Codification of Management Ideas as Standards
Reasons for Turning Management Ideas into Codified Standards
Production and Diffusion of Codified Management Standards
Development of Codified Management Standards (Phase 1)
Diffusion and Use of Codified Management Standards (Phase 2)
The Consequences of Turning Management Ideas into Codified Standards
Conclusion
References
Chapter 19: Understanding and Analysing Resistance to Management Ideas
Introduction
Resistance in Context
Industrial Relations
Labour Process Theory
Post-Structural Theorizing
Productive or Facilitative Resistance: A Contemporary Debate
Conclusion
References
Chapter 20: Performance Implications of Management Ideas
Introduction
Review of the Literature on the Link between Management Ideas and Performance
Key Approaches to Studying the Implications of Management Ideas for Performance
Technological Resources-Focused Approach
Human Resources-Focused Approach
Relational Resources-Focused Approach
Knowledge Resources-Focused Approach
Summary
Complications in the Management Ideas–Performance Link
Two Performance Dilemmas of Management Ideas
Management Ideas and the ‘Sustainability Paradox’
Expanding Research on Management Ideas and Performance
Conclusion
References
PART IV: CONTEXTS
Chapter 21: The (geo-)politics of management ideas: three moments in the trajectory of an instrument of power
Introduction
The Travels of Words: Exploring the Roots of Management
Management and the (American) Corporation: Ensuring Control and Building Legitimacy
Management Ideas as Geo-Political Weapons: The Dynamics of Diffusion after 1945
Framing the Hegemonic Backbone of Neo-Liberalism: Institutionalization and Naturalization after 1989
Conclusion
References
Chapter 22: Management Ideas and the Social Construction of Organizations
Introduction
The Construction of an ‘Organizing Society’
Limitations and Future Research
Conclusion and Implications
References
Chapter 23: The Role of Family Firmsin Corporate Sustainability
Introduction
Corporate Sustainability: Concept and Diffusion
The Role of Organizational Context
Diffusion of Corporate Sustainability in Family Firms
Temporal Dimension
Effective Organizational Control
Diffusion Differences between Family Firms
Active Role in the Institutional Environment
Timing in the Family Business Lifecycle
Conclusion and Future Research
References
Chapter 24: Managing Public Service Professionals Under New Public Management
Introduction
NPM as a Unit-Idea
NPM and Neo-Liberalism
Public Service Professionals Remade
Conclusion: Professional Futures
References
Chapter 25: Management Ideas in Everyday Life
Introduction
Management and the Everyday
Early Managerial Incursions into the Everyday
The Rise of Lifestyle Management
Managing Bodies
Quantify Your Life
Concluding Thoughts
References
Chapter 26: Changing the Critique: from critical management studies to activist scholarship
Introduction
Four Traditions of Critique of Management Ideas and Practices
Organizing Colonial and Gendered Relations Management Ideas
Developing a Wider Purpose for the Critical Study of Management Ideas
From Intellectual Labour to Activist Inquiry
Locale of the Activist Inquiry: The University as a Polygamous Host
Hystericizing Critique and Activism in/with the University
Brief Background
SheepMilkNZ Activism: A Discussion
Conclusion
References
Chapter 27: Alternatives to Management Ideas
Introduction: What’s Wrong with This Book?
The Management of Everything
The (Ideo)logic of ‘Management’ in Management Ideas
Organizing
Suma
Three Principles for Non-Managerial Alternatives
Schools for Organizing
Acknowledgements
References
Chapter 28: New Directions for Research on Management Ideas
Introduction
Making Connections
Familiar Distinctions and Dilemmas: A Third Way?
The Impacts of Ideas and Emerging Contexts
Engaging with Diverse Actors
Value at the Margins: Empirical, Disciplinary, and Theoretical Opportunities
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

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t h e ox f o r d h a n d b o o k o f

M A NAGE M E N T I DE A S

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The Oxford Handbook of

MANAGEMENT IDEAS Edited by

ANDREW STURDY, STEFAN HEUSINKVELD, TRISH REAY, and

DAVID STRANG

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958061 ISBN 978–0–19–879421–9 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Contents

List of Figuresix List of Tablesxi List of Contributorsxiii

Researching Management Ideas: An Introduction

1

Andrew Sturdy, Stefan Heusinkveld, Trish Reay, and David Strang

PA RT I   U N DE R STA N DI N G M A NAG E M E N T I DE A S 1. The System of Management Ideas: Origins, Micro-Foundations, and Dynamics

25

Michael J. Mol, Nicolai Foss, and Julian Birkinshaw

2. The Lifecycle of Management Ideas: Innovation, Diffusion, Institutionalization, Dormancy, and Rebirth

42

Eric Abrahamson and Alessandro Piazza

3. The Philosophy of Management Ideas

68

Joe O’Mahoney

4. Methods for the Study of Management Ideas

86

David Strang and Christian Wittrock

5. Management Techniques

104

Andreas Werr and Peter Walgenbach

6. Instrumental Understanding of Management Ideas Kjell Arne Røvik

121

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vi   contents

PA RT I I   AC TOR S 7. Thought Leaders and Followers: The Impact of Consultants and Advisers on Management Ideas

141

Christopher Wright

8. Business Studies and Management Ideas

159

Lars Engwall and Linda Wedlin

9. Multinational and Transnational Organizations: The Role of Globalizing Actors

177

Philipp Kern, Phil Almond, Tony Edwards, and Olga Tregaskis

10. Business Media: From Gatekeeping to Transmediality

195

Marcos Barros and Charles-Clemens Rüling

11. Management’s Gurus

216

David Collins

12. The Consumers and Co-Producers of Management Ideas

232

Suleika Bort and Alfred Kieser

PA RT I I I   P RO C E S SE S 13. The Re-adoption of Management Ideas: How They Come, How They Go, and Why Some Come Back

251

Patrick Reinmoeller, Shaz Ansari, and Mohit Mehta

14. The Persistence of Management Ideas: How Framing Keeps ‘Lean’ Moving271 Jos Benders, Marlieke van Grinsven, and Jonas A. Ingvaldsen

15. Evolving Management Ideas

286

Hannele Seeck and Juha-Antti Lamberg

16. Popular Management Ideas

303

Hélène Giroux

17. Professional Structures and Practice Change: Institutionalization Processes in Accounting and Strategy Richard Whittington and Deborah A. Anderson

320

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contents   vii

18. Management Ideas as Standards

337

Andreas Rasche and David Seidl

19. Understanding and Analysing Resistance to Management Ideas

354

Darren McCabe, Sylwia Ciuk, and Stephanie Russell

20. Performance Implications of Management Ideas

374

Christopher Wickert, Jost Sieweke, and Riku Ruotsalainen

PA RT I V   C ON T E X T S 21. The (Geo-)Politics of Management Ideas: Three Moments in the Trajectory of an Instrument of Power

393

Marie-Laure Salles-Djelic

22. Management Ideas and the Social Construction of Organizations

411

Shawn Pope and Patricia Bromley

23. The Role of Family Firms in Corporate Sustainability

427

Pramodita Sharma and Sanjay Sharma

24. Managing Public Service Professionals under New Public Management443 Michael Reed

25. Management Ideas in Everyday Life

458

Philip Hancock and Melissa Tyler

26. Changing the Critique: From Critical Management Studies to Activist Scholarship

473

Craig Prichard and Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar

27. Alternatives to Management Ideas

492

Martin Parker

28. New Directions for Research on Management Ideas

508

Andrew Sturdy, Stefan Heusinkveld, Trish Reay, and David Strang

Index515

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List of Figures

1.1 Integrating the management innovation and management fashion processes36 2.1 Sequence of stages and transition paths

44

2.2 Transition forces

45

2.3 Nested levels of abstraction in management ideas

47

8.1 Business studies providing management ideas

163

8.2 Sources of the ideas that business studies diffuse

164

10.1 Sources and postures of legitimate knowledge claims

203

13.1 Google NGram for self-organization, self-management

257

14.1 Model of how management ideas evolve

275

21.1 ‘Management’ in books—American English, British English—Google NGram395 21.2 ‘Management’ in books—French, German—Google NGram

395

21.3 American corporate capitalism and management

397

22.1 Management ideas and the construction of organizational actors

413

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List of Tables

2.1 Revolutionary technologies and management models

50

3.1 Common ontologies of management ideas

70

3.2 The possibilities of Critical Realism for engaging the strengths of philosophies of management ideas

78

3.3 Weaknesses of philosophical perspectives

79

4.1 Study classification, characteristic data sources, analytic techniques, and exemplary studies

88

8.1 List of accredited schools and programmes

167

10.1 Selected business media logics

206

10.2 Traditional business media logics and technological convergence

209

13.1 Process factors driving re-adoption

263

15.1 Three approaches to the evolution of research on management ideas

288

17.1 Practice institutionalization in closed and open professional fields

326

19.1 Overview of different perspectives on resistance

358

20.1 Common approaches to studying the effects of management ideas on performance378

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List of Contributors

The Editors Andrew Sturdy  is Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Bristol, UK. Previously, he held posts at Imperial College London and the Universities of Bath, Melbourne, and Warwick. His research lies mostly in the field of organizational innovation and the role of management consultancy. His work includes co-authored books such as Beyond Organizational Change (Macmillan), Management Consultancy (Oxford University Press), and Management as Consultancy (Cambridge University Press). His work is also published in journals such as Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Human Relations, Research Policy, and the Journal of Organizational Behavior. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Management Inquiry and Visiting Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). His latest work explores management consultancy in national and transnational public sector contexts, including the UK National Health Service. Stefan Heusinkveld  is Associate Professor at the Department of Management and Organization, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). His research concentrates on the production and consumption of management ideas with a special interest in studying the role of professions and occupations, management gurus, and the business media. He has published on these topics in journals such as the Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, British Journal of Management, Human Relations, Information & Management, International Journal of Management Reviews, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Studies. Stefan’s work also includes books such as The Management Idea Factory (Routledge) and (forthcoming) Management Ideas and Managerial Audiences (Cambridge University Press). He is lead coordinator of the EGOS Standing Working Group on ‘Management, Occupations and Professions in Social Context’. Trish Reay  is Professor in Strategic Management and Organization at the University of Alberta School of Business in Edmonton, Canada. She also holds a Visiting Distinguished Professor appointment at Warwick Business School. She currently serves as Editor-inChief at Organization Studies. Her research interests include qualitative research methods, organizational and institutional change, professions and professional identity. She studies these topics in the context of healthcare and family firms.

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xiv   list of contributors Published articles from these research streams appear in Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Work and Occupations, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Family Business Review. David Strang  is Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. His research has focused on the spread of practices in the business, political, and scientific worlds. He has developed statistical methods for the study of diffusion within an event history framework and agent-based models for the simulation of booms and busts in managerial fashion. Strang is author of Learning by Example: Imitation and Innovation at a Global Bank (Princeton University Press) and has published in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, International Organization, Organization Studies, and Sociological Theory. He has held visiting appointments at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, INSEAD, Oxford, the University of Amsterdam, and Tel Aviv University, and received a PhD in sociology from Stanford.

The Contributors Eric Abrahamson is Hughie  E.  Mills Professor of Business Management, Columbia University, USA. Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar is Senior Lecturer in the School of Management at Massey University, Albany, Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand. Phil Almond is Professor of International Management, University of Leicester, UK. Deborah  A.  Anderson is Doctoral Student in Management Studies, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, UK. Shaz Ansari is Professor of Strategy & Innovation, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK. Marcos Barros is Associate Professor at Grenoble École de Management, France. Jos Benders is Professor in ‘Organisasjonskonsepter’, Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway, and Guest Professor, CESO, KU Leuven, Belgium. Julian Birkinshaw is Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Deputy Dean at the London Business School, UK. Suleika Bort is Professor of Organization and International Management, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. Patricia Bromley is Assistant Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at Stanford University.

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list of contributors    xv Sylwia Ciuk is Senior Lecturer in Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes Business School, Oxford Brookes University, UK. David Collins is Professor in Management and Dean of the Suffolk Business School at the University of Suffolk, UK. Tony Edwards is Director of the Institute for International Management at Loughborough University London, UK. Lars Engwall is Professor Emeritus of Business Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden. Nicolai Foss is the Rodolfo Debenedetti Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Hélène Giroux was Professor of Logistics and Operations Management at HEC Montréal, Canada (retired March 2018). Philip Hancock is Professor of Work and Organization, Essex Business School, University of Essex, UK. Stefan Heusinkveld is Associate Professor, Department of Management and Organization, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), The Netherlands. Jonas A. Ingvaldsen is Associate Professor, Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway. Philipp Kern is Postdoctoral Research Associate, Institute for International Management, Loughborough University London, UK. Alfred Kieser is Professor Emeritus, University of Mannheim, Germany. Juha-Antti Lamberg is Professor, Department of History and Ethnology, Jyväskylä School of Business and Economics, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Darren McCabe is Professor of Organization Studies in the Department of Organization, Work and Technology, Lancaster University, UK. Mohit Mehta is Doctoral Candidate in Strategy, Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, UK. Michael J. Mol is Professor of Strategic and International Management and Head of Department in the Department of Strategic Management and Globalization at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Joe O’Mahoney is Professor of Organization Studies, Cardiff Business School, University of Cardiff, UK. Martin Parker is Professor of Organization Studies, University of Bristol, UK. Alessandro Piazza is Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University, USA.

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xvi   list of contributors Shawn Pope is Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Business & Economics at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and an Instructor of Entrepreneurship at Stanford University, USA. Craig Prichard is Associate Professor in the School of Management at Massey University, Palmerston North, Aotearoa, New Zealand. Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society, Copenhagen Business School, DK and Visiting Professor at Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden. Trish Reay is Professor of Strategic Management and Organization, University of Alberta School of Business, Canada. Michael Reed is Professor of Organizational Analysis, Cardiff University, UK. Patrick Reinmoeller is Professor of Strategic Management, Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, UK. Kjell Arne Røvik is Professor of Political Science & Organization Theory, The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø. Charles-Clemens Rüling is Professor of Organization Theory at Grenoble École de Management, France. Riku Ruotsalainen is Assistant Professor of Organization Theory, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), The Netherlands. Stephanie Russell is Senior Lecturer in the Human Resources and Organizational Behaviour Department in the Lord Ashcroft International Business School at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. Marie-Laure Salles-Djelic is Professor of Sociology, Sciences Po, Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CSO), France. Hannele Seeck is Professor of Management and Organization, University of Turku, School of Economics, Finland. David Seidl is Professor of Organization and Management, University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research, Cambridge University, UK. Pramodita Sharma is Professor & Sanders Chair in Family Business, Grossman School of Business, University of Vermont, USA. Sanjay Sharma is Professor & Dean, Grossman School of Business, University of Vermont, USA. Jost Sieweke is Assistant Professor of Management and Organization, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), The Netherlands. David Strang is Professor of Sociology, Cornell University, USA.

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list of contributors    xvii Andrew Sturdy is Professor of Management and Organization, University of Bristol, UK and Visiting Professor, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), The Netherlands. Olga Tregaskis is Professor of International HRM, University of East Anglia (UEA), UK. Melissa Tyler is Professor of Work and Organization, Essex Business School, University of Essex, UK. Marlieke van Grinsven is Research Associate, Department of Management and Organization,Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), The Netherlands. Peter Walgenbach is Professor of Organization, Leadership, and Human Resource Management at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Linda Wedlin is Professor of Organization, Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden. Andreas Werr is Professor of Management and Director of the Center for HRM and Knowledge Work at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), Sweden. Richard Whittington is Professor of Strategic Management, Saïd Business School, and Millman Fellow, New College, University of Oxford, UK. Christopher Wickert is Associate Professor in Ethics & Sustainability, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), The Netherlands. Christian Wittrock is Researcher, the Work Research Institute, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. Christopher Wright is Professor of Organizational Studies, The University of Sydney Business School, Australia.

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R e se a rchi ng M a nagem en t Ide as an introduction Andrew Sturdy, Stefan Heusinkveld, Trish Reay, and David Strang

Introduction Over the past few decades, management tools have become a common part of executives’ lives. Whether they are trying to boost revenues, innovate, improve quality, increase efficiencies or plan for the future, executives have searched for tools to help them. —Darrell K. Rigby The last fifty years of executive life have been filled with a multitude of important new methods and techniques for running a business (which have come) . . . into vogue. —Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch

Managers, professionals, business owners, and other organizational actors are continually presented with potential solutions to their diverse organizational and management problems. The phenomenon of management ideas and associated practices—their emergence, development, dissemination, use, and wider impact and decline—has only been a really significant focus of academic research since the early 1990s. However, as the above quotes suggest, it is a persistent concern for practitioners. The first quote comes from a contemporary, twenty-first century consulting report (Rigby, 2015), as one might have guessed, but the second is from research conducted in the 1960s which refers to the early twentieth century (Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967). Indeed, some would argue that the nature of the ideas themselves has also changed very little in that time—focused on

2    a. sturdy, s. heusinkveld, t. reay, and d. strang motivation, productivity, and leadership for example (Jacques, 1996). Likewise, in his classic study of the idea of management as a whole, Bendix observed that: ‘it is difficult to discern the changing trends of managerial ideologies, for the “new” and “old” themes often blend as if they were one and the same’ (1956: 342; also Barley and Kunda, 1992; Guillén, 1994; Lammers, 1988). Regardless of the content, quantity, and novelty of ­management ideas, their continual (re)production, adaptation, contestation, and use continues to be an important topic to examine and explain, not only for students of management and organization, but for organizations and their members as well as society as a whole. That is what this handbook seeks to do. The management idea phenomenon has become an established component of ­contemporary writing on management and related disciplinary fields such as strategy, marketing, human resource management (HRM), and operations (ten Bos, 2000). Management overall can be seen as a particular, historically specific approach to organizing within capitalism, comprising different structures, roles, actors, practices, discourses, outcomes, and ideas (Engwall et al., 2016; Hales, 1986). Our focus is on the latter, but not in isolation from the other constituents. Furthermore, we are not concerned with all ideas associated with management, but with their most explicit (non-tacit) or packaged and commodified form, as more or less coherent visions, principles, and/or guidelines for managers and others to adopt in organizing resources and securing power and legitimacy (Benders and van Veen, 2001). This definition is nevertheless quite broad so as to include a number of important dimensions (see also Bodrožić and Adler, 2018). First, management ideas may occur in various forms and include other terms that may have different connotations such as management fashions, panaceas, models, concepts, and ideologies. Also, although only partially reflected in the day-to-day work thoughts and discourses of managers, management ideas are intimately connected to practice, not least because much management work is itself discursive (Sturdy and Fleming, 2003). However, management ideas, unlike management innovations, need not always be applied in material practices. The range of ideas is widely known—from ‘ABC’ to ‘value drivers’—with some accounts listing them in detail (seventy-eight in the case of Bort, 2015; see also Hindle, 2000; Mol and Birkinshaw, 2008; Rigby, 2015). They include broad movements and approaches such as Project Management, Total Quality Management (TQM), Business Process Re-engineering, and Corporate Social Responsibility, but also specific techniques such as Activity Based Costing (ABC) or Management by Objectives. Second, management ideas may vary in the extent of their adoption or popularity. Indeed, although some ideas fail to develop and grow (and are often missed in academic studies as a result) (Seeck and Lamberg, in this volume), many gain widespread managerial popularity and some of these, but crucially not all, become associated with substantial changes in organizations (Heusinkveld et al., 2011). Those that are widely applied in practice often become part of business school curricula and even popular discourse and can have profound effects on employees and more widely (Engwall et al., 2016; Watson, 1995). Consider, for example, the assembly line, strategy or customer service, and even the direct application of management ideas to everyday life (Hancock and Tyler, 2009). Of course,

researching management ideas: an introduction    3 like all forms of knowledge, management ideas are tightly connected to context and are dynamic, even processual in nature, changing form and often label (e.g. Guillén, 1994)— ‘old wine in new bottles’. At the same time, their strength often lies in their ambiguity and claims made of universality (Kieser, 1997). But not all ideas succeed, either commercially or in terms of a wide application and, in keeping with the nature of management, their consequences are likely to be differentially experienced, both geographically and hierarchically, as forms of control. In this chapter, we introduce the research field of management ideas and in particular research exploring the processes that surround them, their conditions and consequences. First, we outline the way in which ideas and associated practices are categorized and organized collectively and within subdisciplines. We then seek to account for how the field has grown and become quite fragmented, before briefly outlining the aims and contents of the handbook, including brief summaries of the individual chapters.

Organizing Ideas (and Practices) Ideas are important in management and organizational practice and, more generally in broader society, not the least because they are inherently connected to power. At the most general level, from politics to personal lives, they serve as ‘interpretive frameworks that give definition to our values and preferences’ and can comprise ‘discourse(s), practices, symbols, myths, narratives, collective memories, stories, frames, norms, grammars, models and identities’ (Carstensen and Schmidt, 2016: 218, 322). They are therefore often, but not always, central to our actions. This relationship has long been a focus of debate at the levels of culture and of the individual, in terms of the Protestant ethic and rise of capitalism for example (Abercrombie et al., 1980; Weber, 2002), but also simply in the sense of whether we put ideas into practice and whether our practice is consistent with the ideas we subscribe to (Ajzen and Fishbein,  1980; Argyris and Schon,  1974; Festinger, 1962). Swidler (1986), for example, argues that culture affects behaviour not by supplying values which direct action, but by shaping a ‘tool kit’ or repertoire of habits, skills, and templates that actors draw upon in constructing practical strategies. The power of ideas to persuade, constitute, exclude, and contest ways of being and of acting is central to different strands of social and political theory, running alongside, and sometimes in opposition to, materialist and other structural perspectives (e.g. Anderson, 2017). In the context of management too, the relationship between ideas and action is a ­central concern. For example, in his classic comparative study of management ideologies (e.g. scientific management and human relations), Guillén’s (1994) key finding was to show that they may be adopted without the associated techniques being implemented in  workplaces and, perhaps more controversially, that techniques may be practised without the supporting ideology taking hold. So, for example, it is argued that ‘generally, the ideological and technical components of [a] . . . paradigm reinforce each other, but the absence of either does not seem to prevent the adoption of the other’ (Guillén, 1994: 283).

4    a. sturdy, s. heusinkveld, t. reay, and d. strang Such issues are also evident in more contemporary contexts such as different responses to the rolling out of TQM in different divisions or subsidiaries of a firm (e.g. Kostova and Roth, 2002; Zbaracki, 1998) or the coercive implementation of Six Sigma against the prevailing organizational culture (Canato et al., 2013). Such studies draw attention to the centrality of power with respect to management ideas—the ability to impose, seduce, and resist (Rose, 1990). This has been an enduring theme within management and organization studies, even if the focus is often on the actors or consequences more than ideas in general. Research tends to engage with management ideas in four main ways. First, particular ideas are explored as developments or innovations within the subfields or functional domains of management. Indeed, specific ideas help constitute these disciplines and the related occupational groups within organizations (ten Bos, 2000). So, for example, in HRM, the concern is with ideas based on the management of culture or rewards or being a business partner, while in marketing, attention might be placed on customer relationship management, and in operations with supply chain innovations and so on (e.g. Shenhav, 1999; Wright, 2008). Such research can provide important insights for understanding management ideas in general, but often remains hidden within its functional subdisciplinary boundaries and preoccupations. Second, given that many management ideas are directed towards controlling/engaging employees or changing organizations, they become a focus of research attention indirectly, within the fields of organization theory, behaviour and change, as well as employee/industrial relations and studies of the labour process and public administration (O’Reilly and Reed, 2011). For example, many management ideas can be directly linked to various types and hybrids of control—personal, bureaucratic, technological, output, concertive, and cultural (e.g. Edwards, 1979). Likewise, the management and politics of organizational change can be understood as part of the processes of idea production, negotiation, and institutionalization (Beer and Nohria, 2000; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001). Once again, such research has the potential to provide important insights, but is not always acknowledged in the field of research on management ideas. Third and more directly, rather than focusing on the ideas themselves, research has given attention to the processes through which management ideas emerge, move, and change (Czarniawska and Sévon, 1996; Reay et al., 2013). Even within this area of literature, there are disciplinary distinctions such as those between management learning, knowledge, and innovation which give rise to different ways in which ideas are understood and organized (e.g. Birkinshaw et al., 2008; Blackler, 1995). For example, management ideas could be classified as being explicit, embrained, and encoded, rather than tacit, embodied, or encultured (Alvarez, 1998; Blackler, 1995), or they can be conceptualized as evolving and emerging through practice (Ansari et al., 2010). However, it is difficult to disentangle or distinguish them when taking this approach. Fourth, management ideas are studied as a collective phenomenon, often presented historically, either in the progressive sense of continuing development as regards organizational performance or labour control (Ray, 1986) or as waves, such as in Barley and Kunda’s (1992) classic model of normative and rational conceptions of control in the

researching management ideas: an introduction    5 USA or Ramsay’s cycles of control and resistance (1977). In the former, progressive, case, the problem is not simply around an assumption that things improve, but that ideas change significantly (cf. Jacques,  1996). This is a central characteristic of innovation studies. Indeed, a subfield of this discipline has emerged and grown in significance around management or organizational innovation, as opposed to technological or product innovations (Damanpour, 2014). Here, positions vary as to whether ideas (and their application) are new to the ‘state of the art’ or simply to a particular audience. For instance, Mol and Birkinshaw (2008) elegantly distinguish between (existing) ‘best practice’ and emergent ‘next practice’ in management. However, perspective is crucial, as claims that ‘there is nothing that is new’ are common and not without some validity. Lammers (1988) for example, found that whilst the notion of corporate culture was ­presented as ‘new’ in the early 1980s (e.g. Peters and Waterman, 1982), similar conceptualizations could be traced back to writings from German sociologists in the 1920s and 1930s, even if they were much less successful in gaining widespread (managerial) attention. In seeking to differentiate and organize management ideas, other classifications have emerged such as identifying their main target of action such as the work group, customer, task, organization, environment, and individual employee, and even innerself (e.g. stress management) outer-self (goal setting), and interpersonal (e.g. coaching) (see Huczynski, 1993/2006).

The Rise of Research on Management Ideas As noted above, aside from research which explores management ideas indirectly or within disciplinary and functional boundaries, there has been a growing stream of research that focuses on explaining the production, diffusion, translation, promotion, and popularity or otherwise of these ideas and their role in management and organizational practice. Such phenomena have long been observed. For example, Bendix found that management ideologies (ideas which, in part, serve to justify the role of management): are essentially ambiguous [and] . . . tend to spread and change more or less as fashions change, and that they do not necessarily involve the private convictions of those who espouse them. They are the opinions which given groups of men [sic] have on ‘public display’. Both the ambiguity of ideologies and the lack of personal involvement often provide an opening wedge for new ideas, or at least new emphases.  (1956: 342)

A few years later, Woodward, in her classic 1960s study, observed in passing that ‘management fashion . . . had an important part in organizational changes. The urge to “keep up with the Joneses” seems to be as powerful a force in industrial circles as in social life’ (1965: 22). However, it was not until the 1990s, with the emergence of what are now ­considered foundational texts such as Huczynski (1993/2006), Abrahamson (1996),

6    a. sturdy, s. heusinkveld, t. reay, and d. strang and Czarniawska and Sevón (1996), that a substantive field began to emerge. Notwithstanding more recent concerns to establish the value of ‘evidence-based management’ (Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006), one of the core challenges in this field is that management ideas continue to be widely recognized as especially ambiguous and often lacking in clear material outcomes (e.g. Benders and van Veen, 2001; Walker et al., 2015). This adds to methodological difficulties and variety in research traditions on management ideas, but also may well contribute to the expansion of the field to a huge body of literature. This growth is reflected in the increasing number of articles and journal special issues on management ideas in general (e.g. Organization Studies, Organization, Management Learning, European Management Review) or specific ideas (e.g. Academy of Management Review, Human Relations) as well as research monographs and edited books. Moreover, it has become a regular subject of streams at leading conferences such as the Academy of Management. For instance, there has been at least one stream on the topic annually at the European Group on Organization Studies (EGOS) since the late 1990s, indicating an established, sustained, and significant research community. What lies behind the development of this body of work is a range of factors. First, one important explanation is the fact that management ideas appear to have proliferated (e.g. Pascale, 1990), but as intimated already, it is not at all clear that there are more new ideas now than there were previously. That said, the visibility of new ideas, with high-profile agents such as consultants, gurus, business schools, and ‘thought leaders’, may well have increased in many contexts (Engwall et al.,  2016). Also, management ideas have spread in scope both geographically, with the rise of neo-liberalism, and across sectors or domains, as is evidenced in the intrusion of management into public sectors and private lives (Grey, 1999). Second, great claims are made of new management ideas in terms of their consequences for organizations (Walker et al., 2015). These in turn provoke challenges and critique, partly perhaps because the seeming success of market-based purveyors of management ideas posed a threat to some management academics. Third, another major driver of the increasing interest in management ideas is the professionalization of  managerial work and the accompanying expansion of knowledge external to the firm (Khurana, 2007). Management has been traditionally governed by informal ideas about how to run an office, handle employees, keep costs down, make deals, and stay alert to business opportunities. Today’s management and business landscape, by contrast, features the rapid growth of business school MBAs and executive education; the explosion of business books and blogs; the rise of the business and managerial press, consultancy and of business gurus; and the expansion of a wide range of social scientific and professional disciplines whose work can be applied to organizations (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001). One of the chief resources of all these groups are ideas, which are used to elaborate self-consciously rationalized strategies and structures (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Strang and Meyer, 1993). Competition within communities of consultants, educators, and other professionals and institutions drives the development and churn of these ideas, often in a faddish direction (Strang et al., 2014). Such a dynamic was further fuelled by the rise of the perceived importance of knowledge to national

researching management ideas: an introduction    7 and organizational success in the 1990s—knowledge intensivity and knowledge economies (Blackler, 1995). Indeed, a number of studies of management ideas also form part of a complementary literature and field on management knowledge and learning (see Sturdy, 2004). Contemporary business is shaped by global discourses on claimed sources of organizational performance, fairness, and progress. Managers are not just the subjects of these discourses, however, they actively create ideas as well. Strang (2010), for example, stressed the way that managers at a global bank reworked standard conceptions of TQM, work/family life balance, and how to create a high performance work environment. They combined or translated their own interpretations of success stories among the ‘world’s best companies’ by benchmarking with an analysis of their own firm’s ­history and strategy. Similarly, Reay et al. (2013) showed how managers transformed system level ‘good management ideas’ by developing new interpretations and meanings appropriate for their local contexts. In short, managers have come to be seen as far more active in the production of the ideas that others purvey, especially in terms of their role in translation (Spyridonidis et al., 2016). Fourth, in parallel to the establishment of a powerful institutional field of management knowledge in many Western societies, critical approaches to management expanded and became established within scholarly communities (Delbridge, 2014). Here, attention has been given to the apparently weak evidence base of management ideas and their unwarranted simplicity (Hilmer and Donaldson, 1996; McGill, 1988; Rousseau, 2006; Sorge and van Witteloostuijn, 2004). More prominently perhaps, critics have pointed to the fact that management ideas should not be seen simply as serving organizational ends or rationality. Rather, they have had an ideological, signalling, or legitimating role in seeking to justify expertise, reputation, and authority (Bendix, 1956) and an existential function in simultaneously allaying and accentuating managerial anxiety (Gill and Whittle,  1993). At the same time, many historical and comparative accounts of the emergence and use of management ideas point to their role as a focus of conflict both among management groups and between managers, professions, owners, and labour (e.g. Guillén, 1994). Shenhav’s (1995, 1999) historical work for example, shows how the institutionalization of the systems perspective in the management of organizations was driven by the specific interest of mechanical engineers ‘who carried a professional and ideological claim about the nature of organizations, work relations, and the methods by which they should be viewed and structured’ (1995: 579). Other critics have focused on the negative consequences of management ideas even when they are applied directly for organizational ends. Here research has long pointed to the outcomes of new approaches to management for employees and others—more stressful or alienating working and living conditions and a tendency towards objectification, commodification, and reproducing inequality (Knights and McCabe,  1998; Sturdy,  2004). More recently, attention has also turned to environmental outcomes. Similarly, exporting management ideas has been regarded as a form of neo-imperialism, typically from West to East, but also in the case of Japanization in the 1980s and other geo-political contexts (Chanlat,  1996; Strang  2013). Some authors also point to the

8    a. sturdy, s. heusinkveld, t. reay, and d. strang gendered nature of management ideas and the dominance of masculinity in many, but not all, management contexts (Grint and Case, 1998). While such critical research has formed part of the growth of studies on management ideas, it is not the main factor. Indeed, much of the research on management ideas is not especially critical. The rise of research in areas such as organizational change, innovation, enterprise, and, as noted earlier, management learning may well have contributed more to a focus on management ideas in particular. In short, management ideas, their promotion and effects have become more visible empirically and thus attracted more academic scrutiny. At the same time, it is still unclear how and to what extent this growing academic body of research, critical or ­otherwise, has been fed back to the object of study, and whether this ultimately contributes to more reflexivity amongst management and other organizational practitioners or groups such as unions, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, and policymakers (e.g. Watson, 1995).

A Pluralistic or Fragmented Field? In keeping with an emerging field, there is a certain plurality or fragmentation about its terms, perspectives, and areas of focus. First, and as noted earlier, there are various related, but distinct terms used to refer to management ideas. Do we see ‘management ideas’ as a way of referring to self-conscious practices that are promoted, chosen, implemented, and then probably modified, sometimes institutionalized and invariably abandoned or translated further? A recent review of the current literature on the translation of management ideas, by van Grinsven et al. (2016), revealed no less than forty keywords including management idea, concept, fashion, practice, technique, and innovation. This may not only signal theorists’ preferences for different nomenclature, but can reflect fundamentally different research traditions, each with its own ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions (see O’Mahoney, in this volume). As such, can we say that the use of a particular term, for instance for this handbook, involves privileging particular theorists over others, or are there possibilities for linkages? Indeed, as noted earlier, realist, interpretive, or critical approaches may share an interest in a general phenomenon, but typically focus on studying more or less concrete and more or less managerial aspects of ‘management ideas’. First, in contrast to management/organizational ‘concept’, ‘ideology’, ‘philosophy’, or rhetoric, terms such as management/organizational ‘innovation’, ‘practice’, ‘technique’, and even ‘label’ can signal something relatively concrete that can be implemented, adopted, or translated/modified. If so, we may say that these notions are also rooted in specific and general ideas, which are more abstract. For example, TQM as a set of specific programmatic actions (e.g. provision of individual quality training; the setting up of cross-functional process improvement teams; and the creation of an executive level quality leadership position) is grounded in wider ideas about organizations, including

researching management ideas: an introduction    9 various assumptions and values (workers can or should commit to improvement efforts; workers can be empowered; managers and executives should play leadership roles, etc.). Typically, such management ideas also assume universalism, across cultural and institutional contexts (Maurice et al., 1980). Second, and in a similar vein, terms such as organizational ‘concept’, ‘model’, or ‘form’ may signal that, in contrast to those terms starting with ‘management’, underlying ­ideologies and guidelines may not necessarily serve the interests of a particular group within a firm, i.e. those who represent themselves as managers (Parker, in this volume). In line with this, Birkinshaw et al. (2008) noted that there is little consistency in the terms used and proposed to distinguish between management ideas as a more general prescriptive vision concerning what managers ought to do on a more abstract level, and management techniques and practices at a more operational or behavioural level (also Bort, 2015; Guillén, 1994). However, as noted earlier, such a distinction does not resolve all the problems, and there is no straightforward link between ideas and practices. Indeed, similar issues emerge when considering the transmission of ideas and techniques. For example, Ansari et al. (2010) noted that theorists used different constructs such as translation, editing, creolization, and adaptation to refer to the way in which ideas are modified, but each may have different meanings. A risk here, as is revealed in systematic literature reviews, is that there is little mutual recognition between related studies. This is also linked to the theoretical diversity of the field. For instance, Sturdy (2004) identified six broad approaches (see also Ansari et al., 2010; Birkinshaw et al., 2008; van Grinsven et al., 2016). Here, the (boundedly) rational view was set up against and alongside others—psychodynamic (anxiety), political (power), cultural (values), and institutional (legitimacy) perspectives—where the organizational or technical effectiveness of applied ideas was not considered a primary factor. Overall, the once dominant rational view has been superseded by the institutional in the literature, partly because of the wider growth of the latter in organizational theory more generally (Perkmann and Spicer, 2008). Some scope for theoretical integration was recognized. First, the rational cannot simply be contrasted with social or psychodynamic perspectives, as recent social theory has emphasized (Knights, 1997). Second, the final perspective identified—the rhetorical view—held the possibility for integration at an empirical level. Here, the adoption of ideas is understood in terms of how they are promoted and this can be done by appealing to managers’ different rational, political, and psychological ‘needs’ for example, revealed by focusing on a particular channel or agent for ideas. However, such potential for integration has yet to be fully realized and this sometimes serves to impede productive dialogue. Another way in which the field has become compartmentalized is in its objects of empirical focus. This is especially evident in considering the different actors involved in the production and dissemination of ideas. We have already referred to this above in terms of how different subdisciplines of management, such as HRM or marketing, explore ideas within their own domain, and of how the dynamics of management ideas are considered in other related areas such as organizational change. But divisions also occur within the field which becomes apparent in the fact that most studies focus

10    a. sturdy, s. heusinkveld, t. reay, and d. strang primarily on one key actor such as management gurus, management consultants, business schools, multinational firms, and the business and social media (Engwall et al., 2016). In each case, research is sometimes considered as a separate field of study. For example, there has been a huge literature on the role of consultants (Kipping and Clark, 2012) which also overlaps with research on professional service and knowledge-intensive firms (Empson et al., 2015). The same could be said of research on business schools and multinational corporations which explores their role in the generation and use of management ideas (Ferner et al., 2012), although less so on other agents such as management gurus and the business media. In a similar way, compartmentalization also occurs in relation to distinct research foci that stem from the stages or processes that shape management ideas. Indeed, management ideas have become associated with processes of commodification, translation, standardization, and implementation separately (Suddaby and Greenwood,  2001). Various theorists have stressed the interrelations between these empirical phenomena and their importance for progress in research. For instance, Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall emphasized not only the growing significance of what they dub ‘knowledge carriers’, but also the intensive interaction amongst them. They even argued that this interaction has led to ‘a gradual blurring of boundaries’ (2002: 14). However, generally the different literatures are still poorly integrated. For instance, Huising (2016) signalled an important lack of research at the intersection between diffusion and implementation. This handbook cannot address such an issue on its own. Indeed, there is an argument in favour of maintaining diverse positions or ‘negative dialectics’. However, as the following section demonstrates, it does seek to bring together different foci, approaches, and perspectives and at the same time complement related fields of study such as those of innovation, management, and learning. Finally, compartmentalization of the research on management ideas may also stem from the variety of contexts in which these ideas may occur and are studied. It is widely recognized that management ideas are received differently across distinct temporal and spatial contexts. As already noted, various theorists see management ideas that are presented in a new temporal context largely as recombination of elements from ‘old’ approaches (e.g. Guillén,  1994; Jacques,  1996). Moreover, studies have also shown important variety in the way widely known ideas are taken up in different national and sectoral contexts. For instance Casper and Hancké (1999) explained how the implementation of ISO 9000 by French and German car producers largely preserved country-specific differences in work organization (see also Benders and van Bijsterveld, 2000; Guillén, 1994). Relatedly, we can assume that in analysing these management ideas, different researchers view them from the cultural and institutional frames on management and organization within which they are embedded and that prevail in a specific period. Moreover, as Brunsson (1997) stressed, management ideas need not ­necessarily be disseminated in the market, but may just ‘crop up’ independently in different contexts, thereby suggesting that organizations develop their own ‘management’ knowledge and expertise. Thus in other words, many researchers from different contexts study different ideas in different temporal and spatial contexts, whilst hardly any effort is made to relate them (Cole, 1985).

researching management ideas: an introduction    11

Handbook Structure The aim of this handbook, as with others in the Oxford University Press series, is to ­provide an up-to-date, enduring, and authoritative account of the field. This is achieved by bringing together established and emerging researchers in the area and by providing overviews, illustrations, and evaluations of particular topics and debates as well as integrating them, extending them, and pointing to new and fruitful areas of further research. Our focus is not on the content of specific management ideas, but the general mechanisms and processes involved in their construction, dissemination, and interpretation, as well as general issues in their social scientific investigation. Similarly, the chapters do not tend to report on single research studies, but draw on and bring together diverse sources and use different empirical examples, except in a few cases where one management idea (e.g. Lean) is used as an illustration of a wider phenomenon. Although all chapters include a consideration of the relevant literature, some are more review-based while others develop a more explicit position and extend existing research with a wholly new focus (e.g. research methods, philosophy, new media). We do not adopt a particular disciplinary or theoretical perspective, although much of the work described here lies broadly within the diverse discipline of organization and management studies. The handbook is written for students, researchers, and teachers with an interest in management ideas as well as those interested in management and in ideas in general. Given the diverse nature of the field and its relevance to different phenomena, it engages with those working in the following disciplines, among others: organization theory; organizational behaviour and change; management; employee relations; management learning; innovation; public policy and administration; professional services; and the sociology of work and organizations. It also is of relevance to practitioners, especially those who are actively involved in the production, purchase, and/or use of management ideas such as those working in consultancy, business schools, think tanks and the media, trade unions, purchasing and line management, although the approach taken is to present issues and debates rather than explicitly prescribe policy and practice (cf. Örtenblad, 2015). The volume is organized around four core overlapping themes. The first section, understanding management ideas, sets out the research field in general, in terms of an overall system, but also in terms of different perspectives and research methods. The second section explores the role of different actors and channels of diffusion/translation in detail, including the consumers/producers of management ideas and ‘new’ media, but also traditional players in the management ideas field. The third section, processes, focuses on specific features or dynamics of the management ideas system, such as their adoption, evolution, popularity, institutionalization, rejection, and resurgence. In the fourth and final section, we examine critical and new perspectives on management ideas, highlighting specific socio-political contexts, such as in family businesses and everyday life, but also the possibility of alternative ideas and forms of critique.

12    a. sturdy, s. heusinkveld, t. reay, and d. strang

The Contributions Understanding Management Ideas Michael Mol, Nicolai Foss, and Julian Birkinshaw  start the first section by considering management ideas through the lens of a system. This is understood as a set of actors, such as business leaders, consultants, etc. and the ideas they espouse, operating at individual, organizational, and institutional levels. The authors argue for a bottom-up analysis of this system based on evolutionary processes. They theorize the make-or-buy decision whereby organizations either generate their own ideas or draw on those developed in the wider organizational environment. Eric Abrahamson and Alessandro Piazza present a general conceptualization of the dynamics of management ideas that similarly draws on evolutionary processes of variation, selection, and retention. They develop an analysis of the conditions that lead to innovation, diffusion, institutionalization, dormancy, and rebirth of management ideas. The chapter also stresses the relationship between specific ideas and techniques and the larger families that they belong to. Joe O’Mahoney outlines the main philosophies which underpin studies of management ideas, and discusses their possibilities and limitations, something which, to our knowledge, has not been carried out before. In doing so, more insight is provided into what ‘management ideas’ actually are, and ontological and epistemological challenges are identified which serve to limit interdisciplinary work. By contrast, it is argued that adopting a critical realist position can go some way to achieving integration of perspectives and such approach is outlined specifically in relation to management ideas. David Strang and Christian Wittrock review and assess the main research methodologies used in the study of management ideas and thereby also provide a methodological overview of some of the key studies in the field. This has not been attempted before, as far as we know, and thus provides a useful base for those planning research. They organize the review by the number of cases that studies examine (their ‘N’), since there are dramatic differences between the regression-based techniques utilized in large-scale survey or archival research, the interview methods applied to moderate numbers of cases, and the design of small N comparative research and single case studies. The chapter pays particular attention to research methods from newly emergent computer assisted content analysis as well as traditional archival work and ethnography. No particular approach is favoured; instead, the chapter stresses complementarities across methodologies and the potential for research working at different levels of N to develop a rich picture of the dynamics and effects of management ideas. Andreas Werr and Peter Walgenbach examine management techniques, such as the Balanced Scorecard and Total Quality Management, which provide the vehicles by which management ideas often enter organizational practice. They outline three general perspectives: a rationalist approach that sees techniques as effective guides for action

researching management ideas: an introduction    13 and that is concerned with identifying ‘best practice’; an institutionalist approach that views them as symbols of rationality aimed at an external audience; and a practice-based approach that focuses on the way in which managers employ techniques in the course of their work. The authors stress the insights of the third, emergent stream of research in treating managers as active agents who interpret techniques in the light of the various problems they face, above and beyond those of organizational performance. Kjell Arne Røvik develops the theme of ideas in practice and identifies three related, but different perspectives. His focus is on the instrumental status of management ideas, not just as tools, legitimizing elements, or fashions, but from a pragmatic perspective, related to translation theory. He asks: why are some ideas translated into practice, but others are not? The answer, he argues, lies not in particular inherent traits, but by focusing on actors as translators with different possibilities and trajectories of implementation. By taking a pragmatic perspective, he shows how translation theory can guide efforts to instrumentalize management ideas.

Actors Christopher Wright  assesses the now substantial research on management consultancy and related advisers and outlines the ways in which consultants in particular have sought to innovate and legitimize different aspects of management ideas—commodification, colonization, and implementation. He also develops this literature by introducing some of the recent challenges faced by management consultancy such as increasingly sophisticated clients and wider managerial scepticism, but also, perhaps more importantly, whether they can meaningfully engage with the profound political, economic, social, and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century. Lars Engwall and Linda Wedlin focus on how business schools, schools of management, and departments of business studies play a role in the diffusion of management ideas. They outline the development of diverse academic institutions providing business education before exploring the relationship these organizations have with actors such as  consultants, media, and managers. Finally, they discuss the role of alternatives to ­academic business studies such as non-academic training and corporate universities, calling for more research attention to the dual processes of providing and producing management ideas that go on in all these sites of business or management education. Although a focus of much management research, both in general and in relation to  international business and other subdisciplines, multinational and transnational ­corporations (M/TNCs) have been neglected in the field of management ideas. Philipp Kern, Phil Almond, Tony Edwards, and Olga Tregaskis explore the role of M/TNCs through a focus on the different individual ‘globalizing actors’ involved in balancing the pressures to standardize ideas and practices while also adapting to local differences. They do so by drawing on, critiquing, and extending research from international management and global elites and pointing to the potential of sociologically informed

14    a. sturdy, s. heusinkveld, t. reay, and d. strang perspectives on individuals and their roles in generating, promoting, disseminating, and negotiating ideas and norms within international firms. Marcos Barros and Charles-Clemens Rüling survey the diverse field of business media research and introduce an integrative—technological, cultural, and organizational— framing informed by the concept of media logics. They emphasize the transmediality and multimodality of new media such as user-generated content on the Internet. The packaged, controlled messages of business bestsellers are replaced by more fluid, less controlled, and less expertise-based communications across diverse platforms. This ‘virtual polyphony (and cacophony)’ has significant implications for the nature and translation of management ideas and the actors involved, opening up new opportunities for the construction and dissemination of management ideas. Management gurus have often been held to be key actors in the field of management ideas, not least through the books and other media products associated with them. They have, however, been treated quite dismissively by some academic researchers and other commentators. David Collins takes issue with this stance, asserting the importance of gurus in shaping ‘how we think about, talk about and practise the work of management’. Noting the spiritual etymology of the term ‘management guru’, the chapter sets out and critically develops Huczynski’s notion of a persistent ‘guru theory’ towards a more local and plural conception and surveys the industry that supports these actors, including the spectacle of the guru presentation. Whilst managers are easily seen as the typical consumers of management ideas, Suleika Bort and Alfred Kieser highlight how various other actors such as consultants, researchers, students, and citizens take on the significant role of consumer and analyse their specific motivations and consumption practices. Furthermore, it is stressed that recent research and perspectives (e.g. translation) conceptualize consumers not only as passive receivers of ideas, but consider them to be producers as well, through the active consumption and adaptation of ideas and practices. Indeed, they explain how consuming ideas cannot be separated from producing them, and highlight the interdependence of diverse actors in these processes. The authors also speculate on the future of ideas consumption and the possibility that the number of new ideas in the market is declining.

Processes Patrick Reinmoeller, Shaz Ansari, and Mohit Mehta  examine the adoption of management ideas, mirroring some of the chapters on systems in the opening section, but do so with a specific focus on how ideas come into use, how they fall out of use, and, in ­particular, how they are re-adopted to local contexts after their initial abandonment. They identify different perspectives on (re-)adoption—fashion, function, and process— and further examine these concepts through the specific case of self-management, an idea which spans six disciplines and six decades. They identify external and internal conditions along with technological factors and the role of employee experience as critical factors that help to explain processes of re-adoption.

researching management ideas: an introduction    15 Jos Benders, Marlieke van Grinsven, and Jonas A. Ingvaldsen examine how ideas ­ ersist, as opposed to fads and fashions that come and go. This connects with the theme p of the chapter by Reinmoeller et al. on re-adoption, but focuses on resilience. Using a detailed case study of the idea of ‘Lean’, which began in the 1990s, they highlight the key role of its repeated (re)framing such as: the choice of an attractive label; the change from Lean production to Lean thinking; and field-specific or tailored versions of the idea. They identify these reframings as relevant globally, but also of great importance at field levels and intra-organizationally, helping to explain how Lean has been able to retain a measure of credibility over time in relation to performance effects. Hannele Seeck and Juha-Antti Lamberg span a wide field of literature on the historical development of management ideas since the late nineteenth century. They distinguish three main approaches (mainstream, embedded (institutionalist), and critical) each offering a specific understanding of the way management ideas may evolve over time. Each of these approaches is explored in terms of their main characteristics, areas of focus, and underlying assumptions, noting different strands within them as well as strengths and weaknesses. The authors argue for more innovation in research perspectives and stress that, rather than habitually considering the ‘winners’, there is an important need to focus more on studying forgotten and marginalized discourses and non-popular management ideas. Much of the management ideas literature focuses on popular examples and yet rarely examines what we mean when we describe something as popular. Hélène Giroux unpacks the multiple meanings of ‘popularity’ which, like commonness, interestingly conflates a notion of prevalence (an idea that many people hold) with a notion of vulgarity (an idea designed for or by ordinary people). By focusing on the multiple meanings of popularity, the chapter draws attention to other fields, perspectives, and research which can shed light on management ideas. For example, as more and more ‘ordinary’ people express their thoughts on the Internet, will there be a shift in the content and consequences of management ideas? Richard Whittington and Deborah A. Anderson engage with the process through which new management ideas become institutionalized as widely used management practices. This is a theme which resonates with Benders et al.’s chapter on idea persistence and with Rasche and Seidl’s chapter on standardization. However, here the focus is on a particular context for ideas, that of the professions, and the authors argue that institutionalization processes vary according to degrees of social closure, as enforced for instance by tight regulations and strict qualification requirements. They contrast relatively closed professions, such as accounting, with that of strategy and link these contexts to different theoretical explanations—institutional entrepreneurship and management fashion theory and call for further comparative research and studies of contexts which lie in between open and closed. Andreas Rasche and David Seidl focus on developing a particular strand of the institutionalization of ideas—standardization. They point out that, in one sense, all management ideas can be understood as standards—as shared, voluntary, and descriptive (rather than prescriptive) rules. They also consider standards in a more restricted

16    a. sturdy, s. heusinkveld, t. reay, and d. strang form, as codified, and explore why some management ideas take this form and how they do so in phases. Finally, they consider implications of standardization such as: an increase in uniformity amongst adopters; decoupling between adopters’ daily practices and their formal structures; the explosion of audits; and the diffusion of responsibility for the consequences of adopting management ideas. Whilst resistance has been a subject of study for many years, less attention is given to the frequent contestation surrounding management ideas, not least because many ideas are associated with control either in themselves or their method of introduction. Darren McCabe, Sylwia Ciuk, and Stephanie Russell draw on diverse literatures and specific studies to consider approaches towards analysing workplace resistance to management ideas—industrial relations, labour process theory, and post-structuralism. Whereas all approaches share an interest in non-conformant acts and subjectivities in relation to management ideas, they vary in their central foci (unions; inequality and control; and subjectivity respectively). A more recent approach is then critically examined which presents resistance as more ‘productive/facilitative’ of change and assumed to be beneficial for both organizations and employees. This and other approaches are then considered in outlining a detailed agenda for further research on resistance. Christopher Wickert, Jost Sieweke, and Riku Ruotsalainen focus on the relationship between management ideas and performance. They show that although some studies provide evidence of improved performance as a result of implementing new management ideas, the potential for improvement is contingent on a range of organizational and environmental factors. They discuss two distinct sets of complicating factors: (1) the ‘performance dilemmas of management ideas’ and (2) the ‘sustainability paradox of management ideas’. Overall, it is argued that the positive impact of management ideas diminishes over time when multiple organizations in the same industry adopt the same management ideas. They also highlight the unintended effects of adopting management ideas, such as negative impact on employees or the broader society.

Contexts Marie-Laure Salles-Djelic  introduces this section on the contexts of management ideas through a chapter on the historical emergence of management and the ideas that constitute and justify it. This journey through the twentieth century serves to de-naturalize and de-neutralize management and reveal power as a central concept. The contemporary dominance of management ideas as a taken-for-granted ‘regime of truth’ across domains and geographies can only be understood through following their trajectory historically. The word ‘management’ itself has a very recent history, especially outside of the USA and UK. The trajectory of management is shown to be closely linked to the rise of American capitalism and to earlier periods of imperialism. Three key moments are outlined—ideas as power tools for decision-makers in early corporate capitalism; as geo-political (soft) weapons for the Cold War; and from the 1990s, as the dominant

researching management ideas: an introduction    17 ‘regime of truth’ of a ‘neo-American’ form of corporate, financialized, and globalized capitalism—a form of neo-imperialism. Shawn Pope and Patricia Bromley locate specific management ideas such as ­corporate social responsibility in their larger social context. In doing so, they highlight the role of management ideas in the construction and enactment of organizational actorhood. They outline how cultural transformations related to individual rights, scientization, and mass education have driven the expansion of management ideas, their increasing abstraction, and their increasingly rapid and indiscriminate diffusion. They develop propositions about the effects of management ideas on the expansion and standardization of organizations as a single meta-form of social structure and on our understanding of what an organization can and should do. Pramodita Sharma and Sanjay Sharma’s chapter illustrates how the field of management ideas research can be usefully informed by subdisciplines of management, in this case research on family firms. They show how different characteristics of family firms can be conducive to the adoption of ideas. The idea of corporate sustainability adopted in three family firms is used to develop this argument. In particular, transgenerational temporal orientation, long leadership tenures, and decision-making by a closely knit dominant coalition that can facilitate a shared vision and organizational control are all seen as advantageous to the adoption of management ideas and provide the potential for application in other contexts. Michael Reed examines the idea and effects of ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) and its historical transformation into different forms—technocratic, managerial, and neoliberal. He shows how the ‘unit idea’ or movement of NPM incorporated other management concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘leadership’, and ‘network’ and transformed the meaning of ‘public service’ and the lives of public service professionals in the UK and increasingly elsewhere. In particular, professional power was progressively replaced by managerial and market power and both ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ controls. The chapter concludes by considering the future for public services and the professional staff who deliver them under emergent NPM regimes of control and accountability. Philip Hancock and Melissa Tyler explore the impact of management ideas on people’s everyday life, both within and beyond the workplace setting. After having outlined what can be meant by the term ‘everyday’, they highlight how this is not a new, but is perhaps an intensified, phenomenon. They bring up to date developments brought through recent smart technologies for monitoring the home and body—a ‘quantified self ’. They review, critique, and theorize how management ideas have come to permeate our personal activities, habits, and well-being—such as via the pages of lifestyle magazines and self-improvement literature—and how the everyday is also colonized by management at work for productive ends. This ‘colonization of the everyday, both without and within the workplace’ is evaluated, revealing contrasting views, but ­ultimately is seen as limiting alternative approaches to ways of living. Craig Prichard and Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar focus on recent developments in critical ­management studies which have seen a shift in the mode of critique from a highly

18    a. sturdy, s. heusinkveld, t. reay, and d. strang theoretical and abstract form to a theoretically informed, but more active or engaged one, ‘joining the fray in the street, the office, the farm and the factory’. They review and classify conventional critiques of management ideas and then attempt to demonstrate what a ‘performative’ critique of management ideas would mean through a case study of their own experience of activist scholarship in an agricultural context. Using the psychoanalytic work of Lacan and what they term ‘hysterical inquiry’ as a lens, they argue that it is important to move through different critical positions, keeping tensions and questions in play. Martin Parker concludes the section on contexts and also the main handbook as a whole with a chapter on alternatives to management ideas. While other contributions have placed management ideas in context, they have all had management as a focus, even if sometimes from a critical perspective. Here, by contrast, management is seen as just one possible form of organizing, one of many, but one that has come to be dominant to the extent that it has generally become increasingly difficult to see any alternative. This is not to present organizing as neutral, but as a contested terrain, a form of ‘politics made durable’. Using an example of an organization that is based around cooperative ideas, it is argued that organizing can happen successfully without management and the ideas and underlying logic associated with it. As such, he suggests three broad principles (autonomy, collectivity, and responsibility) to help us think about what sorts of alternatives to management ideas we might consider. More generally, it is argued that we should learn from the variety of different ways in which human beings have organized themselves in different contexts and create schools for organizing, and not restrict ourselves to a concern with management ideas. In the short, final chapter we draw together some thoughts on future areas for research on management ideas and the field as a whole by pulling out some key themes from the individual chapters as well as more generally. Here some recurring issues emerge such as the need to make diverse empirical, theoretical, disciplinary, methodological, and conceptual linkages as well as traditional concerns with unpacking impact and engagement with various research users. In addition, attention is drawn to new empirical, technological, and methodological opportunities and with the possibility for extending the reach of studies related to management ideas.

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pa rt I

U N DE R STA N DI NG M A NAGE M E N T I DE A S

chapter 1

the system of m a nagem en t ideas origins, micro-foundations, and dynamics Michael J. Mol, Nicolai Foss, and Julian Birkinshaw

Introduction Ideas about what might be effective and efficient ways of managing companies enter management discourse, may be turned into specific management practices, may become dominant, and then, disappear again. This is particularly visible in the domain of practitioner-oriented management ideas about the sources of success. The 1980s was the decade of ‘culture’ (Peters and Waterman, 1982), the 1990s saw an emphasis on ‘process efficiency’ (Hammer and Champy, 1993), then Jim Collins’ (2001) thinking on leadership and strategic focus dominated for some years, until the publication of Kim and Maubourgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy (2005). These different approaches were fundamentally single-factor explanations. This made them easy to communicate and comprehend and partly for this reason they were promoted by media, consultants, and gurus, and taught in executive programmes, all of which increased their popularity. Academic research is subject to similar phenomena, as we see in the fall and rise of strategic planning (Mintzberg, 1994). Yet in the world of research there is, we would argue, greater cumulativeness in knowledge due to slower change processes, institutional safeguards, and different incentive structures. Common terms for such dynamics are ‘management fads’ (Abrahamson,  1996), ‘management fashions’ (Kieser, 1997), or simply ‘popular management techniques’ (Staw and Epstein, 2000). While these are apt terms to describe the process through which an individual idea emerges for some period of time, they risk drawing attention away from the system-like features of management ideas. It is this system of management ideas, and particularly its evolution, that we seek to analyse in this chapter.

26    m. j. mol, n. foss, and j. birkinshaw While many authors have discussed systemic aspects of management ideas (e.g. Ansari et al., 2010), our understanding of the dynamics of a system of management ideas still displays a number of gaps. What are the origins of a system of management ideas? How are ideas diffused and how do some ideas become institutionally embedded and legitimized in the form of management practices—which we understand to be specific processes, tools, structures, and techniques that managers apply in their work (Birkinshaw et al., 2008)? Why do ideas sometimes disappear again? What role do individual actors play in this process? In this chapter, we contribute to the understanding of the dynamics of systems of management ideas. We begin by clarifying in what sense we talk about a ‘system of management ideas’. Drawing on general notions of a ‘system’ (Simon,  1962) and the ­sociology of knowledge literature (e.g. Kuhn, 1962), we argue that a system of management ideas refers to actors of different kinds, primarily managers and their organizations, media, consultants, intermediary organizations, gurus, and academics, the ideas held in common by these actors, and how these ideas are institutionalized and thus attain normative force (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001). We suggest that such a systems view may be embedded in an evolutionary logic, in which the system carries knowledge over time, and is selected for or against, depending on the availability of relevant rivals. However, little is known about the evolutionary dynamics of such systems. We then move on to what we see as the main contribution of this chapter: We examine the micro-foundations of a system of management ideas, focusing on the role of managers and organizations in particular and how these actors are part of the evolutionary dynamics of systems of management ideas. While a number of scholars have made significant contributions that capture important features of the system of management ideas, the soft underbelly of such work remains the system’s micro-foundations, in particular the role played by managers and firms (Birkinshaw et al., 2008). We argue that managers are not passive adopters of management ideas. On the contrary, many, perhaps most, management ideas originate in the practice of management, before they are codified, systematized, examined, etc. by gurus or academics, and subsequently disseminated back to the business community (a classical example is the balanced scorecard, see Mol and Birkinshaw, 2008). Management ideas may of course also spread directly in the business community through imitation of favourably viewed practices, or by market selection favouring companies that implement more effective management practices. The second part of the chapter explores these processes utilizing a basic variation– selection–retention framework (Campbell,  1965). In particular, we present a process model to understand how variation, selection, and retention of management ideas occurs at the organizational level, where organizations face a choice at each stage between adopting existing, fashionable practices, versus creating novel practices. Thus, we contrast the management fashion loop, driven by purveyors of management ideas, and the management innovation loop, driven by buyers/consumers of management ideas. Effectively the choice between these two loops can be framed as a make-or-buy choice and we discuss what drives organizations to choose one mode or the other.

the system of management ideas    27

Systems of Management Ideas The Notion of a ‘System’ In the philosophy of science literature, a perspective related to Kuhn’s was provided by Lakatos (1970) who, coining the notion of scientific research programmes, observed that there are hierarchical relations between the core ideas that are central to all efforts within the programme, the heuristics that drive problem-solving, and actual problemsolving in the form of new scientific theories. Again, by analogy, there may be hierarchical relations in systems of management ideas. In fact, the notion of a hierarchy is inherently associated with the notion of a system (Simon, 1962). Hierarchy here refers to the conventional ordering of institutions, organizations, and individuals as existing at separate levels. It has long been argued (Gruber and Niles, 1972) that the three steps of research leading to new science, new science leading to new technology, and new technology leading to utilization can in fact be replicated for management ideas. A system is conventionally defined as an architecture of interdependent elements that stand in a hierarchical relation to each other (Simon, 1962). What these elements are can of course vary from one system to the next. One type of system is an actor-based system. In our context, an actor-based system of management ideas involves multiple actors, some more dominant than others and driven by a variety of motivations, who may interact to produce, disseminate, consume, and alter or reproduce management ideas in a way that forms a ‘system’. But the system may also refer not to who produces and uses management ideas, but to the content of these ideas. This is of course a familiar notion: Classical arguments in the theory and sociology of science and knowledge suggest that there may be ‘systems of knowledge’, perhaps best intuited by Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) famous notion of ‘paradigms’: the idea that science is typically organized in terms of a series of ‘universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners’ (Kuhn, 1962: x; also see more recent work on ‘Mode I/II’ models of knowledge production in Gibbons et al., 1994). By the same token, the history of management ideas also manifests several generally recognized achievements that provide solutions for a community of practitioners (Birkinshaw et al., 2008) and which become dominant, at least for some time, by for instance being taught in business schools and by private suppliers of business education, adopted by consultants, recognized and promoted in the media, and perhaps endorsed by politicians (e.g. new public management). Thus, systems of management ideas are co-constituted by actors, ­organizations, and artefacts representing power and interests. However, debates about Taylorism, shareholder/stakeholder models, and ‘bad for practice’ theories (Ferraro et al., 2005; Ghoshal, 2005) equally point to the system-like features of the ideas themselves. For example, consider the discussion of ‘shareholder’ visà-vis ‘stakeholder’ models of management. Shareholder models have direct implications

28    m. j. mol, n. foss, and j. birkinshaw for the organization, strategy, and human resource management (HRM) policies of the firm. Ideas about shareholder models of management are intertwined with ideas in economics about how to best deal with principal–agent problems, finance ideas about how profit maximization and shareholder value maximization are related, as well as fundamental economics ideas about how profit maximization, cost minimization, and efficient resource utilization are connected. In turn, these ideas are intertwined with normative ideas of a utilitarian bent (e.g. ‘decision-makers should pursue efficient resource uses’). Thus, engaging critically with the ‘shareholder model’ does not mean criticizing a single well-defined idea, but dealing with a complex of ideas that forms a system of more tightly connected ideas. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for stakeholder models of management. In sum, it is plausible to ascribe system-like features to key management ideas and the practices they support and inspire, in the sense that these interlocking ideas and practices are produced and reproduced by many different actors. The ideas are embodied in ‘heuristics’ which we here use in the sense of the philosophy of science literature (Lakatos,  1970), that is, more or less explicitly held and generally accepted notions of  how to deploy, expand, etc. the relevant management ideas. These heuristics are ­supported by normative forces of institutionalization, so that not conforming to ­predominant generalized heuristics may involve a penalty in terms of loss of legitimacy. Following Simon (1962: 458) we argue that for the system of management ideas ‘the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole’.

Systems of Management Ideas in the Literature Our argument so far that there may be systems of management ideas dovetails with the notion that there are overarching ‘management models’ (Birkinshaw, 2010; Birkinshaw and Goddard, 2009), which are taught in business schools, applied by consultants, and perhaps promoted by media and pundits and otherwise institutionally legitimized. These overarching management models encapsulate a range of interdependent specific management practices and behaviours (elements) and thus can also be considered a system. More generally, there are various expressions of the notion a system of management ideas in the management research literature, and these can be found in several strands of research. For example, Huczynski (1993) discussed the market for management ideas, arguing it is primarily a form of ‘conscious and unconscious collusion’ between consumers of management ideas (managers) and suppliers of those ideas, mostly consultants. Suddaby and Greenwood (2001), whose focus is on the larger institutional field of management, further investigate this production side of knowledge. They argue there are two distinct dynamics at work, one whereby knowledge is commodified by suppliers creating a routinized and codified knowledge product, and one

the system of management ideas    29 whereby the suppliers ‘colonize’ adjacent knowledge areas or professional jurisdictions (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001). Abrahamson (1996: 261) broadly recognizes the same actors as being involved in what he calls management fashion, but additionally argues that ‘[m]y preliminary sketch of management fashion suggests that it is largely a cultural ­phenomenon, shaped by norms of rationality and progress’ (emphasis added). Kieser (1997) stresses the political dimension of the system of management ideas, calling it a ‘knowledge arena’, where the different players may cooperate in order to broaden the appeal of a fashion, but can also compete when attempting to take a bigger share of the profits that flow from this fashion. Bodrožić and Adler (2018) examine long-run shifts in management models over time through a Schumpeterian lens, arguing that major technological change has consistently preceded change in management models in the USA over the last 150 years (see also Barley and Kunda, 1992). Finally, there is what might be called the managerial perspective of Birkinshaw et al. (2008), which views management ideas as part of a system aimed at innovation in organizational practices. In this view, managers are primarily the producers of ideas. Management ideas manifest themselves at different hierarchical levels. Thus, the more general, abstract ideas exist at the institutional level, and are promoted by consultants and business schools to an audience of knowledge consumers, potentially for pecuniary gain (Abrahamson,  1996; Kieser,  1997). They exert their influence on various actors through cognitive, normative, and even regulative forces, for instance when certification requires that certain management practices are adhered to, as with ISO 9000 (Guler et al., 2002). These ideas become concrete in terms of logics that are followed by specific actors, notably companies (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999). Such logics are often called the dominant managerial logic of an organization (Prahalad and Bettis, 1986) or its management model (Birkinshaw, 2010; Birkinshaw and Goddard, 2009). Eventually this management model will express itself in a variety of management practices (Birkinshaw, 2010).

Micro-Foundations as a Partial Gap in the Literature It seems obvious that a system of management ideas changes over time. In the world of practice today nobody discusses business process engineering or total quality management as originally intended. This is not to say that the underlying concern over quality has disappeared, or even that quality is no longer seen to be a concern of the entire organization, merely that the management practice labelled total quality management is no longer the means through which organizations pursue quality. Some practices become taken-for-granted, while others fade away. There is of course a variety of reasons why an idea fades away. First, ideas and associated practices can simply become obsolete due to the emergence of new and superior ideas, which has for instance been the case with MRP I becoming MRP II, and then ERP (Mol and Birkinshaw, 2008; Scarbrough et al., 2015). Second, there may be a ‘zeitgeist’ (spirit of the time), which is needed for a particular kind of idea to become popular. Barley and

30    m. j. mol, n. foss, and j. birkinshaw Kunda (1992) suggested that long waves of technological change drive shifts in theories of management that subsequently diffuse, get imitated (or sold on the market for ­management practices) and institutionalized, forming a system of management ideas. Building upon this Abrahamson (1997) argued that rational practices, which assume work processes can be formalized and rationalized to optimize labour productivity, appear just prior to an upswing in long Kondratieff waves (along with technological innovations). By contrast normative practices, which assume organizations can make employees more productive by shaping their thoughts and capitalizing on their emotions, appear just prior to a downswing. The post emergence prevalence of these ­practices does not seem to be related to Kondratieff waves though, but rather to the ­performance gains that managers perceive to be obtainable from these practices (Abrahamson, 1997). Third, and relatedly, practices may simply turn out to be less beneficial (whether in terms of firm performance, legitimacy, or otherwise) than they were supposed to be or become less beneficial over time as the contingencies that underpinned their effectiveness start to disappear. Kimberly (1981: 94) observed that ‘[t]hose managerial innovations whose direct contributions to output and productivity are the most difficult to determine are the least likely to survive protracted periods of scarcity, particularly in manufacturing as opposed to service organizations’. A lack of environmental fit may turn practices that are successful elsewhere into fads when they are exported, because their core meaning no longer holds. Within a system of management ideas, change agents, in some given organizational and institutional context, can alter the system. Thus, Birkinshaw et al. (2008) study the emergence of innovative management practices, that is, variations in the body of management practices in use, arguing that internal change agents are always involved, and in some instances external change agents as well (see also Mol and Birkinshaw, 2014). The literature recognizes that processes of imitation and diffusion may in fact change a system of management ideas (Guler et al., 2002). The literature on management fads essentially studies such diffusion processes. One part of this literature has used simulation models to study diffusion of practices; such studies by definition use the idea of a system, because for the model to work it is necessary to define who the actors are and how they interact with each other (Abrahamson and Rosenkopf, 1997; Strang et al., 2014; Strang and Macy, 2001). All this amounts to saying that the system of management ideas does not emerge through some mysterious process at the institutional level, but rather that emergence, diffusion, and eventual institutionalization of this system all turn on bottom-up processes, actioned by individuals and happening through the interaction of individuals. Of course, those individuals act within a pre-existing institutional matrix of norms, collective expectations, standards, rules, etc. (Coleman, 1990; Felin et al., 2015), but it remains the case that changes in the system are reducible to actions and interactions of individuals. Such micro-foundational points are not entirely absent from the literature. Thus, the literature on management fads studies the process of diffusion of management ideas, highlighting the roles that particular individuals play (e.g. Huising, 2016; Scarbrough et al., 2015). As noted above, the simulation literature also focuses on bottom-up processes. And in histories of the emergence of many specific management

the system of management ideas    31 ideas it is well documented that individuals play a key role (Mol and Birkinshaw, 2008; Wren and Greenwood, 1998). And yet, our understanding of the micro-foundations (Felin and Foss,  2005) and micro-mechanisms of the system of management ideas contains several related gaps. First, we do not have a good conceptual model that links the initial emergence of new management ideas to their subsequent diffusion and later institutionalization in terms of individual actions and interactions. Literatures on the innovation and spread of management ideas largely operate independently, so important explanatory mechanisms are not linked, although they evidently are in reality. We should acknowledge that an ­important reason for this is that there is simply relatively limited understanding of how innovation of management ideas takes place, relative to diffusion of management ideas but also relative to other types of innovation (Birkinshaw et al., 2008). Second, our understanding of some of the key mechanisms is quite incomplete, particularly concerning how new management ideas arise in organizations. In this respect Birkinshaw et al. (2008: 825) argued that [w]hile many of the landmarks of management innovation are familiar to every business scholar (for example, GE’s development of the modern research lab and GM’s invention of the M-form organization structure), the amount of detailed knowledge about how management innovation is actually implemented is limited.

In the following, we attempt to address these two gaps.

An Evolutionary Model of the System of Management Ideas We propose that the system of management ideas is subject to an evolutionary logic (Birkinshaw et al., 2008; Campbell, 1965; Van de Ven and Poole, 1995; Vermeulen, 2018), that is, it undergoes processes of variation, selection, and retention (VSR). To view the system of management ideas through such an evolutionary logic is a logical extension of how we have conceived of this system above. In particular, as opposed to teleological and lifecycle change models, the evolutionary logic focuses on multiple entities rather than a single entity (Van de Ven and Poole,  1995), which is consistent with having ­multiple actors in the system. And, as opposed to dialectic and teleological change models, an evolutionary logic focuses on a prescribed mode of change, rather than a constructive mode of change (Van de Ven and Poole, 1995), which is entirely consistent with the micro-foundational notion we have posited where individuals drive change. Furthermore, we note that VSR processes can occur at different levels, ranging from the very macro to the very micro. At the top of the hierarchy, there may be competing systems of management ideas. Thus, much was made of the differences between US and Japanese systems of management ideas a few decades ago, and these were explicitly seen as rival systems of mutually reinforcing elements (Pascale and Athos, 1981), meaning

32    m. j. mol, n. foss, and j. birkinshaw there is variation. Furthermore, there is an evolutionary pressure on these systems, stemming from the fact that key actors are in competition. Because the system consists of highly complementary elements which lend relative stability and rigidity to management practices, there is an element of retention. But evolutionary processes also take place within the system itself, and indeed within the actors populating the system. For instance, Toyota’s intra-organizational experiments with its Lean system have now lasted many decades and have involved adding to, modifying, and discarding the Lean system. At the institutional level an army of consultants and other supply-side providers of knowledge on Lean have helped an ever-expanding population of organizations to also take up, modify, and retain or discard Lean, starting initially in Japan and the car industry but now across the world and throughout the manufacturing and services sectors. The appearance and disappearance of experts on Lean suggests that there are many individual level VSR processes, alongside organizational and institutional level ones. Individual consultants, for instance, have to make a call about whether to continue to invest in their knowledge of an existing management practice, or to move on to a new fashionable practice, which might in fact be a source of significant anxiety (Sturdy, 1997). And the role of an individual in promoting a particular practice within an organization changes over time (Huising, 2016). Variation in management ideas can come about in different ways. On one hand, there are clear instances of planned and highly deliberate invention of novel practices. This is the case, for example, with the invention of brand management by Procter and Gamble (Mol and Birkinshaw, 2008). On the other hand, some novel practices emerge as a by-product of technological innovation and can be argued to appear serendipitously. A case in point is end user computing, which arose due to the emergence of the personal computer (Zmud, 1982). Whether deliberate or not, however, variation comes about through micro-level actions of individuals, the people Meyerson (2003) described as ‘tempered radicals’, Davenport et al. (2003) as ‘idea practitioners’, and Birkinshaw et al. (2008) as ‘change agents’. These change agents can be driven by a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic motives. We acknowledge that while the world of practice and the academic literature celebrate the successes of these individuals in bringing about variation and change, there are undoubtedly many more failures. These failures seldom make it to the spotlight, although there are some interesting accounts where highly novel and seemingly successful management practices were not retained later on, such as Oticon’s spaghetti organization (Foss, 2003).

Criticisms of the Evolutionary Approach Exactly how ideas are selected is a highly contentious issue in the literature. A first issue concerns the notion that management practices are innovated, chosen, and implemented in a deliberate, rational manner because of their projected consequences. Evolutionary scholars have sometimes criticized this idea, because evolutionism in social science

the system of management ideas    33 typically entails downplaying rational choice. Instead, it is posited that new management practices emerge through a stochastic process (which is agnostic on the mechanism that generates new realizations of the ‘management practices’ random variable). This is the approach of, for example, Nelson and Winter (1982) and Vermeulen (2018). Another line of attack stresses that little systematic evidence exists about the consequences of management practices for firm performance. Thus, Staw and Epstein (2000: 523) stated, somewhat extremely, that ‘[t]here is not a steady progression of ideas based on systematic knowledge of people and organizations, nor are there clear-cut discoveries of principles for motivating and coordinating the work of others’. Their work showed that uptake of fashionable practices worked well for the CEO’s remuneration but had no discernible effect on firm performance. Vermeulen (2018) argues that it is entirely ­plausible that practices which have deleterious effects remain in use. Strang and Macy (2001) also find that there is a disconnect between organization level performance outcomes, which can improve as an outcome of practice uptake, and population level diffusion, which goes up and then down as the fad disseminates. It has alternatively been claimed that ‘improvements in administrative techniques and in the organization of economic activity may be just as important as technological innovation in terms of their productivity enhancing characteristics’ (Teece, 1980: 464). In fact, the problem here may not so much be that there is no theoretical cumulation, but rather that theorizing ranges ahead of empiricism due to the difficulty of properly measuring management practices, the lack of proper micro data with a sufficiently expansive longitudinal dimension, and the methodological and practical challenges involved in measuring at more than one level of analysis (Vaccaro et al., 2012). However, evidence does exist although it is typically scattered across management research fields. While, for example, the HRM literature is rich on systems thinking (i.e. bundles of HR practices as mutually reinforcing components in a system), the systems considered are specific to HRM (Kossek, 1987) and are not linked to other kinds of practices (financial, accounting, marketing, etc.). While the innovative survey methodologies and field experiments pioneered by Bloom and Van Reenen (2007) and their co-authors rigorously address measurement practices, this line of research involves extremely generic management practices (of a ‘one size fits all’ variety) and does not consider that management practices may cluster in different bundles or systems. In any case, both the opponents (Staw and Epstein,  2000) and the proponents (Teece, 1980) of a rational, performance-driven view of management ideas are united in their belief that individual agents, such as CEOs, are primarily responsible for selecting in and selecting out certain ideas. Whether much or little foresight is involved, whether much or little is known about consequences, and whether or not the emergence and spread of management practices is spread mainly through mimetic isomorphism or rational, independent choice, human agency is involved in the generation and recognition of new management ideas and practices on the demand (user) side. Likewise, on the supply (purveyor) side, individual fashion setters (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999) engage in pressuring demand-side individuals to select their ideas.

34    m. j. mol, n. foss, and j. birkinshaw

Dynamics and Consequences of a System of Management Ideas at the Organizational Level In an attempt to apply this broadly evolutionary and micro-foundational perspective to management ideas, we now turn our attention towards organizational level VSR processes, linking them to institutional and individual level processes where desirable and possible.

Two Streams of Literature On the organizational level two separate streams of literature have emerged regarding this topic: (1) work that looks into how organizations adopt existing practices, often in modified form; and (2) work that looks into how organizations create their own innovative practices to tackle problems. Of course, at the phenomenon level there is a grey area where an existing practice is adapted so much that it becomes innovative. The reverse, where a new practice is nothing more than a renaming of an existing practice, seems less likely to occur. This kind of imitation is certainly less prevalent than violations of the intellectual property behind product innovation, presumably because management practices are much harder to codify (Birkinshaw et al., 2008; Teece, 1980) and are strongly dependent on organizational context. Thus, innovation and diffusion should not be seen as strictly separate phases since practices are often altered substantially in the course of implementation (Alänge et al., 1998). Still, in principle individual agents can choose whether to apply new or existing practices to tackle a challenge. Again both literatures have emphasized that there is some system of management ideas. In the former stream it is about the meeting of supply and demand for a practice. The fashion literature (especially Abrahamson, 1996) emphasizes fashion users (managers) and fashion setters (particularly gurus, consultants, technical organizations, and the media). The adaptation literature (Ansari et al., 2010) discusses practice and intra-organizational characteristics as a form of supply and organizational and supraorganizational characteristics on the demand side. In the latter literature, the central position is held by change agents (Birkinshaw et al., 2008), who are individuals inside or outside the organization operating within a wider system (an organizational and an institutional context) and innovation is stimulated by exogenous sources, which lead to some dissatisfaction with the status quo. While there has been some limited integration of these literatures, there has not been any consideration of the question, ‘Under what conditions do organizations use one mode (adoption) or the other (creation)?’—a question that can alternatively be interpreted as a make-or-buy decision-making problem. This is both a theoretically

the system of management ideas    35 challenging issue, as described in more detail below, and one of practical relevance because management practices affect a range of organizational outcomes. This main question produces a number of sub-questions, including: How are the two related? An innovative management model may for instance diffuse and become codified to enter a system of management ideas. At what levels do these conditions exist? How does the modal choice affect a system of management ideas? Does the predominant system in use in an o ­ rganization affect the modal choice, and if so how? Next, we look to address some of these questions.

Innovation and Fashion First, we consider how the management innovation process (Birkinshaw et al., 2008) contrasts with, and links into, the management fashion process as described by Abrahamson (1996). A new practice can be developed by internal change agents or alternatively an existing practice can be obtained from a market provider (the third option of allying is less common—Geyskens et al., 2006). At different junctions, internal change agents have a choice between creating a novel practice and buying in an existing standard solution. We therefore model both choices. Figure 1.1 contains an overview of our process model. It builds upon the process model of Birkinshaw et al. (2008), since we recognize there are different stages, displayed horizontally. Here, these stages are ­variation (when a solution is proposed), selection (when a solution is implemented), and retention (when retrospective sense-making of the solution takes place). Progress between the stages need not be linear, or indeed straightforward, and although we picture how perceived success may lead to future uptake of a solution, many, in fact potentially most, solutions will not be a resounding success. Meanwhile, on the vertical axis, we distinguish between the management fashion loop (buy option), fundamentally driven by the suppliers of solutions (the consultants and so on), and a management innovation loop (make option), where users/buyers of solutions create novel practices. Our model departs from the assumption that demand for a solution emerges when there is dissatisfaction with the status quo (Birkinshaw and Mol, 2006). That is, a company either faces some specific problem its existing practices cannot handle well enough, or proactively spots a new opportunity to improve its ways of working. Historically, an example of the first category is the creation of the matrix structure in the aerospace and aircraft manufacturing in the 1950s, while the more recent practice of crowdsourcing is a good example of the second category. As noted, a solution can either be standard, if it has been applied in another context (e.g. in another organization, industry, or country, or even in the same setting but in response to another problem or opportunity); or it can be novel, created in response to this specific problem or opportunity. Furthermore, we argue that the choice between a novel and a standard solution occurs at multiple points in time. Although there is an initial choice to go with either a novel or a standard solution (arrow A in Figure 1.1), this standard solution can be implemented in such a non-standard way that the de facto implemented solution actually

36    m. j. mol, n. foss, and j. birkinshaw Management Innovation Loop

Demand side: Buyers of management practices

Novel solution proposed Company problem or opportunity

A Standard solution proposed

Novel solution implemented

B

Standard solution implemented

Internal sense-making of innovation Solution interpreted as a success

C

Supply side: Purveyors of management practices

Ideas and practices put forward by external providers

ENVIRONMENT

VARIATION

Management Fashion Loop

SELECTION

Company experience used to bolster idea

RETENTION

Figure 1.1  Integrating the management innovation and management fashion processes

turns out to be novel (arrow B). Indeed, if a novel solution implemented in some ­organization/location starts to spread beyond that same setting, this may lead to the novel solution becoming a (new) standard solution, implying it turns from a management innovation into a management fashion (arrow C). None of the arrows A, B, and C necessarily occur during the VSR processes that solutions go through. In fact, we suspect an overwhelming majority of such VSR processes occur entirely within one of the two loops, that is, the management fashion loop or the management innovation loop. Yet, we argue that instances where one of these three arrows occurs are of great significance from a practical point of view and an organization theoretical stance. Arrow C helps to explain the origins of a new management fashion, which in one way or the other have to lie in some organizational implementation of a practice that is at least perceived to be novel, if not successful. Meanwhile arrows A and B help to increase the applicability or domain of an existing standard solution, thereby increasing what has been called its interpretive viability (Benders and Van Veen, 2001) and effectively changing what a management fashion may be about, particularly if the occurrence of arrow A or B is followed by the occurrence of arrow C. Typical explanations for the make-or-buy decision derive either from the transaction cost economics tradition (Williamson, 1985), whereby the make option is chosen if the buy option (the market) fails due to the need to invoke assets that are highly specific to the transaction and therefore of limited further use to the supplier firm, or from the resource-based view (Barney, 1991), whereby firms choose to make (internalize) a transaction if the firm’s productive resources for that transaction are superior to those of outside suppliers (Jacobides and Winter, 2005). In other words, whether a firm chooses to use a standard solution or create a novel solution is an ‘economizing’ decision. Although this is ultimately an empirical question, there are reasons to believe that economizing explanations are somewhat problematic for this particular make-or-buy decision. First, there is general scepticism about the usefulness of transaction cost economics in the context of innovation (e.g. Mol, 2005). Second, there is strong evidence that when it comes to implementation of management practices organizational ­legitimacy has a major role to play (Abrahamson, 1991; Birkinshaw et al., 2008),

the system of management ideas    37 which suggests that it may be necessary to invoke institutional theory arguments. Such arguments are not unheard of in the make-or-buy literature. One particular case of legitimacy-driven decisions to buy (outsource) is the ‘Kodak effect’ (Loh and Venkatraman, 1992); Kodak was first to outsource its IT operations and this provided the legitimacy that other firms needed to follow suit. In a similar vein uptake of a standard solution by a large and highly visible firm may well lead other firms to follow. Third, we suggest that whether a standard or novel solution is chosen will to a great extent depend on how the problem is framed. If the problem is framed as novel it is more obvious to pursue a novel solution. This suggests that the decision-making structures of the firm also come into play. Recent work in outsourcing (Bidwell, 2012) has drawn from the behavioural theory of the firm to argue that decisions to pursue one or the other option can be driven by internal political agendas. This suggests that organizations may choose the novel over the standard solution, or vice versa, because doing so serves some internal political interests. Future empirical investigations into the choice to make or buy a management practice ought to reflect these multiple theoretical perspectives.

Conclusion In this chapter we have presented the case for a ‘system of management ideas’, in the sense of actors holding, promoting, diffusing, adopting, acting upon, and perhaps ­ultimately abandoning certain key ideas about how to run businesses. Such a system involves a body of distinct knowledge (the idea); the transfer of that knowledge across time and space, change as a result of local adaptation or innovation, and selection for or against. We emphasize the multilevel nature of this system, with key levels being the institutional, organizational, and individual. Furthermore, we argue that the evolution of the system of management ideas is best seen through a VSR lens, and that any such variation, selection, or retention is fundamentally a micro-foundational issue, i.e. it is driven by choices and action of individual agents. We then consider the specific question of whether organizations employ existing management ideas or devise novel ideas in response to a problem or perceived opportunity. This decision can be analysed as a make-or-buy problem, and we touched on several conceptual perspectives for doing this. Our formulation generates several specific insights. The first is that there is a twoway interaction between fashions and innovations. While it is undeniably the case that every management fashion is eventually a consequence of some act of innovation (Abrahamson, 1996; Birkinshaw et al., 2008), we emphasize that there is also a reverse path, where a fashion can be reinterpreted in a novel manner, such that the actual practice is an innovation that is new to the context or new to the state-of-the-art. The roots of a number of historical management innovations (Mol and Birkinshaw, 2008), such as the moving assembly line, support this. Second, we emphasize that individual agents repeatedly face a choice whether to buy an existing, fashionable practice from an outside

38    m. j. mol, n. foss, and j. birkinshaw purveyor, or to make (develop) a novel practice internally. Third, we show how ­variation, selection, and retention are all key mechanisms in the evolution of the system. These insights offer room for new empirical and conceptual research at the intersection of management fashions and management innovations.

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the system of management ideas    39 Coleman, J.  S. (1990). Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Collins, J. C. (2001). Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t. London: Random House. Davenport, T.  H., Prusak, L., and Wilson, H.  J. (2003). What’s the Big Idea? Creating and Capitalizing on the Best Management Thinking. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press. Felin, T. and Foss, N. J. (2005). ‘Strategic Organization: A Field in Search of Micro-Foundations’, Strategic Organization, 3: 441–55. Felin, T., Foss, N. J., and Ployhart, R. E. (2015). ‘The Microfoundations Movement in Strategy and Organization Theory’, Academy of Management Annals, 9: 575–632. Ferraro, F., Pfeffer, J., and Sutton, R.  I. (2005). ‘Economics Language and Assumptions: How Theories Can Become Self-Fulfilling’, Academy of Management Review, 30: 8–24. Foss, N.  J. (2003). ‘Selective Intervention and Internal Hybrids: Interpreting and Learning from the Rise and Decline of the Oticon Spaghetti Organization’, Organization Science, 14: 331–49. Geyskens, I., Steenkamp, J. B. E., and Kumar, N. (2006). ‘Make, Buy, or Ally: A Transaction Cost Theory Meta-Analysis’, Academy of Management Journal, 49: 519–43. Ghoshal, S. (2005). ‘Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices’, Academy of Management Learning & Education, 4: 75–91. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., and Trow, M. (1994). The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Gruber, W. H. and Niles, J. S. (1972). ‘Put Innovation in the Organization Structure’, California Management Review, 14: 29–35. Guler, I., Guillén, M. F., and Macpherson, J. M. (2002). ‘Global Competition, Institutions, and the Diffusion of Organizational Practices: The International Spread of ISO 9000 Quality Certificates’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 47: 207–32. Hammer, M. and Champy, J. (1993). Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. New York: Harper Business. Huczynski, A.  A. (1993). ‘Explaining the Succession of Management Fads’, International Journal of Human Resource Management, 4: 443–63. Huising, R. (2016). ‘From Adapting Practices to Inhabiting Ideas: How Managers Restructure Work across Organizations’, in L. E. Cohen, M. D. Burton, and M. Lounsbury (eds.), The Structuring of Work in Organizations. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 47. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing, 383–413. Jacobides, M. G. and Winter, S. G. (2005). ‘The Co-evolution of Capabilities and Transaction Costs: Explaining the Institutional Structure of Production’, Strategic Management Journal, 26: 395–413. Kieser, A. (1997). ‘Rhetoric and Myth in Management Fashion’, Organization, 4: 49–74. Kim, W. C. and Mauborgne, R. (2005). Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Kimberly, J. R. (1981). ‘Managerial Innovation’, in P. C. Nystrom and W. H. Starbuck (eds.), Handbook of Organizational Design Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 84–104. Kossek, E.  E. (1987). ‘Human Resources Management Innovation’, Human Resource Management, 26: 71–92. Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

40    m. j. mol, n. foss, and j. birkinshaw Lakatos, I. (1970). ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, in I.  Lakatos and A.  Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 91–195. Loh, L. and Venkatraman, N. (1992). ‘Diffusion of information Technology Outsourcing: Influence Sources and the Kodak Effect’, Information Systems Research, 3: 334–58. Meyerson, D. E. (2003). Tempered Radicals: How Everyday Leaders Inspire Change at Work. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press. Mintzberg, H. (1994). ‘The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning’, Harvard Business Review, 72: 107–14. Mol, M. J. (2005). ‘Does Being R&D Intensive Still Discourage Outsourcing? Evidence from Dutch Manufacturing’, Research Policy, 34: 571–82. Mol, M. J. and Birkinshaw, J. (2008). Giant Steps in Management: Creating Innovations that Change the Way We Work. London: Prentice Hall/FT. Mol, M. J. and Birkinshaw, J. (2009). ‘The Sources of Management Innovation: When Firms Introduce New Management Practices’, Journal of Business Research, 62: 1269–80. Mol, M.  J. and Birkinshaw, J. (2014). ‘The Role of External Involvement in the Creation of Management Innovations’, Organization Studies, 35: 1287–312. Nelson, R. R. and Winter, S. G. (1982). An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pascale, R. T. and Athos, A. G. (1981). ‘The Art of Japanese Management’, Business Horizons, 24: 83–5. Peters, T.  J. and Waterman, R.  H. (1982). In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. New York: Harper & Row. Prahalad, C.  K. and Bettis, R.  A. (1986). ‘The Dominant Logic: A New Linkage between Diversity and Performance’, Strategic Management Journal, 7: 485–501. Scarbrough, H., Robertson, M., and Swan, J. (2015). ‘Diffusion in the Face of Failure: The Evolution of a Management Innovation’, British Journal of Management, 26: 365–87. Simon, H. A. (1962). ‘The Architecture of Complexity’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106: 467–82. Staw, B. M. and Epstein, L. D. (2000). ‘What Bandwagons Bring: Effects of Popular Management Techniques on Corporate Performance, Reputation, and CEO Pay’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 45: 523–56. Strang, D., David, R., and Akhlaghpour, S. (2014). ‘Coevolution in Management Fashion: An Agent-Based Model of Consultant-Driven Innovation’, American Journal of Sociology, 120: 226–64. Strang, D. and Macy, M.  W. (2001). ‘In Search of Excellence: Fads, Success Stories, and Adaptive Emulation’, American Journal of Sociology, 107: 147–82. Sturdy, A. (1997). ‘The Consultancy Process: An Insecure Business?’, Journal of Management Studies, 34: 389–413. Suddaby, R. and Greenwood, R. (2001). ‘Colonizing Knowledge: Commodification as a Dynamic of Jurisdictional Expansion in Professional Service Firms’, Human Relations, 54: 933–53. Teece, D. J. (1980). ‘The Diffusion of an Administrative Innovation’, Management Science, 26: 464–70. Vaccaro, I. G., Jansen, J. J., Van Den Bosch, F. A., and Volberda, H. W. (2012). ‘Management Innovation and Leadership: The Moderating Role of Organizational Size’, Journal of Management Studies, 49: 28–51.

the system of management ideas    41 Van de Ven, A.  H. and Poole, M.  S. (1995). ‘Explaining Development and Change in Organizations’, Academy of Management Review, 20: 510–40. Vermeulen, F. (2018). ‘A Basic Theory of Inheritance: How Bad Practice Prevails’, Strategic Management Journal, 39: 1603–29. Williamson, O. E. (1985). The Economic Institutions of Capitalism. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wren, D. A. and Greenwood, R. G. (1998). Management Innovators: The People and Ideas That Have Shaped Modern Business. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zmud, R. W. (1982). ‘Diffusion of Modern Software Practices: Influence of Centralization and Formalization’, Management Science, 28: 1421–31.

chapter 2

The Lifecycl e of M a nagem en t Ideas innovation, diffusion, institutionalization, dormancy, and rebirth Eric Abrahamson and Alessandro Piazza

Introduction This chapter distinguishes five stages in the lifecycle of management ideas: their ­innovation, diffusion, institutionalization, dormancy, and rebirth. It has three objectives. First, to show that considering these different stages simultaneously facilitates studying each stage and stage transition separately. Second, we examine the lifecycles of both abstract management ideas and instantiations of these ideas into specific ideas. Many questions about the lifecycle of specific ideas are hard to address without considering abstract ideas. It is difficult, for instance, to study the lifecycle of ideas such as ‘Time and Motion Study’ or ‘Rate Setting’ without considering the lifecycle of the more abstract management idea of ‘Scientific Management’ to which these specific ideas belong. Third, researchers studying the lifecycle of management ideas tend to draw conclusions from successful episodes of innovation, diffusion, institutionalization, or dormancy and rebirth, without checking whether they would reach similar conclusions when studying unsuccessful episodes. We advance a broad-brush conceptualization of conditions explaining both success and unsuccessful episodes. This chapter’s first section describes our five stages in management ideas’ lifecycles. The second clarifies conceptual distinctions between abstract and specific ideas. Section three conceptualizes forces that explain transitions across stages in abstract management ideas’ lifecycles. This allows us, in the fourth section, to develop general propositions about the causes of transitions between stages in the lifecycle of specific management

the lifecycle of management ideas    43 ideas in the context of the lifecycle of abstract management ideas. A fifth section returns to this chapter’s three objectives and the research they suggest.

Stages in the Lifecycle of Management Ideas We could parse the lifecycle of management ideas into many different sequences of stages. We want a sequence that highlights and helps explain important, emergent research questions. We also want a comprehensive set of stages. So, we need a viewpoint revealing a comprehensive set of different lifecycles. Such a viewpoint is elusive, however, because studies bearing on the lifecycle of management ideas usually use a mono-innovation strategy. They examine the lifecycle of one, or at most a few ideas, but rarely of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of innovations (Strang and Soule, 1998). Therefore, to gain our viewpoint, we use Bogardus’ (1924, 1942) poly-innovation study of around 2,700 nonmanagerial innovations. We derive a sequence of stages that captures the lifecycle of innovations, generally, and is best suited to studying management ideas’ lifecycle, particularly. Bogardus adopted a poly-innovation strategy in one of the earliest diffusion studies in US sociology (Bogardus, 1924, 1942). Each year, between 1915 and 1940, if at least five of Bogardus’ 150 respondents, throughout the USA, reported the inception of a faddish innovation, he noted the time of its inception and disappearance. Bogardus followed the lifecycle of 2,702 innovations over twenty-five years. We take five stages from Bogardus’ (1942) study: ‘Innovation’, ‘Diffusion’, ‘Institution’, ‘Dormancy’, and ‘Rebirth’. They raise four questions at the core of research about management ideas’ lifecycles. First, why are certain management ideas theorized into ­management innovations, whereas others are not? Second, why do many, but not  all, management innovations diffuse, often relatively transitorily, resembling the characterization of management fashions? Third, why do others endure relatively permanently, resembling the characterization of management institutions? Fourth, why do some management ideas remain dormant, whereas others are reborn and theorized as ­management innovations?

Stages in the Lifecycle of Innovations Using Bogardus’ (1942) study, in Figure 2.1, we distinguish not only five stages, but also possible transition paths between them. We advance more than a sequence-of-stages model. We advance a broad-brush, process theory of necessary—though not sufficient—forces which must co-occur with sufficient strength for management ideas to transition between stages (Mohr,  1982).

44    e. abrahamson and a. piazza Diffusion Stage

Innovation Stage Path 1

Path 5

Path 2

Path 4

Institution Stage Path 7

Path 6

Path 8

Dormancy Stage

Path 3

Rebirth Stage

Figure 2.1  Sequence of stages and transition paths

We use the acronym ‘NF’ to denote each of these necessary, though not sufficient, forces. CNF denotes the co-occurrence of NFs that cause a stage transition. We distinguish early-life, mid-life, late-life, and rebirth CNFs in Figure 2.2. We define the terms ‘innovation’, ‘institution’, and ‘fashion’ here, because we use them throughout this section. First, ‘management innovations’ are ‘theorizations’ of management ideas (Strang and Meyer, 1993). Theorizations are linguistic, management prescriptions, like ‘don’t automate, obliterate’, denoted by labels, like ‘Business Process Reengineering’ (Hammer, 1990). Second, we do not define institutionalized innovations by the relative permanence in their lifecycles and fashion waves by their relative impermanence. Rather, we define ‘institutions’ (Colyvas and Maroulis, 2015; Scott, 1995) and ‘fashions’ (Abrahamson, 1991) according to the distinct social forces causing them. Certain fashions can become institutionalized, enduring relatively permanently (Colyvas and Jonsson, 2011; Perkmann and Spicer, 2008).

Early-Life CNFs Causing Transitions to the Innovation Stage Bogardus’ (1942) study reveals the lifecycle of thousands of ideas that were theorized as innovations and diffused. It does not highlight a question that certain students of management ideas have begun to address: why are certain management ideas theorized as

the lifecycle of management ideas    45 Innovation Stage All Conditions Present Early-Life Transition Conditions At Minimum One Condition Absent

Diffusion Stage All Conditions Present Mid-Life Transition Conditions At Minimum One Condition Absent

Institution Stage All Conditions Present Late-Life Transition Conditions At Minimum One Condition Absent

Dormancy Stage All Conditions Present Rebirth Transition Conditions At Minimum One Condition Absent Rebirth Stage

Figure 2.2  Transition forces

management innovations whereas others are not (cf. Colyvas and Maroulis, 2015; Powell et al., 2014)? That is, what are the early-life CNFs causing management ideas to be ­theorized as management innovations (Figure 2.1, Path 1)? Absent one of these NFs, nascent management ideas fail to become innovations, entering the Dormancy Stage (Path 2).

The Mid-Life CNF Causing Transitions to the Diffusion Stage Bogardus’ (1942) study suggests that most innovations have relatively transient lifecycles, like those produced by management fashion mechanisms. He finds that 88 per cent of innovations lasted less than a year and 98 per cent less than two (Bogardus, 1942). His findings antedate, by forty years, Zucker’s (1983: 26) claim that ‘Few innovations are widely adopted, by organizations or elsewhere, with most looking more like the social characterization of fads than institutions.’ This raises a question which certain scholars have begun to examine: why do many management innovations diffuse, often relatively transitorily (Colyvas and Jonsson, 2011; Greenwood et al., 2002; Naumovska et al, 2015; Perkmann and Spicer, 2008; Zeitz et al., 1999)? In other words, what is the mid-life CNF explaining why certain management innovations transit from the Innovation to the Diffusion Stage (Figure 2.1, Path 5)? Absent one NF, they enter the Dormancy Stage (Path 6).

46    e. abrahamson and a. piazza

Stage 3: The Late-Life CNF Causing Transitions to the Institution Stage In Bogardus’ study, only 2 per cent of innovations lasted more than three years. Unfortunately, Bogardus (1942) lists only eight such institution-like innovations: wrist watches, camouflage, cameras, radios, automobile braking signals, zippers, Tonneau windshields, and bobbed hair. In hindsight, the first six of these innovations have had relatively permanent lifecycles of at least seventy-five years and are well institutionalized at the time of this chapter’s writing. A seventh innovation, ‘Tonneau Windshields’, does not fit neatly at either pole of the relatively-transient fashion or relatively-permanent institution continuum. Its lifecycle greatly exceeds the relatively-transitory lifecycle of 98 per cent of Bogardus’ ­innovations, but falls short of the relatively-permanent 75-year lifecycle of six of these innovations. So, certain innovations appear to survive longer than many relativelytransient ­innovations, but shorter than many relatively-permanent innovations. This raises a question re-examined recently by students of management ideas: why do institutionalized management innovations survive more or less permanently (cf. Colyvas and Jonsson,  2011; Naumovska et al.,  2015; Perkmann and Spicer,  2008)? In other words, what is the late-life CNF for management innovations to persist during the Institutionalization Stage. Absent one of these NFs, institutionalized management ideas become deinstitutionalized and enter the Dormancy Stage (Dacin and Dacin, 2008) (Paths 9 and 10).

Stages 4 and 5: The Dormancy and Rebirth CNFs to the Dormancy and Rebirth Stages Management ideas enter the Dormancy Stage either when they fail to be theorized as management innovations (Path 2) or to diffuse (Path 6). They also enter this stage when they become unfashionable (Path 6) or deinstitutionalized (Path 10). Management ideas remain in the Dormancy Stage until the rebirth CNF occurs (Path 3). The eighth of Bogardus’ (1942) relatively-permanent innovations, ‘Bobbed Hair’, had a lifecycle unlike the other seven. It was born, went dormant, and was reborn. In the USA, during the nineteenth century, one hair-styling fashion in full-length women’s hair replaced the next (Darwin, 1872). This lasted until the early 1920s, when ‘Bobbed Hair’, a medium-length hair-style, became popular. This radical innovation of women cutting their hair survived until the late 1930s, when it disappeared. Mysteriously, after remaining dormant for thirty years, at the onset of the 1960s, the Bobbed Hair innovation in cut hair was reborn. It rapidly regained popularity and remains institutionalized. Bobbed Hair reminds us that certain management ideas are also reborn. As Bendix (1956) noted ‘old ideas have been rephrased rather than abandoned’ (1956: 339) and

the lifecycle of management ideas    47 ‘­traditional ideologies have been formulated anew in the terminology which have been currently fashionable’ (1956: 342). More recently, scholars have documented the rebirth of certain management ideas (cf. David and Strang, 2006; Jacques, 2012/1996; Larsson, 2015; Mol et al., 2008; Røvik, 2011). However, this raises the question: why do some management ideas remain dormant, whereas others are reborn and theorized as management innovations? The CNF causes management ideas to re-emerge from the Dormancy Stage and transit into the Rebirth Stage (Path 3). Absent one of these NFs, they remain dormant.

Management Ideas We asserted that many of the questions about the lifecycle of specific management ideas are hard to address without considering the lifecycle of abstract management ideas which these specific ideas belong to. Therefore, we clarify the conceptual distinctions involved. Figure 2.3 builds upon Bodrožić and Adler’s (2018) approach to conceptualizing management ideas at nested levels of abstraction. The next section examines the language of ‘rhetorics’ which serves to theorize abstract management ideas to articulate ‘management models’ and their constituent ‘management innovations’ (Abrahamson, 1997; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Bodrožić and Adler, 2018; Kunda and Ailon-Souday, 2005).

Management Rhetorics

Distinct body of ideas that offers organizational manager precepts for how best to fulfil their technical and social tasks.

Management Models

Specific management ideas theorized using lables that denote prescriptions for transforming organizational inputs into organizational outputs.

Management Innovations

Figure 2.3  Nested levels of abstraction in management ideas

Abstract to Specific Management Ideas

Discourse theorizing abstract ideas about the human nature of working individuals and other organizational stakeholders, as well as how they should be managed accordingly and to what management end.

48    e. abrahamson and a. piazza

Rhetorics The term ‘management rhetoric’ denotes discourse designed to convince organizations to use management innovations. This discourse theorizes abstract ideas about the human nature of employees and about how to manage them. Two rhetorics have re-emerged four times during the history of US management thinking: normative and rational rhetorics (Abrahamson, 1997; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Bodrožić and Adler, 2018; Guillén, 1994; Kunda and Ailon-Souday, 2005). Rational rhetorics. Rational rhetorics serve to theorize and convince managers ‘that  work processes can be formalized and rationalized, to optimize productivity’ (Abrahamson and Eisenman, 2008: 727). The idea is that employees are intrinsically unmotivated to work and motivated instead by extrinsic inducements, particularly financial rewards (Shenhav, 1995, 1999). Rational rhetorics also theorize workers as incapable of conceiving what work they should execute. Therefore, hierarchically superior managers should do so. Managers use abstract management models, such as Scientific Management, and their constituent innovations—such as ‘Time and Motion Study’—to conceive which and how tasks should be executed by recalcitrant employees (Shenhav, 1995, 1999). Normative rhetorics. Normative rhetorics theorize and seek to convince managers that ‘employees can be rendered more productive by shaping their thoughts and capitalizing on their emotions’ (Abrahamson and Eisenman, 2008: 727). The abstract idea is that employees are socio-psychological beings, intrinsically motivated to work. Abstract management models, such as the Quality Management model, and its constituent ­specific management innovations, such as ‘Job Enrichment’, seek to render work ­intrinsically motivating for employees (Hackman and Oldham, 1976). Normative rhetoric also theorizes and seeks to convince managers that employees have the capacity to both conceive of, and execute, technical improvements. Abstract management models, such as the Quality Management model (once again), and their constituent specific management innovations such as Self-Managing Teams, allow employees to find the best way to conceive of and execute work without managerial interference (Nijholt and Benders, 2007). The ‘Organizational Culture’ innovation similarly shapes organizational values and norms to channel socio-psychologically ­motivated work (Barley et al., 1988).

Management Models The language of rhetorics serves to theorize what Bodrožić and Adler (2018) call ‘management models’: ‘distinct bodies of ideas that offer organizational manager precepts [or prescriptions] for how best to fulfill their technical and social tasks’ (Bodrožić and Adler, 2018: 86). Their historical analysis indicates that each time rational or ­normative rhetorics re-emerge, they serve to theorize related but distinct management innovations.

the lifecycle of management ideas    49

Management Innovations ‘Prescriptive language’ serves to theorize specific management ideas to produce management innovations, distinguished by distinct labels. Three caveats are important in order not to reify the concept of management innovations. First, management innovations are defined either as a labelled set of management prescriptions perceived as new by an audience, or substantively new relative to the state of the art (Kimberly, 1981). We suggest that this determination is empirical, not conceptual. Perceived management innovations—the same management ideas with a different label—are reborn during the rebirth stage. Substantive innovations are born, rather than reborn, during the innovations stage of a management model and constitute an advance by its standards. Second, management innovations have what Benders and Van Veen (2001) called high ‘interpretive viability’; that is, the language theorizing a specific management idea, constituting an innovation, allows for multiple viable interpretations. More rarely, organizations, such as standardizing bodies, limit viable interpretations (Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005). Innovations’ high interpretive viability causes their linguistic ­theorizations to be generally applicable (Kieser, 1997), vague (Giroux, 2006), or a fuzzy set of management prescriptions (Hackman and Wageman, 1995). These characteristics of many management innovations’ theorizing enable organizations to translate (Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005; Grinsven et  al.,  2016) or reinvent them (Rogers,  2005). That is, organizations ‘edit’ (SahlinAnderson,  1996) the theorizing language of i­nnovations’ prescriptions in ways that ­customize them to fit their organization’s idiosyncrasies (Fiss et al.,  2012; Westphal et al., 1997). So, management innovations can mutate as they diffuse across organizations, from different sectors (cf. Ansari et al., 2010; Czarniawska and Panozzo, 2008; Giroux and Taylor, 2002) and countries (Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005; Guillén, 1994). Third, organizations use management innovations either substantively or ­symbolically (Sturdy, 2004). They use them substantively when they implement these ­innovations to improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness (cf. Powell, 1995). They use them symbolically to signal to their stakeholders their use of state-of-the art management innovations and reap their organizations’ stakeholders’ support, whether they use these innovations substantively little, if at all (cf. Staw and Epstein, 2000).

The Lifecycle of Abstract Management Ideas There exists a consensus that the lifecycle of abstract management models and ­innovations—routines embedded in human action—are greatly influenced by the lifecycle of ‘technologies’—routines embedded in physical materials (Abrahamson, 1997; Abrahamson and Eisenman, 2008; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Kunda and Ailon-Souday,

50    e. abrahamson and a. piazza

Table 2.1  Revolutionary technologies and management models Second revolutionary technological wave Steam power and railways Emergence, installation, deployment Rational rhetorics Line and staff management model

Exhaustion Normative rhetorics Industrial betterment management model

Third revolutionary t­ echnological wave Steel and electric power Emergence, installation, deployment Rational rhetorics Scientific management management model

Exhaustion Normative rhetorics Human relations management model

Fourth revolutionary t­ echnological wave Automobile and oil Emergence, installation, deployment Rational rhetorics Strategy and structure management model

Exhaustion Normative rhetorics Quality management model

Fifth revolutionary t­ echnological wave Computer and telecommunication Emergence, installation, deployment Rational rhetorics Business process management model

Exhaustion Normative rhetorics Knowledge management model

2005). Students of technological determinants of management models tend to use ­neo-Schumpeterian models of technological revolutions—such as that in steel and ­electric power, or computers and telecommunication technologies (cf. Perez,  2002, 2010; Schumpeter, 1939). To understand the interrelation between management models and revolutionary technologies, it is imperative to distinguish four phases in their lifecycles (cf. Perez, 2002, 2010). During the first, gestation phase, managers experiment with the revolutionary technology. There follows an installation phase during which the technology diffuses to leading economic sectors. Then, during the third, deployment phase, the technology spreads to most remaining sectors. Finally, during the last, exhaustion phase, the technology’s internal contradictions and economic dynamics cause it to yield diminishing returns. Table  2.1 summarizes research on the interrelation between technological phases and abstract management models’ lifecycles.

The Innovation and Diffusion Stage in Abstract Management Ideas The gestation phase of revolutionary technologies creates the conditions during which theorizing organizations can successfully use rational rhetorics to convince managers

the lifecycle of management ideas    51 to use rational management models and innovations. The fourth, exhaustion phase creates similar conditions for normative rhetorics, ideas, models, and innovations. Why, during the gestation phase, can markets for management theorizations ­successfully resuscitate rational rhetorics? Barley and Kunda (1992) suggest that ­during this phase, managers face the problem of moulding employee behaviour to the mandates of revolutionary technologies. Managers become receptive to rational rhetorics because they theorize management models and innovations that address this problem. Why, during the exhaustion phase, can markets for management theorizations successfully resuscitate normative rhetorics? The exhaustion phase confronts managers with two problems. First, the improper, overuse of rational management models engenders absenteeism, strikes, and internal organization contradictions causing declining labour productivity (cf. Baron et al., 1986). Second, and relatedly, revolutionary technologies exhaust their economic benefits and begin yielding diminishing returns (Barley and Kunda, 1992; Kunda and Ailon-Souday, 2005). Managers become receptive to normative rhetorics because they promise solutions to both their labour and financial problems. First, normative management models promise to render employee work more pleasurable, thereby reducing labour dissatisfaction and its absenteeism/striking correlates (Bodrožić and Adler, 2018). Second, these ­models promise that the use of relatively costless intrinsic motivators—like satisfying work which becomes its own intrinsic reward—will succeed in motivating employees. The cheap intrinsic rewards of normative management models counteract revolutionary technologies’ diminishing returns because they substitute for the more expensive, extrinsic rewards of rational management models, such as salaried work (Abrahamson, 1997). We argued that the simultaneous study of abstract and specific management ideas would enable the former to cast light on the latter. Table 2.1’s summary of extant research suggests that: Proposition 1: Rational management models and their constituent innovations have a higher likelihood of emerging during the gestation phases of revolutions in ­material technologies and normative management models and innovations during their exhaustion phases.

Table 2.1 also suggests that: Proposition 2: Rational management models and their constituent innovations have a higher likelihood of diffusing across lead sectors of the economy during the installation phases of revolutions in material technologies. Proposition 3: Rational management models and their constituent innovations have a higher likelihood of diffusing from lead sectors to all sectors of the economy during the deployment phases in material technologies. Proposition 4: Normative models and their constituent innovations have a higher likelihood of diffusing to all sectors of the economy during the exhaustion phases of revolutions in material technologies.

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The Institutionalization of Abstract Management Ideas DiMaggio and Powell (1983) and other neo-institutionalists have made the defining characteristics of institutions their relatively-persistent reproduction caused by one or more of three types of institutionalization processes (Scott, 1995). The most important institutionalization process, in this chapter, is the tendency of management models to become increasingly taken-for-granted over time (Zucker, 1977). As Bodrožić and Adler (2018: 111) noted, ‘Once a . . . [management model] . . . achieves a dominant position, it functions as a new [institution] which shapes subsequent action by creating a  taken-for-granted frame of reference, associated routine and artifacts, as well as new  interests in sustaining the new status-quo.’ This suggests, in accordance with Table 2.1, that: Proposition 5: Rational management models and their constituent innovations will become increasingly institutionalized over the gestation, installation, and deployment phases of revolutions in management technologies. Proposition 6: Normative management models and their constituent innovations will become increasingly institutionalized over the exhaustion phases of revolutions in management technologies.

When a management model is institutionalized, how long will it persist, and what will cause it to become deinstitutionalized and go dormant (Dacin and Dacin, 2008)? Neoinstitutional arguments posit that when institutions have become taken-for-granted, they are robust and long-lived (DiMaggio, 1991). Therefore, only major shocks, like the emergence or exhaustion of revolutionary technologies, would deinstitutionalize management models and send them and their constituent innovations into a stage of dormancy (Barley and Tolbert, 1997). So, as Table 2.1 suggests: Proposition 7: The emergence phases of revolutionary technologies will tend to deinstitutionalize and send into dormancy normative management models and their constituent innovations. Proposition 8: The exhaustion phases of revolutionary technologies will tend to deinstitutionalize and send into dormancy rational management models and their constituent innovations.

The Dormancy and Rebirth of Abstract Management Ideas When a management innovation disappears, what goes dormant and what can be reborn? This chapter draws a clear distinction between management ideas and the ­language used to theorize them as management innovations. What goes dormant and re-emerges is not the language that theorized an innovation. It is the management idea that this language theorized. Therefore, Table 2.1 suggests that:

the lifecycle of management ideas    53 Proposition 9: General normative management ideas, and their constituent specific ideas, will tend to go dormant during the emergence phases of technological revolutions and re-emerge during their exhaustion phases. Proposition 10: Specific rational management ideas, and their constituent specific ideas, will tend to go dormant during the exhaustion phases of technological revolutions and re-emerge during their emergence phases.

The Lifecycle of Specific Management Ideas This chapter provides more than a typology of stages in the lifecycle of specific management ideas. It advances a broad-brush process theory (Mohr, 1982). CNFs determine whether or not a management idea moves from one stage to the next (Figure 2.2). To develop our process theory, it is necessary to first highlight one gap that Bodrožić and Adler (2018) recognize in their in-depth, historical analysis. Abstract management ideas, rhetorics, and models don’t spring to life sui generis and ex nihilo. They must be produced somewhere, somehow, by someone who can convince managers to use them, at a sometimes hefty price (Peterson, 1976; Peterson and Anand, 2004). Bodrožić and Adler (2018) underemphasize the role of specialized ‘theorizing organizations’—such as consulting firms—that populate the supply-side of a ‘market for fashionable management theorizations’. Research indicates that this market’s supply-side is populated by an organizational field comprising a number of types of theorizing organizations that play different roles in this market (Engwall et al., 2016). They include consulting firms (cf. Kipping and Clark, 2012), business media (cf. Nijholt, 2010), industry associations (cf. Greenwood et al., 2002), guru-shops (cf. Jackson,  1996), and educational institutions (cf. Lawrence et al., 2002; Meyer, 2010). Supply-side organizations thrive and survive by debunking, ad seriatim, older, once fashionable management innovation. They do so to profit from ­theorizing, broadcasting, and selling purportedly new and progressive fashionable management innovations across demand-side organizations, which could use them. The demand-side of the market for management is populated by governmental, nonprofit and for profit organization, across many varied sectors of the US economy, and throughout the globe (Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005).

Early-Life CNF Causing Transitions to the Innovation Stage There exist case studies of the processes by which nascent management ideas become theorized as specific management innovations (Abrahamson and Fairchild,  1999; Colyvas and Maroulis, 2015; Lawrence et al., 2002; Powell et al., 2014). These studies

54    e. abrahamson and a. piazza reveal a common pattern which conforms to Tolbert and Zucker’s (1996: 182) claim that organizations which innovate ‘are likely to be comparatively few in number, limited to a circumscribed set of similar, possibly interconnected organizations facing similar circumstances [problems], and to vary considerably in terms of the form of implementation [of solutions]’. Case studies of organizations on the demand-side of the market for management theorizations suggest that, during the innovation stage, organizations produce what might be called ‘proto-innovations’; that is, incipient theorization of management ideas providing linguistic prescriptions about how to solve management problems with management solutions. As it circulates among organizations, the theorized language of proto-innovations has great interpretive viability, and is translated, interpreted, and edited (Sahlin-Anderson, 1996) to fit these organizations’ idiosyncrasies (cf. Ansari et al., 2010). This language, therefore, has high interpretive viability and varies in form, meaning, and labels across organizations and time (Tolbert and Zucker, 1996). There is a convergence here between case studies of supply-side and of demand-side organizations belonging to the market for fashionable management theorizations. Studies focusing on demand-side organizations usually find that it is supply-side t­heorizing organizations that develop unitary labels, unify, and articulate proto-­innovations’ prescriptive theorizations in ways that lead them to diffuse within the set of organizations where they emerged (Abrahamson and Fairchild,  1999; Colyvas and Maroulis,  2015; Lawrence et al., 2002; Powell et al., 2014). Studies focusing on supply-side organizations find that they can take these prescriptive theorizations and diffuse them outside the set of organizations where they emerged. They infuse these prescriptions with sufficient interpretive viability that they can broadcast and sell them to large numbers of varied types of organizations (cf. Clark and Greatbatch, 2002; Heusinkveld and Benders, 2005; Van Veen et al., 2011). There exists a wealth of case-study research about the emergence of proto-­innovations among market demand-side organizations and their colonization by supply-side organizations. With some possible exceptions (Clark and Greatbatch, 2004; Heusinkveld and Benders, 2005), there are virtually no case studies bearing on the question: why do certain management ideas become theorized as innovations and others not? We develop, next, a parsimonious, abstract, and potentially generalizable model highlighting the birth-transition CNF for management ideas to become management innovations (Birkinshaw et al.,  2008; Kimberly,  1981). Absent one NF, they do not. Abrahamson and Fairchild’s (1999) theory-development case study advances one birthtransition CNF which we generalize here. Their model extends Cohen et al.’s (1972: 16) ‘Garbage Can’ theory and stresses its three necessary—though not sufficient—forces: ‘problems, solutions, and participants’. Management problem NF.  The theoretical construct denoted by the term ‘problem’ requires some clarification (Abrahamson and Fairchild,  1999). First, in line with case-study evidence we reviewed, we define a management problem as a gap between a manager’s aspirations and outcomes (Simon, 1962). Second, initially, managers across small sets of organizations experience problems in a vague way. Problems often remain

the lifecycle of management ideas    55 unrecognized, unheeded, and ignored across larger organizational fields. It follows that forces causing management problems are not sufficient conditions for the theorization of management ideas into management innovations. Incipient solutions.  As noted above, extant case studies of the theorization of both abstract and specific management indicate that management ideas emerge or re-emerge. They do not suggest, however, that they do so magically because they provide solutions to management problems. To the contrary, abstract and specific management ideas undergo a much more anarchic circulation processes wherein problems find solutions just as often as solutions reveal problems (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 2000; Bodrožić and Adler, 2018; Colyvas and Maroulis, 2015; Lawrence et al., 2002; Powell et al., 2014). Moreover, problems and solutions can be shared and matched across organizations only if their existence can be communicated via a relatively common theorizing language prescribing these solutions as curatives for these management problems (Green, 2004). For all these reasons, incipient ideas about solutions, alone, are not sufficient for the ­theorization of management ideas into management innovations. Participating theorizing organizations. As noted above, management ideas do not become magically theorized as innovative solutions to management problems. Supply-side theorizing organizations develop unitary labels, unify, and articulate proto-­innovations’ prescriptive theorizations in ways that can diffuse both within and outside the set of organizations where they emerged. There is also no implication that theorizing organizations are always present, a­ vailable, willing, and capable to translate management ideas into a management ­innovation (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999). For instance, theorizing organizations may be occupied with selling other management innovations or lack the skills to theorize them (David and Strang, 2006). Moreover, research indicates that those on the supply-side of management theorizing markets can sell innovations in some countries and not others (cf. Benders and Van Bijsterveld, 2000; Heusinkveld and Benders, 2001; Newell et al., 1998). Therefore, the mere existence of theorizing organizations ready and capable of theorizing management ideas into management innovations is not a sufficient condition. We suggest instead that: Proposition 11: The impact of management problems on organizations, the existence of ideas about solutions to such problems, and the availability of organizations specialized in theorizing prescriptions about how to use solutions to address problems, constitute the CNF for management ideas to be theorized as management innovations.

Mid-Life CNF Causing Transitions to the Diffusion Stage As we noted, Bogardus’ (1942) study’s results are consistent with Zucker’s (1983) later claim that few innovations are widely adopted. This section examines a double-barrelled

56    e. abrahamson and a. piazza question: we know that many innovations diffuse, but why do many not? And, why do many (but not all) innovations have transitory lifecycles? There exist three, distinct types of diffusion models that suggest answers to these questions: contagion models, broadcast models, and hybrids of both (Strang and Soule, 1998). Contagion models. In contagion models, organizations that adopt (reject) a management innovation cause its contagious adoption (rejection) by organizations that had not yet adopted (rejected it). Researchers have noted a number of contagion mechanisms: learning (Strang, 2010), mimesis (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), admiration (Sevón, 1996), social pressure or risk avoidance (Abrahamson and Rosenkopf, 1991), or socio-psychological forces (Abrahamson and Fairchild,  1999). Contagious diffusion (rejection) spreads through inter-organizational networks (Levitt and March,  1988; Still and Strang,  2009). Many of these contagion models assume the existence of ‘bandwagon’ or ‘herding’ feedback loops wherein increases in the weighted number of ­adopters (rejecters) of an innovation cause still more adoptions (rejections) among networked organizations. Research has found contagious adoption (rejection) of management innovations within organizational sectors, but less often across sectors (cf. Burns and Wholey, 1993; Davis, 1991; Davis and Greve, 1997; Davis et al., 1994). Despite a wealth of research on the contagious diffusion of management innovations, it largely ignores the first question addressed in this section: why do many management ideas diffuse, whereas others diffuse little, if at all? One exception is computer-simulation of bandwagon contagion. This research suggests that the distribution of the degree of organizations’ susceptibility to contagious infection (cf. Abrahamson and Rosenkopf, 1991) and the structure of their intergenerational networks (cf. Abrahamson and Rosenkopf, 1997) explain whether their innovations diffuse (are rejected) extensively or not all. Because it explains the diffusion of management innovations’ adoption followed by their diffusion or rejection, this research casts light on the second question addressed in this section: why do many innovations have transitory lifecycles, but some don’t (Figure 2.1, Path 3)? Proposition 12: The distribution of the degree of organizations’ susceptibility to contagious infection and the structure of their intergenerational networks are CNF for the transitory diffusion of management innovations.

Broadcast models. Theories of the market for management theorizations, which we used in the section about the emergence of innovations, are models of diffusion by what Strang and Soule (1998) call ‘broadcasting’ rather than contagion. Among such broadcast models, coevolution models of the fashion market’s functioning have received the most attention for a number of reasons. First, coevolution models stress the reciprocal influence of supply and demand in causing both the emergence of innovations and diffusion of the adoption (rejection) of these management innovations (Abrahamson, 1996; Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999; Hirsch, 2000; Kieser, 1997; Meyer, 2010; Peterson and Anand, 2004; Strang et al., 2014). Reciprocal causation between supply- and demand-side

the lifecycle of management ideas    57 organizations has been found both in poly-innovation studies of diffusion (Abrahamson and Reuben, 2016) and in case studies (cf. Kipping and Clark, 2012). Second, coevolutionary models of the broadcast of management innovation have received attention because they can explain, more easily than contagion models, the wide-scale diffusion of both abstract and specific management ideas. Indeed, research on the diffusion of abstract management models and their constituent innovations has found that they diffuse across broad sectors of economies nationally, and across national borders, globally (Bodrožić and Adler, 2018; Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005). It is difficult to conceive of how contagion mechanisms, alone, could explain the diffusion of management models and management ideas as contagion networks rarely span multiplicity of sectors and nations. Not surprisingly, broadcast diffusion by market supply-side organizations has been found to play a central role in inter-sectoral and cross-national diffusion (cf. Bodrožić and Adler, 2018). Third, more fine-grained studies also cast light on the interrelation between the lifecycles of abstract and specific management ideas. Abrahamson and Eisenman’s (2008) reanalysis of Carson et al.’s (2000) data shows, in line with the research summarized in Table 2.1, that rational (normative) fashionable management innovations tend to emerge during the onset of revolutionary technologies’ emergence (exhaustion) phases. Moreover, Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999) examined the rise and fall of four central management fashions that substituted for each other over time. Abrahamson and Eisenman (2008) used computer automated content analysis of the theorizing discourse of their four fashionable innovations. They employed a coevolution model to explore reciprocal causation between supply and demand for these fashions. Demandside organizations’ preferences for normative (rational) innovations would cause management supply-side organizations to broadcast such innovations. These broadcasts of each succeeding fashion would not only meet demand-side organizations’ preferences, but also reinforce them. As they found, each succeeding, normative (rational) fashionable management innovation would be theorized with increasingly normative (rational) theorizing language (see also Cole, 1999). An innovation must emerge or be reborn before it can diffuse. This observation instantiates this chapter’s argument that by considering simultaneously various stages in the  lifecycle of management ideas, it becomes easier to study separately each stage and transition between stages. So, the early-life CNF cause of the innovation stage must engender an innovation before it can diffuse. Whether a management innovation diffuses transitorily or not depends on a fourth, general, NF. Namely: Proposition 13: Coevolution in mechanisms of the market for fashionable management innovations is a NF for the transitory diffusion of management innovation.

Proposition 13 is very broad. Computer simulation models suggest much more finedgrained, testable propositions about mid-life CNFs (Strang and Macy, 2001). In particular, Strang et al. (2014) advance a hybrid contagion-broadcast coevolutionary model. In this

58    e. abrahamson and a. piazza model contagion across supply-side organizations’ decisions about how much to broadcast management innovations influences and is influenced by contagion among demand-­ side organizations’ decisions about whether to use these broadcasted innovations.

Late-Life CNF Causing Transitions to the Institution Stage Bogardus (1942) found that though many innovations have relatively-transitory lifecycles, a few have relatively-permanent lifecycles. Research on management innovations also finds that not all fashions have relatively transitory lifecycles (cf. Nijholt and Benders, 2007; Strang, 2010; Thawesaengskulthai and Tannock, 2008). This raises the question, what is the late-life CNF that explains why certain fashion management ideas that diffuse survive relatively transitorily, whereas others persist relatively permanently? Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999: 710) noted that there is ‘precious little research examining why certain fashions become institutionalized and others do not’. Students of fashions and institutions address this question, independently, but in complementary ways. Studies of NFs causing fashionable innovations’ retention are reviewed and conceptualized by Colyvas and Jonsson (2011) and those of NFs forestalling unfashionable innovations’ rejection by Perkmann and Spicer (2008). Jointly, these articles suggest a list of late-life NFs that influence the retention of fashionable innovations or forestall the rejection of unfashionable ones. Perkmann and Spicer’s (2008) and Colyvas and Jonsson’s (2011) articles have commonalities. First, they argue that different types of organizations exert various political, technical, and cultural institutionalizing forces that contribute to the retention of fashionable innovations or forestall the rejection of unfashionable ones. State organizations, such as regulatory agencies, wield coercive institutionalization forces. Professional or quasi-professional organizations, such as standardizing bodies, accreditation agencies, professional associations, or business schools, control normative institutionalizing forces. Social movement organizations can mobilize collective institutionalizing forces. Second, both studies suggest that the more that different types of organizations use these institutionalizing forces, the more likely they will institutionalize management innovations. Moreover, the longer these joint institutionalizing efforts reproduce management innovations unchanged, the more they become taken for granted and institutionalized, to the point that—as Zucker (1983: 25) observed—‘alternative management innovations [such as the employee vacation] may be literally unthinkable’. Research has begun to explain when fashions might become institutionalized, but is  largely silent on when institutionalized innovations will be deinstitutionalized (cf. Naumovska et al., 2015). Arguably, most of what we know, in this connection, does not go beyond the somewhat tautologous claim that the deinstitutionalization of management innovations occurs when exogenous shocks have sufficient power to deinstitutionalize them. There is a notable exception to this claim. Cole (1989) employed Benson’s (1975) balance theory to explain the CNF for the fashionable management innovation to persist relatively permanently. Balance theory proposes that management innovations remain institutionalized as long as balance

the lifecycle of management ideas    59 occurs; that is, as long as the interests of organizations in retaining a management innovation remain aligned. Misalignment causes deinstitutionalization. Cole (1989) examined this proposition by comparing the lifecycle of the Quality Circle fashion in Japan, Sweden, and the USA. QCs endured in Japan, because the interests of state, government, and labour unions, in supporting QC’s retention, were balanced. They became deinstitutionalized in Sweden when these organizations’ interests fell out of balance. In the USA, balance never existed, causing fashion market forces to produce the transitory QC fashion wave. It is commonly observed that the early-life and mid-life CNF condition must result in a management fashion before the occurrence of a NF can institutionalize it. Cole’s (1989) application of balance theory suggests that: Proposition 14: Balance between the interests of organizations that influence the institutional retention of fashionable management innovations is the CNF for the continuing institutional retention of these innovations.

Rebirth CNF Causing Transitions to the Rebirth Stage Management ideas go dormant under two conditions. First, when ideas are ‘un-­theorized’; that is, never theorized during the innovation stage (Figure 2.1, Path 1). Second, when ideas become ‘de-theorized’, that is, stripped of their theorizing language during the diffusion stage, when management innovations become unfashionable, or during the institution stage, when they become deinstitutionalized (Figure 2.1, Paths 6 and 9). Proposition 15: Management ideas enter the Dormancy Stage either when they remain un-theorized as innovations, or when innovations are de-theorized because they don’t diffuse, become unfashionable, or are deinstitutionalized.

Arguably very similar management innovations that go dormant during one rational (normative) period seem to be reborn during subsequent rational (normative) periods. For example, there exists a striking resemblance between several rational management innovations to map out work processes most efficiently: the ‘Gantt Chart’ management innovation of the Scientific Management model, the ‘PERT and Critical Path Methods’ innovations of the Strategy and Structure model, the ‘Process Mapping’ innovation marking the second half of the normative Quality Management model (David and Strang, 2006), and the emergence of the rational Business Process Management model (Abrahamson and Eisenman, 2008). This would suggest that with each re-emergence of  dormant rational rhetorics, there also re-emerged a dormant, process-mapping innovation. Each of these innovations, however, used different theorizing language to express a similar process-mapping idea. In research on the lifecycle of management ideas, the phenomenon of the rebirth of management ideas is only beginning to receive renewed attention (cf. Birkinshaw et al., 2008; Heusinkveld et al., 2013 ; Jacques, 2012/1996; Mol et al., 2008; Røvik, 2011).

60    e. abrahamson and a. piazza However, no studies, as of yet, provide clear answers to the question: what is the ­re-emergence CNF that explains why some dormant ideas undergirding defunct ­innovations are re-theorized as similar innovations and others not? This chapter’s conceptual apparatus suggests many propositions providing possible answers to this question. Because of space constraints, we make three points. Proposition 11 about the early-life CNF for the transition to the innovation stage could explain the re-innovation or rebirth of innovations. What remains in question, however, is why one management idea would be reborn and not another? We derive two illustrative propositions, one technological and one ideational, addressing this question. Table 2.1 summarized research indicating how four revolutions in material technologies caused an alternation between four rational (normative) rhetorics theorizing four distinct rational (normative) management models and their constituent innovations. Each rational model and its innovations served to bend employee behaviour to the mandates of emergent revolutionary technologies. Each normative model and its ­innovations addressed labour and economic problems during revolutionary technology’s exhaustion phase. Rational (normative) innovations are theorizations of ideas that have greater or lesser interpretive viability (Benders and Van Veen, 2001). This suggests that more (less) interpretively viable ideas lend themselves well (less well) to being re-theorized and reborn as innovations fitting subsequent revolutionary technologies. Thus: Proposition 16: The greater the interpretive viability of a management idea ­theorized as a rational (normative) innovation during the emergence (exhaustion) period of one revolutionary technology, the more likely this idea will be re-theorized and the innovation reborn during the emergence (exhaustion) stage of subsequent revolutionary technologies.

Management innovations with low interpretive viability, because their meaning was limited by standardizing organization, might tend not to re-emerge. What ideational forces might increase the likelihood of rebirth of ideas across different revolutionary technologies? We described, in some detail, normative and rational rhetorics with an eye to distinguishing the specific management ideas that are central components of general normative (rational) management ideas. Specific management ideas, central to general ideas, would have to be revived when these abstract management ideas were revived. Therefore: Proposition 17: The greater the centrality, in abstract management ideas, of one of its constituent specific management ideas, the more likely that this specific idea will be reborn.

For instance, as we noted above, one central idea theorized using rational rhetorics is that employees are incapable of conceiving what work processes they should execute and how. Therefore, managers need to map out these work processes for employees. This

the lifecycle of management ideas    61 creates a demand for process-mapping management innovations which are indeed reborn with the rebirth of each rational management model. Another central idea ­theorized using rational rhetorics is that workers are intrinsically unmotivated to execute processes. Managers must motivate employees to do so by tying extrinsic reward, particularly salary, to process completion. This creates a demand for management i­nnovations that prescribe reward systems to compensate employees for carrying out processes. So, with the rebirth of each rational management model, we would expect the rebirth of similar reward systems: the ‘Piece Rate’ innovation of the Scientific Management model, the ‘Merit Plan’ innovation of the Strategy and Structure model, and the ‘Pay for Performance’ innovation of the Process Management model, for instance. Some research suggests that rebirth occurs because supply-side organizations package ‘old wine in new bottles’ (Kimberly, 1981). These organizations take ideas from ­earlier management innovations and re-theorize them as ‘new’ management innovations. Alternatively, rational (normative) ideas may remain imprinted and dormant in certain organizations or sectors, ready to be re-theorized, at the emergence (exhaustion) phases of subsequent revolutionary technologies.

Conclusion This chapter had three objectives. First, we sought to establish that by considering simultaneously all the key stages in the lifecycle of management ideas it would become easier to conceptualize and study each stage and stage transition separately. We noted that research studies at the junction of the innovation and diffusion stages (cf. Colyvas and Maroulis, 2015; Lawrence et al., 2002; Powell et al., 2014), diffusion and institutionalization stages (Colyvas and Jonsson, 2011; Perkmann and Spicer, 2008), and the dormancy and rebirth stages (cf. Birkinshaw et al., 2008; Larsson, 2015; Mol et al., 2008; Røvik, 2011) are beginning to substantiate this claim. Our broad-brush conceptualization suggests the need for more conceptual and research efforts examining interrelations between emergence, diffusion, institutionalizations, dormancy, and rebirth stages. This chapter distinguishes more abstract management ideas versus more specific management ideas. Many questions about the lifecycle of more specific management ideas are very hard, if not impossible to address without considering simultaneously the lifecycle of the more abstract management ideas which these specific management ideas belong to. Therefore, a second objective of this chapter was to explain each stage transition in the lifecycle of specific management ideas and innovation, while using as an explanatory context the study of the lifecycle of abstract management ideas. Pursuing this objective has the added benefit of helping to understand the reciprocal relation between the lifecycle of abstract and specific management ideas, as well as its interrelation with the lifecycle of material, revolutionary technologies. Researchers studying the lifecycle of abstract management ideas and those studying the lifecycle of specific management ideas have largely talked past, rather than to, each

62    e. abrahamson and a. piazza other. Our broad-brush theorizing tried to show that both types of researchers lose from this lack of exchange. So, we tried to illustrate the interrelation of abstract and specific management ideas when it has been studied (cf. Abrahamson and Eisenman, 2008) or to conceptualize it when it has not. We tried to show that this strategy made it possible to make headway in addressing some of the most resilient, vexing, and enduring questions about the lifecycle of management ideas. Why do certain management ideas diffuse, whereas others don’t? Why do certain ideas that do diffuse survive relatively transitorily, resembling the characterization of management fashions, whereas others persist relatively permanently, resembling the characterization of management ideas during institutionalization or deinstitutionalization stages? Most importantly, we tried to show that it will be very difficult to make headway in studying the re-emergence of management ideas without considering simultaneously the re-emergence of both abstract and specific management ideas. Finally, this chapter sought to address a fundamental issue affecting much research on different stages in the lifecycle of management ideas: its tendency to sample on the dependent variable. Research examines why innovation in management ideas occurs, but rarely when it fails to. A lot of research studies why innovations diffuse, but little about why innovations don’t diffuse. Research suggests why institutionalization occurs, but rarely why it does not. There is a need for more studies of management ideas that do not become innovations, of innovations that do not diffuse, of fashions that do become institutions, and of dormant management ideas that re-emerge (see also Reinmoeller et  al., in this volume). We have tried to advance thinking on what happens during ­innovations’ lifecycles by developing general propositions that future studies can test and elaborate.

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chapter 3

The Phil osoph y of M a nagem en t Ideas Joe O’Mahoney

Introduction Whilst management literature is replete with claims about the sources, creation, evolution, diffusion, translation, and destruction of ideas, it is rare that academics ask explicitly what ‘management ideas’ actually are. This absence is surprising because these terms often specify things that can happen to ideas in the context of management and organization or the broader society, and implies both that ideas have properties which regulate what they can and cannot do, and that we can have some knowledge of these properties. This implies, therefore, something about the ontology (what is) and e­ pistemology (what can be known) of management ideas, and places these claims firmly within the realm of philosophy. Whilst there are a few studies that do seek to define ideas (Birkinshaw et al.,  2008; Sturdy,  2004), they tend to focus on the different themes or perspectives (McKinley et al., 1999) on management ideas, rather than the various o ­ ntological or epistemological assumptions that authors make about what management ideas actually are, let alone which of these might be more useful (or indeed correct) than others. The absence of philosophical interrogation concerning management ideas has led to three problems. First, clarity. Research texts tend to assume that the concept under consideration is a management idea, with little justification or specification of why this might be the case. Wider questions concerning, for example, if ideas actually exist, if so in what sense, and what this means for what they can do, are all but ignored. One consequence is that although the use of verbs such as ‘diffuse’, ‘translate’, or ‘evolve’ imply something very specific about what can happen to an idea, it is often left to readers to infer exactly what these are. As an illustration, one might type ‘management idea’ and ‘evolution’ into Google Scholar and see how many of the articles really mean, let alone define or specify a Darwinian or Lamarckian form of evolution. Second, interdisciplinarity. The confusion as to the status of management ideas is exacerbated by the variety of perspectives and associated terms which are deployed (see the introduction to this volume). If I am talking about ideas, and you are talking about innovations, fashions,

the philosophy of management ideas    69 concepts, services, practices, or routines, how do we know the extent to which our work might be complementary unless we know what it is we are talking about? As we shall see, the claimed and implied philosophical underpinnings of different conceptualizations of management ideas have led to disciplinary siloes which tend to ignore each other whilst tackling similar topics. Finally, veracity. It is one thing to clarify what we think ideas are, but another to accept that these definitions are adequate. Management ideas are generally attempts (though often flawed) to conceptualize how organizations respond to interventions. In other words, explicitly or otherwise, they make truth claims: not only in theorizing causality, but also in critiquing prior truth claims as misguided, limited, or wrong. It follows that, at least in the minds of most academics, there are more or less accurate ideas, not only of what ‘works’ in organizations, but also of why (see Wickert et al., in this volume). In short, some academic conceptualizations of management ideas are more accurate reflections of reality than others and without knowing what these are, we are in little position to compare their relative veracity. In responding to these weaknesses, this chapter clarifies and critiques what management ideas are assumed to be in the extant literature, and discusses the possibilities of an alternative more integrative approach. The chapter first discusses the possibilities and limitations of four different but influential philosophies (which are often implied rather than declared) concerning what management ideas are: positivism, actualism, ­interactionism, and social constructivism. In identifying these, several caveats must be made. First, whilst the four philosophies represent the vast majority of perspectives in the extant literature (see, for example, O’Mahoney,  2016) they are by no means exhaustive. The negative ontology of Laclau and Mouffe (2001) or the socio-material theorizing of Barad (2007), for example, are not detailed here as they are rarely, if at all, used in the literature. Second, the four perspectives have been termed philosophies because they represent relatively coherent associations of ontology and epistemology with corresponding consequences for methodology (see Strang and Wittrock, in this volume). However, as we shall see, they are rarely strictly adhered to by academics exploring management ideas. Most commonly, philosophies are implied within texts, or, even when they are claimed, are not adhered to throughout (O’Mahoney, 2011). Moreover, there is not a one-to-one matching between these philosophical perspectives and the themes/approaches identified by others—for example, institutional theory implies and states a variety of philosophical approaches to understanding the institutionalization of ideas. Following the discussion of the possibilities and limitations of these four perspectives, the chapter then develops, and argues for, the utility of an explicitly critical realist conceptualization of (management) ideas as a more integrative, realistic, and useful approach to studying management ideas, and the world in which they exist.

Management Ideas This section identifies four philosophical approaches to management ideas and outlines their strengths and weaknesses, first individually, and then collectively (Table 3.1).

Table 3.1  Common ontologies of management ideas Philosophical approach

Ontological commitments

Epistemological assumptions

Methodological preferences

The population level spread  of empirical ­manifestations of implementations over time / space Cultural constructions of meaning by local groups

Essentialism; Atomism; Naïve realism; Empiricism

Objectivism

Communicative relationality; Local cultural construction of meanings

Relativism; Pragmatism

Actualism (e.g. Actor-Network Theory)

Empirical events

Ideas as events; Change through empirical networks; Realist

Social ­constructivism

Discursive constructions

Discourse; anti-essentialism

Positivism (naïve realism; scientism; empiricism) Symbolic Interactionism

Ideas as . . .

Possibilities

Limitations

Quantitative extensive methods (e.g. surveys / citations); Regression analyses Interpretivist intensive methods (e.g. anthropology; ethnography)

Macro-level view; rationality of the agent

Constructivist

Intensive methods; ‘Follow the network’; Ethnomethodology

Empirical networks; Decentres the human; Agency of the non-human

Relativism

Intensive methods; Discourse analysis; Deconstruction; Interviewing

The socially constructed nature of ­innovations; micro-level politics

Confuses survey / citation data with empirical reality; Produces ‘thin’ ­explanations; agency often excluded or presented as purely rational Ignores commonalities from wider social and cultural context; Tends to underplay social structures (e.g. rules, routines, roles) Excludes non-empirics (e.g. ­motivations, interests, structures). ANT treats humans as equivalent to non-humans; Difficulty with ‘why’ questions Focus on the local can miss the wider macro-level view; Focus on discourse means structure and the material get ignored; Difficulties conceptualizing resistance.

Boundaries; Inter-group communication; The power of  objects in enabling cooperation

the philosophy of management ideas    71

Positivism One of the popular approaches to studying management ideas focuses on citation ­analyses (primarily papers in journals and newspapers) and surveys (e.g. Osayawe Ehigie and McAndrew, 2005). Here, the focus tends to be on population level movements of ideas and thus is particularly well suited to identifying patterns of the longitudinal dynamics of ideas and proposing potential influences on these, such as types of entrepreneurs, socio-economic context, and quality of consultancy (e.g. Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999; Strang et al., 2014). Studies using this approach often make several (generally implicit) assumptions about the nature of the concepts they study which indicate an underlying philosophy which contains several principles. First, positivist studies (sometimes termed ‘scientism’ or ‘naïve realism’) often assume that reporting of the concept through citations or surveys can tell us something about the actual concept in practice. Whilst this assumption is occasionally mentioned in papers’ ‘limitations’ sections, it is never held to be so significant as to undermine the conclusions of the study. Of course, it may be true that such methods can tell researchers something about the existence of ideas, but it may also not be true (Benders et al., 2007). What is often missing from studies is a discussion of the conditions in which the former or the latter may be the case, and the extent to which such conditions are evident in the study in hand. At worst, this is an example of what Bhaskar calls the epistemic fallacy: ‘the view that statements about being can be reduced to statements about knowledge’ (Bhaskar, 1975: 36). The conflation of epistemology and ontology is problematic for several reasons, not least because, where detailed work has been done, the reporting of management fashions is often shown to be at odds with their observed existence (for example, Collinson et al., 1998). Second, in generalizing about, say, Total Quality Management (TQM), from surveys or citations of TQM, these approaches often imply a Platonic view of existence: that there is a ‘real’ innovation which is distinct from the empirical manifestations which are measured. Such studies often assume that the reported innovations are the same, or at least have a core set of features, which make them TQM. This type of thinking is Platonic at heart because it assumes we can know something about an idealized form of ­innovation from its empirical manifestations. Additionally, studies sometimes do not confine themselves to descriptive efforts (i.e. the instances in their survey or citation group) but go further to make predictive prescriptions, i.e. that a successful implementation will follow if conditions A, B, and C are met (e.g. Terziovski et al., 2003). A corollary of assuming a Platonic ideal form is that the ‘real’ innovation is unchanging and eternal: generally the conceptual form of what is being studied is assumed to be temporally static (if it were not, the prescriptions and correlations would not be possible). This absence is often exacerbated by the tendency of this perspective to focus on the diffusion phase of a lifecycle rather than the creation/destruction periods (Clark, 2004). As a consequence, it is often, though not always, assumed that the empirical implementation is binary in existence, i.e. that it is either implemented completely or not. This is

72   j. o’mahoney an atomistic assumption, which as we see in the following, makes statistical analyses easier but is out of kilter with the ongoing, emergent, and processual nature of business transformation. Ontologically, these approaches certainly involve a form of realism, but it is a form of what Sayer calls ‘naïve realism’ such that ‘the appeal to facts . . . involves collapsing statements into their referents, thought objects into real objects. It thereby appears to appeal to the facts themselves, the way the world is, in an unmediated fashion’ (Sayer, 2010: 42). In focusing on the diffusion of innovations through statistics, positivist methods parallel natural science approaches such as pathology, epidemiology, or demography (Rahmandad and Sterman, 2008). The approach of diffusion studies therefore often implies that change is ‘subject to the laws of physics’ (Czarniawska, 2012: 12), such that, when variables A, B, and C are in alignment, an innovation or idea will spread or be implemented ‘successfully’ (e.g. Ceci and Iubatti, 2012). The positivist assumptions of such approaches are most evident in the regression analyses that are often performed to highlight the dependencies and mediators of diffusion. The necessary assumption of regression analyses in this sphere is that the social world is a ‘closed system’, i.e. that whenever X occurs, then Y will follow (Fleetwood and Hesketh,  2015). For example, Waarts and Van Everdingen (2005) use regressions to argue that national cultures ‘highly significantly’ explain variance in the diffusion and adoption of enterprise resource systems, with the generalization that ‘we can safely conclude that national culture does influence the individual adoption decisions of companies’ (2005: 608). Here, diffusion is ‘explained’ by its correlation to measures of culture. Regardless of the ­accuracy of both these measures, the correlation or relation between ERP and completed questionnaires about culture are taken to be causal with minimal understanding of how the two may be related. The statistical emphasis of such papers means that hard-to-measure and complex mediators do not get included (for example, human agency).

Interactionism In contrast to the atomism and empiricism implied by diffusion studies, interactionism focuses on the role of inter-group communication, cooperation, and boundaries in creating, translating, and implementing management ideas (Bechky, 2003; Wenger, 1999). Rather than focusing on the entity of the idea, the interactionist perspective emphasizes the dynamic role of local knowledge construction and sense-making which reconstruct ideas as they transgress organizational or group boundaries. As ideas ‘mean different things in different worlds [and] actors are faced with the task of reconciling these meanings if they wish to cooperate’ (Star and Griesemer, 1989: 388) the methodological focus of this perspective tends towards interpretivist methods such as ethnography or participant observation, which are suited to understanding the meanings which different communities generate. Empirically, interactionist studies tend to focus on different professional, hierarchical, or occupational ‘communities of practice’ that have disparate

the philosophy of management ideas    73 understandings of ideas (Swan et al., 2007). The construction of meanings frequently involves ‘boundary objects’ (such as strategy tools or engineering diagrams) which provide a basis for communication as they ‘inhabit several intersecting social worlds and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them’ (Star and Griesemer, 1989: 393). As a philosophy, interactionism focuses on the construction of meanings though human relationships and related emergent phenomena such as consciousness and language (Blumer, 1986). It has its theoretical roots in the American pragmatist tradition (Peirce, 1998) which emphasizes the usefulness of truth statements to the groups using them and its roots can be traced to the symbolic interactionism of Strauss (1959) and Blumer (1962). Such approaches prioritize rather than decentre the human from their analyses. Yet, whilst writers in this tradition focus on the construction of meanings, interactionism is ‘quite definitely rooted in ontological realism’ (Porpora, 2015: 67). As Blumer wrote ‘I shall begin with the redundant assertion that an empirical science presupposes the existence of an empirical world. Such an empirical world exists as something available for observation, study and analysis’ (Blumer, 1969: 21). Yet, this realism is more often implied when interactionism is used to study management ideas, with authors accepting (or at least implying) that real things such as roles, production systems, or technology impinge upon social interactions, sense-making, and meaning construction (see, for example, Annels, 2010: 21). Boundary objects, for example, are taken to be ‘both concrete objects and abstract concepts’ (Swan et al., 2007) and are argued to be ‘embedded in social structures’ (Pawlowski and Robey, 2004). However, the focus of this perspective is less on external realities but on the local construction of shared meanings by different groups, thus, epistemologically, writers tended towards relativism and use methods sensitive to the construction of meaning, such as ethnomethodology, anthropology, or case-study research. The focus of interactionism on meaning-making is both enabling and limiting. Ethnomethodological approaches enable insights into the processes by which meanings are translated between groups to enable their cooperation, but the emphasis on the distinct communities of practice within organizations, as opposed to their wider social and cultural context, can mean that important commonalities are overlooked. For example, Swan et al. (2007: 1833) analyse boundary objects which help different communities of practice (e.g. researchers, clinicians, scientists) ‘reveal and accommodate differences in perspective and, therefore, reconcile differences in meaning to create a common understanding’. Yet, in common with many other studies from this perspective, their analysis neglects the wider social and structural context of these ‘communities’. It fails, for ­example, to include their many commonalities: they are all English-speaking, degree educated, and professional. Moreover, they are all employed by the same company, and as such are constrained by common social structures, for example, organizational rules, cross-departmental routines, and employment contracts. Such commonalities not only mean that there are many other opportunities for creating shared meanings but also that wider social structures might play an important part in enabling the communicative practices that the paper seeks to highlight.

74   j. o’mahoney

Actualism: Actor-Network Theory (ANT) An increasingly popular approach to understanding management ideas, and especially their movement, is actualism, the most common form of which is Latourian ANT studies. For Latour, and those that do not misinterpret his work (e.g. Luoma-aho and Paloviita, 2010), management ideas are not lasting entities but temporary events (‘actors’), which are enabled by a specific and temporary alignment of other events within a ­network of relations. Yet, the network is neither determined nor inevitable, as actors are enrolled and institutionalized into networks by other actors through the translation of their interests or representations. Such enrolment (called interessement by Latour) often involves the use of rhetoric, persuasion, and argument to shift the interests of actors in order to build alliances that enable the implementation or spread of management ideas (e.g. Giroux, 2006; Robinson et al., 2010). Often such efforts involved the creation of an ‘obligatory point of passage’ whereby the representation of actors is ­colonized by one group. Other ANT papers focus on the translation of an entity through an actor-­network. For example, Sandhu et al. (2008) detail the differentiated translation of a balanced scorecard implementation through a network of human and non-human actors. This  approach is consistent with ANT, but focuses not on the establishment of an actor-network, but the subsequent spread of ideas (called ‘tokens’) across that network (Latour, 2007). The ontology of ANT is ‘proudly’ actualist and anti-essentialist (Harman, 2009: 16), rejecting social structures or invisible motivations in favour of tracing the empirical networks between actors (Latour, 2007; Latour and Woolgar, 1986). Yet, as with the positivist approaches, ANT has a ‘flat’ realist ontology, rejecting any emergent or structural forms of existence in favour of a focus on events. Whilst, ontologically realist, ANT is epistemologically constructivist (see also Elder-Vass, 2008), in that whilst real objects exist ‘out there’ they come into being through the practices of science—which is itself seen as another actor-network (Latour and Woolgar, 1986). Indeed, as it is the network which lends properties and powers, humans and non-humans are treated symmetrically: things are only what they ‘come to be in a relational, multiple, fluid, and more or less unordered and indeterminate (set of) specific and provisional practices’ (Law and Mol, 2008: 365). For this reason, ANT often decentres the human from its accounts, and emphasizes the agency of non-human ‘material actors’. Yet, the ontological strictures of ANT cause difficulties. Harrisson and Laberge (2002), for example, use ANT to examine a change project at a multinational company. The analysis sought to understand how the management idea was ‘presented, discussed and debated’ and how the interests of actors were translated using ‘appeals, persuasion and use of convincing language’ (2002: 148). To achieve this, the authors highlight how interessement was attempted by emphasizing messages of job security and higher wages. However, the highly actualist ontology of ANT, which rejects the concept of social structure, results in an analysis which excludes the wider social forces that might play a significant role in understanding the workers’ capacity for resistance such as national culture, employment levels, firm ownership, national laws, and class.

the philosophy of management ideas    75 For example, the ability of, say, migrant workers to resist a change in China (Smith and Pun, 2006) is probably significantly less than the skilled engineers Harrisson and Laberge studied in Canada. In highlighting the importance of empirical networks in enabling and constructing change, ANT’s methodology provides powerful insights into how management ideas spread. However, by rejecting social structures, and the power which this implies, the question of why ideas spread is often left unanswered (Elder-Vass, 2008). For example, both Guilloux et al. (2013) and Strong and Letch (2013) use ANT to describe how the translations of interests occurred that enabled IT-led change in their cases. Yet, both struggle to explain why key actors such as regulators played such a powerful role without recourse to structural explanations. Others, such as Harrison and Laberge (2002) struggle to restrict their analysis only to actual events, often using emergent concepts such as roles, routines, or social structures which Latour explicitly rejects.

Social Constructivism Another common approach to understanding management ideas is social ­constructivism—an approach often associated with ‘Scandinavian Institutionalism’ (Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996). This perspective tends to focus on the construction and reconstruction of management ideas through discourses and ‘micro-politics’ (Reay et al., 2013). Indeed, the 1990s and 2000s provided fertile publishing ground for scholars that wished to show the utility of Foucault in understanding the self-disciplining effects of discourses of managerialism, TQM, Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), ‘Quality’, strategy, New Public Management, Lean and many others, on workers (e.g. Knights and McCabe, 2003). Although many Scandinavian Institutionalists claim a Latourian underpinning, this is, in practice, rarely actualized, with most pieces tending towards a social constructivist approach, with a relativist ontology which claims to reject the ‘grand narratives’ or generalizable laws associated with scientism (O’Mahoney, 2016). This approach suggests that knowledge of an extra-discursive ‘external’ world is not possible, ‘either because it is claimed there is no external reality outside of texts or discourses (strong social ­constructivism) or because if there is an objective reality, we can know nothing about it (weak social constructivism)’ (O’Mahoney and Vincent, 2014: 5). Here, discourses or narratives are emphasized through the inclusion of many social constructivist theorists in these papers, especially Foucault (e.g. Kelemen,  2000). These texts also tend to commit to an anti-essentialist position which applies not only to ideas, but also to all other entities such that organizations, subjects, and indeed the social world are only social constructions. This presentation of management ideas as created, disseminated, and known through discourses encourages scholars to use intensive methods suited to identifying and understanding discourses, such as interviewing and discourse analysis, to enable insights into how ideas are constructed, known, and translated. Empirically, this results in a variety of

76   j. o’mahoney approaches: for example, some writers focus on the construction of management ideas by management consultants, publishers, gurus, and business schools (e.g. SahlinAndersson and Engwall, 2002) whilst others have explored the processes that agents enact when translating ideas into local contexts—for example the rules that inform ‘editing’ activities when putting ideas into practice (e.g. Morris and Lancaster, 2006). Moreover, the understanding of management ideas as constructed through local discourses, as well as having constructive effects, calls attention to ideas as dependent on the politics and rhetorics of legitimation that actors deploy in organizations (e.g. Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005). However, this focus, especially if kept within the bounds of social constructivism, can be limiting when the focus on the local and discursive misses the non-local, structural, and population-level embeddedness of an innovation, which can help explain its success or failure (Fleetwood, 2005). Frandsen (2010), for example, when examining the implementation of management accounting in a hospital, shows how discourses of accounting ‘discipline’ nurses’ work and ‘create truths about them as individuals and their abilities’ (2010: 338). Whilst enlightening, this argument not only misses some of the important structural aspects of the case (such as unionization, the type of organization, or national laws), but its anti-essentialist ontology means that the characteristics of any particular innovation—its price, whether it works, whether it is easy to implement—are sacrificed to the discursive representation of the innovation (whether management say it works). The limitations of the philosophies detailed above originate, I argue, from their ­ontological and epistemological principles. These not only limit their methodological power, but also their ability to engage with each other. A major reason for this, I suggest, is the different conceptions of what an idea is. Positivism tends to frame management ideas as reports of implementations (in citations or surveys); interactionism, whilst less uniform in its approach, tends to see ideas as meanings produced by local communities; actualism sees ideas as events; and constructivism represents ideas as discursive constructions. Other than the siloed nature of academic studies in this field, which can limit their analytical insights (Joseph and Roberts,  2003), these rather narrow definitions prompt the question, can management ideas not include all these aspects, and others? The remainder of this chapter points to an alternative, more ecumenical, philosophy, that helps integrate some of the strengths of the four philosophies detailed above whilst ameliorating some of the weaknesses.

Critical Realism: An Ecumenical Philosophy? Critical realism (CR) is an ontology developed by Roy Bhaskar (1975, 2011) which holds that reality exists at different emergent ‘levels’ which are dependent upon, but i­ rreducible to each other (for example, atoms, cells, organisms, minds, people, teams, organizations,

the philosophy of management ideas    77 society). It argues that reality is stratified, and distinguishes between the real (underlying causal mechanisms), the actual (empirical epiphenomena), and the empirical (perceptions of the actual). It is, therefore, epistemologically relativist, but, crucially, with a commitment towards judgemental rationality (the human ability to judge between better and worse theories about the world). CR holds that things (‘entities’) such as organizations, ideas, or money, have properties and powers (e.g. to employ, to change behaviours, to purchase) which affect other entities, and exist independently of our talk about them. With reference to methodology and ‘domain level theory’ (i.e. theorizing at a field or subject matter level), CR is quite ecumenical: ‘there are no specifically CR methods of research . . . there is a valid and important place for all the methods sociologists have employed—although not necessarily in the way they have employed them’ (Porpora, 2015: 63). CR theorizing is useful for theorizing management ideas because it helps integrate the strengths of the perspectives above whilst combating some of their weaknesses. If we take the strengths first, we can see from Table 3.2 that each strength (taken from Table 3.1) relates to a different theoretical aspect of critical realism with which it can engage. Here, we can see that CR’s proposition of reality existing at different emergent levels allows its acceptance of macro-level entities such as social structures and populations of management ideas, as well as micro-level entities such as people, identities, and actions. Its commitment to a stratified ontology means that it accepts the domain of the actual favoured by positivism and actualism, but also the ‘empirical’ domain of discourse and human communication. Moreover, CR’s conception of people accepts the powers of agency suggested by ANT, but also the potential to be rational suggested by scientism. Yet CR also accepts that what appears rational to people is affected by discourse, culture, and communication (Archer, 2000). Finally, we should note the agnosticism CR has for methods and domain-level theorizing: unlike the other archetypes, CR does not have a preference for any specific approach to studying or theorizing management ideas. Thus, CR can integrate at least some of the strengths of the different philosophies. Concerning the limitations in the four philosophies (taken from Table 3.1), these can be grouped into five areas which CR also addresses (Table  3.3). The first concerns a reductionist ontology which accepts only one form of reality. For ANT and diffusion studies, this is the empirical actor-network, whereas for social constructivism, it is discourse. The critical realist commitments to an emergent ontology, to entities (with properties), and to causal mechanisms, mean that discourse, events, materiality, people, and relations are all ontologically permissible but not conflated. The second is the exclusion of either a micro or macro view on reality. As we saw earlier, both are important in understanding management ideas. For CR, the macro and micro are not conflated, but are mutually dependent (for example, agency and structure). The third, related to the first two, is an inadequate conceptualization of humans, which are either ignored or reduced to a single phenomenon such as events (ANT) or discourse (social ­constructivism). By committing to emergence, CR accepts that humans are multi-layered complex entities, with properties and powers that cannot be reduced to one dimension. The fourth is that by failing to distinguish between epistemology and ontology both

Table 3.2  The possibilities of Critical Realism for engaging the strengths of philosophies of management ideas Philosophy

Strengths

Category

Critical realist engagement

Positivism (Scientism)

Macro-level view

Emergent levels

Rationality of the agent

People and relations

Boundaries

Domain level theory

Interactions between different groups The power of objects in enabling ­cooperation

People and relations Entities, powers, and ­mechanisms

Empirical networks

Stratified ontology

Decentres the human

People and relations

Agency of the material

Entities, powers, and mechanisms Transitive vs. intransitive

Emergence accepts the population view of ideas / ­innovations, and suggests these are dependent on but irreducible to ‘lower’ levels. People are entities that possess a number of properties and powers, one of which is (limited and bounded) rationality. CR is agnostic to domain level theorizing providing there is sufficient evidence to support the theory. CR holds that relationality is a key emergent property of people and groups. This includes discursive, structural, and material ­interactions. CR accepts both the (intransigent) material reality of objects, and the properties and powers that this implies, as well as the (transigent) shared discourses and theories by which these objects are understood. The empirical networks (i.e. connected events) in ANT are, for CR, the domain of the ‘actual’. CR promotes a complex view of the human as emergent (cells, organs, minds, action, rationality, etc.). However, it does not accord a ‘special’ place to humans over and above the powers and properties we hold. For example, it accepts the agency of the non-human. CR accepts that material entities have powers and properties.

Symbolic Interactionism

Actor-Network Theory (Actualism)

Social Constructivism

The socially constructed nature of ideas Micro-level politics

Emergent levels (structure and agency)

CR accepts that ideas are partially, but not entirely, socially constructed. CR would also argue that ideas have a material and structural nature. CR is agnostic to the concept of micro-level politics. However, it would also add that the activities of actors (re)produce structural relations (e.g. of power).

the philosophy of management ideas    79

Table 3.3  Weaknesses of philosophical perspectives Ontology

Weaknesses

Problem category

Empiricism

Confuses survey / citation data with empirical reality Produces ‘thin’ explanations Humans excluded or presented as rational actors Ignores commonalities from wider context Tends to underplay social structures Treats humans as equivalent to non-humans Difficulty with ‘why’ questions Excludes non-empirics Focus on the local can miss the wider macro-level view (e.g. social ­structure; population level descriptions) Focus on discourse means structure and the material gets ignored Difficulties conceptualizing resistance

No distinction between epistemology and ontology Lack of explanatory power Limited conception of humans

Symbolic Interactionism Actualism

Social Constructivism

View limited only to the micro-level View limited only to the micro-level Limited conception of humans Lack of explanatory power Reductionist / conflationary ontology Reductionist / conflationary ontology

No distinction between epistemology and ontology Limited conception of humans (as subjects of discourse).

constructivism and positivism generate ‘flat’ views of the world which struggle to find an explanation for why change occurs in their measures (either discourse or statistics) other than by referencing back to those entities. By making a distinction between the two, CR can not only posit that changes to discourse or statistics occur because of change at the level of the real, but also that our discourses or statistics may be mistaken or simply wrong. Explanation for CR comes from generating approximations of the causal mechanisms that exist. This provides critical realism with the capacity to provide richer explanations of why empirical events occur without resorting to mere correlations or descriptions.

A Critical Realist Definition of Management Ideas The principles of critical realism mean that we can begin to interrogate what a management idea is from this perspective. Before starting, there are three caveats. First, in order to avoid confusion, this definition concerns those common management ideas, such as BPR, TQM, Lean, and Human Resource Management (HRM) which are specific approaches to organization implemented in organizations, rather than the more ephemeral approaches such as ‘greening’. Second, the definition is not meant to be definitive or final. It is a tentative start to illustrating what these types of ideas are. Finally, it should be

80   j. o’mahoney stressed that critical realism is a meta-theory. It has been used as a foundation by many authors to underpin social theorizing (for example concerning structure and agency, or reflexivity) and ‘domain level theory’ (for example, applying social theory to domains such as workplace conflict). The theorizing described here seeks to explicate a realist conception of ideas which includes critical realist meta-theory, and some common realist social theorizing concerning structure and agency (Archer, 2003). Stratification: From a critical realist perspective, management ideas are discourses (texts and talk), practices (empirical routines), or ideas (thoughts or mental elaborations) about organizing. These pertain to different types of reality which should not be conflated, for example, a management idea which does not currently exist may be written about in a prescriptive consultancy report; empirical routines may have evolved without being written down, talked or even thought about; and thoughts about a management idea might not be reflected either in any texts, or in empirical practices. These distinctions allow slippage between what HRM, say, is in practice and what people believe it to be, or talk about it being—in CR terms, the distinction between the ‘actual’ and ‘empirical’. This is important for three reasons. First, because managers (in completing surveys) and academics (when studying ideas) may be wrong in their identifications—claiming to ‘have’ or ‘see’ say teamworking when it does not exist in practice. Second, because some management innovations are often old wine in new bottles, and distinguishing between discourse and reality allows the observer to show that new rhetorics do not necessarily equate to new practices (see Seeck and Lamberg, in this volume). Relatedly, and finally, discourses can be deceiving, with ‘right-sizing’, ‘restructuring’, and ‘re-engineering’, for example, used as discursive tricks to hide the painful realities of redundancies. Causal mechanisms: As most management ideas concern ‘what works’ in organizing (normally improved efficiency), most imply (and more rarely state) causal mechanisms that link a feature of the management idea to an effect: for example, TQM improves quality by enabling workers to generate and implement improvements. Yet, as any manager or academic knows, social mechanisms are not that simple. A critical realist conceptualization suggests that mechanisms may be actualized in certain contexts. For example, TQM may improve quality by enabling workers to generate and implement improvements when (among other things) there are high trust relations between managers and employees. Yet, even when a mechanism is actualized, there may be countervailing mechanisms (e.g. deteriorating machines, poor materials, budget reductions) which counteract the operation of the mechanism. Thus, in critical realist studies, one often sees the phrase ceteris paribus—‘all other things being equal’. The specification of the causal mechanisms of a management idea also helps us understand the difference between an effective management idea and an ineffective one, in that a good management idea is one that contains an accurate understanding and explication of the causal mechanisms which tend to (ceteris paribus) produce the desired results. A bad idea, it follows, is one that has an inaccurate understanding of such mechanisms. This means that not all good management ideas work empirically. It is also important to emphasize that it is not just the management idea that has causal powers, but also the idea of the idea. Thus, BPR, which had very high failure rates,

the philosophy of management ideas    81 was popular in many companies as the idea of BPR is also a discursive entity in itself which has causal powers, for example, to attract consultancy clients or to resonate with prevailing economic conditions (O’Mahoney,  2007). Thus, whilst the implied causal mechanisms of any idea might be wrong, this will not necessarily make it unpopular or impotent. This means that management ideas that are wrong (i.e. have flawed understanding of the mechanisms for ‘success’) can still be virulent. Structure and agency: CR specifies a (re)productive relationship between structure (macro-level cultural and social contexts) and agency (the micro-level generation of ideas by consultants and gurus, and the implementation of these in organizations) (Grint and Case, 1998). Agency is influenced by structure through social and cultural conditioning (e.g. the ‘disciplining’ of workers through discourse), which means that management ideas are intrinsically ideological—often concerned with the normalization of neo-liberal forms of capitalism. As such, management ideas exist in relation to other ideas which can provide enabling (or countervailing) conditions. Thus ideas such as privatization, free-trade, laissez-faire government, New Public Management, competitive tendering, and outsourcing, can be seen as ‘complexes’ (Elder-Vass, 2010) which have logical resonance with each other as part of a wider ideology of neo-liberalism. This emphasizes the importance of the content (i.e. properties) of ideas themselves rather than simply framing them as mere constructions. To summarize, a critical realist conception of management ideas is that they are real entities, but can be real in different ways (discursive, empirical, and ideational senses) (Fleetwood,  2005). They ‘work’ (or otherwise) through causal mechanisms which interact with social contexts to produce effects. Management ideas also have properties which make them different to each other and provide logical coherence (or otherwise) with other ideas. Furthermore, management ideas contribute to the reproduction of the social structures which condition them, and in turn condition the agents which enact them.

Conclusion This chapter argued that there has been little philosophical interrogation of management ideas and that this has led to three problems: ambiguity concerning what authors mean by a ‘management idea’, lack of interdisciplinarity and a ‘siloing’ of the field, and a failure to interrogate the veracity, or at least the contradictions and limitations of each approach. The chapter then outlined the strengths and weaknesses of four approaches that underpin the extant literature, namely positivism, interactionism, actualism, and social constructivism. I argued that whilst each approach provides its own insights, their ontological strictures mean that engagement with, and insights from, other perspectives, are few, and thus their analyses are frequently limited and limiting. The chapter then introduced critical realism, arguing that its stratified, emergent, and realist ontology can (partially) integrate the insights from the four other philosophies, whilst ameliorating their respective weaknesses.

82   j. o’mahoney I am aware of the provocative, and probably arrogant, nature of this argument. It comes close to the ‘insufferably smug [and] extraordinarily naive’ (Van Maanen, 1995: 133) call of Pfeffer (1993) for organization studies to develop a specific, consensually approved paradigm, upon which to better develop the field’s legitimacy, progress, and quality. A similar charge might be made of this chapter, but it would be misplaced. The focus of my critique is not (as Pfeffer’s was) on the theoretical or methodological diversity of the field—indeed, I have shown that such variety is complementary with a CR ontology—but rather on the exclusivity of other philosophies, whose ontological strictures discourage interdisciplinary exchange. Indeed, I would argue that the insights of ANT, positivism, interactionism, and social constructivism do not come from their ontological, but their methodological preferences (see Strang and Wittrock, in this volume), which often pose little challenge to a critical realist ontology. Critical realism is by no means the final word. Its limitations are well known (Al-Amoudi and Willmott, 2011; Cruickshank, 2004) and it has been subject to refinement, not least by Bhaskar himself (Bhaskar, 2008). As an ontology, it is difficult to operationalize, and in the field of management ideas has had little use. There are, therefore, several opportunities and implications for future research, two of which I now highlight. The first is for authors to explore more thoroughly the opportunities posed by critical realism for the study of management ideas and explore more fully how CR concepts such as emergence or stratification might help further current debates. Moreover, there are many additions to the rather basic form of critical realism that I have presented here, which may be of conceptual use to researchers. I think especially of dialectical critical realism, recent work on relationality (Donati and Archer, 2015), and the arguments that realists have developed concerning morality and ethics (Sayer, 2010). The second is a call for researchers to be less afraid of straying from their ontological silos and braver about engaging with other approaches. Such interperspective dialogue requires us to, perhaps, jettison some of the caricaturing and ‘straw-manning’ of competing ontologies, and instead focus on the useful epistemological and methodological insights that they provide. Might we dare to imagine, for example, a survey-supplemented study of the discursive construction of management ideas, an analysis of actor-networks which includes insights from a structural perspective, or a psychology study of boundary-spanners? There is, I would argue, little to be lost and much to be gained from such efforts.

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chapter 4

M ethods for th e St u dy of M a nagem en t Ide as David Strang and Christian Wittrock

Introduction In 1955, Peter Blau published his PhD dissertation as Dynamics of Bureaucracy, an instant classic that put Max Weber’s ideal type to empirical test in a study of two employment agencies. Blau observed workplace interactions on a daily basis for three months and followed up by interviewing each employee in his or her home. The study analysed patterns of cooperation and competition among case workers who relied on each other for assistance while hiding new vacancies from their colleagues under stacks of papers. Dynamics of Bureaucracy laid the groundwork for sociological exchange theory and helped foster the empirical analysis of organizational behaviour. Ten years later, Blau returned to the subject of Weberian bureaucracy with the goal of investigating the relationship between structure and performance. As he recalls in an academic memoir, ‘It dawned on me that data on all these considerations can be obtained from records and informants and do not require surveys of all or even a sample of members of the organization, let alone direct observation for months of every kind of group of officials’ (Blau  1995: 11). Brief site visits to 156 personnel agencies obtained structural profiles from archival records and agency personnel. Blau et al. (1966) and related articles examined functional interdependencies between size, administrative intensity, formalization, professionalization and the like, and helped give rise to the quantitative analysis of organizational structure. This tale of two studies reminds us of some fundamental methodological truths. First, there is a trade-off between breadth and depth. Few cases, many attributes; many cases, few attributes. Observation schemes which involve months of direct observation can be applied to a small sample at best, but these are apprehended as multi-layered social worlds. Data collection techniques that require hours of the investigator’s time can be applied to hundreds of cases and can be captured with a moderate level of complexity. Data acquisition that occupies nanoseconds can be applied to millions of instances, but nothing other than values on a limited menu of variables is known.

methods for the study of management ideas    87 Innovations in research methodology seek to relax this trade-off, capturing larger slices of the social world at lower cost. The workhorse of quantitative research in the social sciences, regression analysis, was introduced as a way of identifying simple functional relationships more economically than could be done via tabular cross-classification (for penetrating critiques of the assumptions and explanatory merit of regression analysis, see Abbott, 1988; and Freedman, 1991). The current explosion of interest in automated text analysis is premised on the notion that machine learning can extract intelligible ­patterns comparable (or superior) to those identified by knowledgeable human coders, while handling orders of magnitude larger numbers of cases. Second, Blau’s two studies teach us that every way of seeing is simultaneously a way of not seeing. Research methods provide partial insight into an always more complex reality, much like the blind men who each grab a part of an elephant and variously judge it to be like a tree, a snake, a rug, and a spear. Blau (1955) examined interactions within work groups while Blau et al. (1966) inspected variation in formal structure. The worlds uncovered by the two projects are complementary; the work groups were embedded in organizational structures while the agencies were composed of fleshand-blood human beings (surprise!). Too often, trade-offs based on research design are mistaken for ontological commitments. While it has very general applicability, we recount the tale of Blau’s two studies here because methodological complementarities are critical to research on management ideas. The OED defines ‘idea’ as ‘any product of mental apprehension or activity, existing in the mind as an object of knowledge of thought’. But mental constructs cannot be directly observed, and must be put into action—operationally or discursively—to be impactful (Sturdy and Fleming, 2003). Scholars measure not ideas themselves but policies, techniques, and behaviours that are informed by those ideas, and by investigating the communicative acts—the sayings and the writings—whereby ideas are pointed to, advocated, and opposed. There is no ‘one best way’ to accomplish this; instead, we have a menu of methodologies that help bring into focus the many ways that ideas enter into talk and action. This chapter’s first major section surveys some central research strategies in the field. To map this complex landscape in a simple but robust way, we group studies by the number of cases they investigate. The second major section focuses on methodologies employed in bibliometric and discursive analyses of (largely written) text. These deserve special attention for two reasons: because they grapple with the interpretive and communicative processes that are central to management ideas and because techniques for capturing and analysing discourse are currently being revolutionized.

Methodology and Sample Size We organize methodological choices and their implications by classifying studies by the number of cases they investigate (in common parlance, their ‘N’). For heuristic purposes four such categories are distinguished here: Large N, Moderate N, Small N, and Case Studies (a fifth category, Very Large N, may emerge in future work, but is not

88    d. strang and c. wittrock currently well populated). Characteristic data sources, analytic techniques, and exemplary studies linked to each category are discussed below. Table 4.1 provides a summary. We should note at the outset that the notion of a ‘case’ hides ambiguity. For example, in Table 4.1 we classify Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999) as a Large N study because it content-analyses hundreds of articles; the study could alternatively be viewed as a Small N comparison of four techniques (job enrichment, quality circles, TQM, and re-engineering). See Ragin and Becker (1992) and Ragin (2008)

Table 4.1  Study classification, characteristic data sources, analytic techniques, and exemplary studies Number of cases

Focal outcomes

Main data sources

Analytic technique

Exemplary studies

Timing of adoption and variable content of management ideas/ practices Shifts over time in the interpretation and interpreters of management ideas Use and modification of management ideas

Legal/regulatory records Organization surveys

Various forms of regression analysis including event history analysis Portrayal of trends, various forms of regression and cluster analysis

Davis and Greve (1997) Westphal et al. (1997)

Interviews

Categorization into subtypes

Moderate N

Propagation of management ideas

Texts, speeches

Small N

Development of management ideas across organizational fields (often, national business communities) Reception and use of management ideas in a single organization

Organizational surveys, bibliometrics, historical narrative

Discourse analysis Conversation analysis Qualitative comparison

Heusinkveld and Benders (2005) Wilhelm and Bort (2013) Clark and Greatbatch (2011) Cole (1989) Guillén (1994)

Large N

Large N

Moderate N

Case Study

Case Study

Mapping of management ideas/ discourses over time in a single organizational field

Bibliometric databases

Surveys, interviews, archival records, participant observation Organizational surveys, bibliometrics, historical narrative

Barley et al. (1988) Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999)

Mixed qualitative/ quantitative account

Kunda (1992) Strang (2010)

Mixed qualitative/ quantitative account

Barley and Kunda (1992)

methods for the study of management ideas    89 for extended discussion, and Strang and Siler (2017) for a related scheme that maps methodological shifts in organization studies over fifty years.

Large N Research In research on management ideas, ‘Large N’ studies generally examine policies, techniques, and structures of a sample of organizations large enough to sustain multivariate models (there is no absolute minimum, but 100 cases are ‘barely enough’). Management ideas are both dependent and independent variables here—the organizational practices that researchers seek to explain embody ideas about how to organize, and the explanations feature characteristics of those ideas as contextual or conditioning factors. A central research design studies the spread of management practices within an organizational population. Event history analysis (EHA) is the technique of choice when attention centres on adoption timing. EHA handles the core methodological challenges of temporal analysis: censoring (the fact that many cases do not adopt during the study’s observation period, and may never adopt) and time-varying covariates (the values of causal factors change over time). It also provides a natural framework for the investigation of diffusion processes whereby each event influences subsequent behaviour (Strang and Tuma, 1993), a central mechanism in social network and institutional accounts of organizational change. (Note that diffusion research is often criticized from a ‘translation’ perspective for treating diffusing practices as stable and invariant; a fair point, but one that highlights the value of complementary methodological strategies that can be applied at different levels of N.) Tolbert and Zucker (1983) provide a pioneering EHA of civil service reform. Management ideas enter the study in two ways. First, civil service reform—where organizations are staffed by officials appointed based on their technical expertise and insulated from partisan pressures—embodies the project of organizational rationalization in general and Weberian bureaucracy in particular. Second, Tolbert and Zucker develop a content analysis of temporally varying patterns of discourse that they link to patterns of adoption. An early period of contestation over the merits of personnel reform is associated with adoption by cities plagued with the problems that civil service reform sought to address. A later era, when civil service procedures became uncontroversial, is associated with widespread adoption disconnected from city characteristics. Tolbert and Zucker’s temporally sensitive analysis concretizes the process by which a controversial management idea becomes taken-for-granted and captures the implications of this ideational shift for organizational action. Davis and Greve’s (1997) study of the diffusion of two organizational responses to hostile takeovers—the poison pill and the golden parachute—provides a second exemplary analysis of practice adoption. They note that while economic theory recommends golden parachutes (generous termination packages for executives triggered by a takeover bid) as remedies against managerial self-interest, organizational participants and investors regarded them as giveaways while viewing poison pills as legitimate defences

90    d. strang and c. wittrock against corporate raiders. Davis and Greve show that poison pills spread rapidly through the thin ties of board interlocks while golden parachutes spread more slowly via the thicker medium of local business communities. Once again, cross-sectional and temporal variation in organizational adoption points to the power of management ideas. The abandonment of organizational practices is less often studied. This is in part due to measurement difficulties; organizations publicize the often-fashionable practices they adopt while abandonment may be a non-event where techniques quietly fall into disuse. In one of the few studies of both processes, Burns and Wholey (1993) find that abandonment is less driven by organizational and inter-organizational factors than adoption is. There are similarly few studies of intra-organizational diffusion (though see Kostova and Roth, 2002; Strang and Jung, 2009) due to the difficulty of obtaining detailed data on diffusion trajectories within the firm. Analyses of practice variation shift attention from the timing of adoption to the ­content of adopted techniques. For example, Westphal et al. (1997) examine hospital usage of twenty practices associated with TQM such as ‘periodic assessment of community needs’, ‘formation of project teams to improve quality’, ‘senior management training in TQM principles and methods’, ‘use of brainstorming’, and ‘use of scatter diagrams’. Similarly, Strang and Bradburn (2001) examine the appearance of twenty provisions in health maintenance organization (HMO) enabling laws, such as whether HMOs are required to have open enrolment periods and whether they must include consumer ­representatives on their governing boards. And Fiss et al. (2012) code thirteen features of golden parachute contracts (such as whether they include stock options). Studies of practice variation compare the usage profile of focal organizations to ­typical patterns within a reference group. Westphal et al. (1997) measure the similarity of each hospital’s practices to that of the medical community as a whole, finding that ‘conformity’ is positively linked to regulatory compliance but negatively linked to organizational efficiency. Strang and Bradburn (2001) show that states in the USA converge on a modal set of legal provisions that was advocated by a national regulatory body, while a small number of politically charged provisions exhibit variation linked to the strength of mobilized actors such as physicians’ associations. Likewise, Fiss et al. (2012) demonstrate that more visible firms have less extensive golden parachute provisions that correspond closely to community norms. Large N research is generally based on archival data generated by regulatory agencies, professional associations, trade groups, and public interest organizations. For example, Davis and Greve (1997) acquired the dates of poison pill and golden parachute adoption from the Investor Responsibility Research Center and proxy statements; corporate interlocks from Standard and Poor’s Directory of Corporations, Executives and Directors; and covariates like market value and market-to-book ratio from Standard and Poor’s Compustat database. Westphal et al.’s (1997) study of TQM practices utilized data collected by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, Health Care Investment Analysts, and the American Hospital Association. Investigators also utilize ABI/Inform and similar business press compendia to form measures of discourse (as we discuss in more detail below), national statistical bureaus for demographic and

methods for the study of management ideas    91 socio-economic indicators; and corporate communications such as annual reports and press releases. In addition to archival sources, many Large N studies draw on organizational ­surveys—some conducted by third parties and others by the researcher. Outstanding examples of the latter include Osterman’s (1994, 2000) telephone surveys of ‘high performance’ innovations such as quality circles and self-directed teams; Dobbin et al.’s (1993) survey of personnel practices; and Baron et al.’s (1996) study of organizational templates in the high-tech industry. Multi-wave data collection efforts include Lawler and associates’ surveys of the Fortune 1000 regarding their use of human resource and workplace practices, conducted at three-year intervals from the 1980s (see for example Lawler et al., 2001) as well as Bain Consulting’s biennial inquiry into the use of management tools by their clients and several instruments developed by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound, 2016). While repeated surveys are becoming more common, it remains a challenge to chart the trajectory of management ideas over time by asking organizations about their practices. One difficulty is a lack of conceptual standardization; when different surveys define practices in disparate ways, the joint picture they present may be incoherent (Nijholt and Benders, 2010). A second limitation is that most surveys focus on ‘hot’ innovations whose popularity is rising while detailed information about usage during fashion downswings is sparse. A third and perhaps the most serious problem is reliance on a single respondent per organization whose identity and knowledge base are generally unknown to the researcher (Marsden et al., 2006). The potential for slippage or distortion is well illustrated by Gray (1993): 60 per cent of respondents to his mail survey indicated that their firms employed quality circles, but follow-up interviews found that only one in eight firms actually had an operating QC programme. An innovative strategy that addresses these shortcomings is provided by Easton and Jarrell (1998), who collected full organizational histories through extended interviews with centrally placed managers.

Moderate N Studies A second type of analysis works with a moderate N, generally more than 10 and substantially less than 100. Unlike Large N studies, this number of cases is small enough to permit insight into the subjective orientations of actors, a central concern of much work on management ideas. Moderate N studies are at the same time large enough to permit classification of cases into subgroups, though they are generally unable to sustain the multi-causal models and statistical tests that we see in Large N research. The primary data collection technique in Moderate N studies is the interview, which fosters a fluid exploration of meanings. One research stream within this group examines the strategies and subjective understandings of carriers of management ideas such as consultants. Heusinkveld and Benders (2005) interviewed a sample of forty consultants who had published on popular

92    d. strang and c. wittrock management techniques to explore obstacles to the commodification of emerging management ideas, discovering much supply-side conflict over turf. Likewise, Heusinkveld et al. (2013) studied thirty-two consultants who worked with a management idea that was seen as ‘old news’. Interviews and publications showed that consultants did not simply abandon the concept, but instead struggled to maintain its viability by streamlining, standardizing, refocusing, and broadening the idea and its implementation. Likewise, Kitay and Wright (2007) conducted fifty-eight interviews to investigate the relationship between consulting rhetoric and occupational roles, identity building, and professional pressures. Other Moderate N research focuses on managers and workers who are active idea producers as well as audiences for external knowledge carriers. Wilhelm and Bort (2013) conducted interviews with thirteen executives to understand how they talk about management concepts, unearthing four interpretive patterns: as a way of learning from the experiences of others; as a tool that could be used to control organizational change; as a source of external legitimacy; and as collective sense-making. Sturdy et al. (2015) present interview-based research in twenty-five organizations that identifies the emerging phenomenon of ‘consultant managers’, while Knights and McCabe (2000) examined orientations towards teamworking through interviews with thirty managers and thirty shop floor employees. Similarly, some studies investigate how presentations of management ideas are received by audiences. Clark and Greatbatch (2011) asked subjects to rate videotaped extracts of sixteen speeches delivered by seven management gurus and found that perceptions of charisma were based on presentational delivery rather than content. Groß et al. (2015) conducted interviews with sixty-five managers attending guru seminars to probe how listeners interpreted the presentations, noting that some audience members distanced themselves from the guru’s message while others were captivated.

Small N Studies A third category of studies examines the adoption and use of management ideas among a small comparison set (most commonly two to four). This research design often takes industries, nation-states, or other groupings as cases, gaining insight into macro-structural variability while abstracting away from the specific policies and practices of individual organizations. Small N studies are able to explore how management ideas are produced and used with a wider range of evidence than Moderate or Large N research can, since they forgo consistent measurement at the level of defined units of analysis. It is important to note, however, that these studies work with extensive information on each case; they are differently organized but not intrinsically less complex than large N research. Robert Cole’s (1989) study of small-group work practices in American, Japanese, and Swedish industry provides an exemplar. The structure of these activities differs across the three nations, from Japan’s foremen-led quality control circles to autonomous work groups in Sweden and management-led quality circles of the USA, yet they reflect common ideational elements (participation, commitment, autonomy). Cole highlights

methods for the study of management ideas    93 the national infrastructures that promote organizational change and the key roles of leading corporations and national unions. For example, quality control circles in Japan were sponsored by a national association of scientists and engineers which worked in partnership with industry leaders to produce a vibrant movement. Sweden’s autonomous work groups were similarly supported by major firms like Volvo, faltering when corporate interest waned. In the USA, market competition between consultants who struggled to control a weak national association impeded the spread of best practices and helped make quality circles a fad. Guillén’s Models of Management (1994) provides a second exemplar, one that studies three families of management ideas and associated practices in four countries. The research uses a combination of organizational surveys, business press discourse, and historical narrative to characterize the reception of scientific management, human relations, and structural analysis in the USA, Germany, Spain, and Great Britain. For example, American and British firms applied human relations techniques extensively while Germany and Spain did not, although the ideology or ideas associated with human ­relations had considerable currency in (Catholic) Spain. Guillén argues that the diffusion of management idea families depended on a similar pattern of structural change in organizational populations across the four cases, while the identity of key advocates (such as leading firms, the state, and social scientists) varied from country to country. Small N studies can also take individual companies as their units. A good example is Marchington et al.’s (1994) examination of attitudes towards employee involvement ­programmes in six firms. While based on employee surveys, these are used to explore contextual factors rather than to develop a model of individual attitudinal variation (as a Large N study might do). Marchington et al. find that programmes were generally well received in three companies that were financially successful and which gave unions and workers a voice, while there was little buy-in when employee involvement was implemented in a top-down manner to achieve cost savings. Similarly, Zbaracki’s (1998) study of five organizations details how managers initially approached TQM with hesitation, only to become full-blown advocates after the decision to adopt was made. Finally, some Small N studies examine the production of management discourse. Clark and Greatbatch (2004) researched the making of six bestsellers by interviewing the many contributors to their production. Beginning with authors, they used a snowball sampling strategy that included ghost-writers, editors, and other stakeholders. Similarly, Nijholt et al. (2014) interviewed ten editors to learn how management ideas come to be discussed in the business press. They show how editors function as gatekeepers in the diffusion of management ideas, applying selection criterion or norms of newsworthiness such as ‘Novelty’, ‘Controversy’, ‘Unusual’, ‘Prominence’, and ‘Proximity’.

Case Studies Finally, Case Studies (in our usage) examine an N of one. Like Small N studies, they draw on multiple methods and sources of evidence to develop sophisticated interpretations and causal accounts. They differ in forgoing structured comparison in favour of gaining

94    d. strang and c. wittrock a more phenomenological insight into the phenomenon of interest by focusing on a ­single instance. In one exemplary study, Kunda’s Engineering Culture (1992), the construction of organizational identity and membership commitment in a high-tech company is examined. His ethnographic research shows how framings of appropriate action (‘Do what’s right’) blur the boundaries between the self and the organization. This construction of identity is received in quite different ways by employees depending on their status and expected future with the firm. Kunda is particularly successful in capturing the ambivalence with which the company’s ‘strong culture’ of commitment is greeted by members of the organization, as an ideal, a fact of life, and a problematic slogan. Strang’s Learning by Example (2010) examines the benchmarking programme of an elite bank to observe concrete processes of inter-organizational learning and diffusion. The study inverts the usual structure of diffusion analysis, investigating the adoption of many practices by a single organization rather than one practice by many organizations. Data sources include interviews; questionnaires sent to benchmarking teams and to a random sample of employees; observation of quality improvement efforts; inspection of benchmarking reports and corporate policies; and implementation records drawn from organizational archives. Strang finds that the bank emulated prestigious firms outside the financial services industry while giving limited attention to competitors, consultants, and academics. The study also shows that management ideas were selected and modified at every stage; the lessons of external site visits were reworked by benchmarkers into politically viable proposals targeted at the firm’s management team while policies formally adopted by executives were altered in the course of implementation. Some case studies examine organizational fields rather than single firms. An exemplar is Barley and Kunda’s (1992) inquiry into the rise and fall of ‘conceptions of control’ such as industrial betterment, scientific management, and systems analysis. The case here is corporate (organizational) America, approached as a discursive community. Barley and Kunda argue that discourse oscillates between rational and normative concepts in connection with long waves of technological change, a theme further developed by Bodrožić and Adler (2018).

Bibliometric Studies and Discourse Analysis Bibliometric Research Bibliometric studies map interest in management ideas over time by counting numbers of publications on a given topic as well as classifying these into various categories. Publication counts are generally normalized by the number of publications per year, though the number of pages may also be used as corrective measure (Shenhav, 1995).

methods for the study of management ideas    95 Calhoun et al. (2011) uses citation counts of Senge’s ‘The Fifth Discipline’ to trace attention to the concept of the learning organization over a sixteen-year period. While most bibliometric research examines one or a few management ideas, Carson et al. (2000) study sixteen, Thawesaengskulthai and Tannock (2008) twelve, and Pascale (1990) examines twenty-seven. A recent paper by Abrahamson and colleagues (2015) ups the ante by investigating more than 500 management ideas. Early uses of bibliometric data documented the bell-shaped publication curves of  ideas like Quality Circles, Total Quality Management, and Business Process ­Re-­engineering (e.g. Kieser,  1997; Pascale,  1990). This observation led to theorizing about management idea lifecycles and helped inspire the notion of managerial fashion (Abrahamson, 1996). Abrahamson and Eisenman (2008) show how rapid swings of interest in specific techniques relate to longer-term movements in underlying models of organizational change. Carson et al. (2000) link variation in sixteen fashions to features like implementation difficulty and find increasingly short lifecycles over time. By contrast, Strang (2010) and Thawesaengskulthai and Tannock (2008) identify management techniques that do not follow a boom-and-bust pattern. For example, the number of articles per year on benchmarking rises to a moderate level and then reaches a plateau, perhaps because the technique was used in support of multiple fashionable practices (TQM, re-engineering, knowledge management) rather than being hyped as a standalone solution (see also Benders et al., in this volume). Bibliometric article counting often utilizes ABI/Inform Global and the Business Periodicals Index along with other databases such as the Dutch ‘OnLine Contents’, Ingenta, and BIDS. Some studies have a narrower scope in targeting specific journals. For example, Walgenbach and Beck (2002) trace the institutionalization of the quality movement in Germany through analysis of 1,515 articles appearing in a single journal. Madsen (2016) suggests that Google Trends can directly capture interest in management ideas by assessing Internet search frequencies. The use of online sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn remains largely unexplored in work on management ideas, but are increasingly used in big data diffusion research (Strang and Patterson, 2016; see also Barros and Rüling, in this volume). Search strategies in bibliometric research often rely on a thesaurus supplied by the database provider. But when they do so, they monitor what a coder (rather than the author) later decided should count as an instance of the idea in question. Abstracts are also often produced by the database provider or journal, and it is not always feasible to separate them from those written by authors. Additionally, in searches using online interfaces it is often unclear if one is tapping into key words and abstracts supplied by the author or a (machine) coder. One solution is to search on title or full-text only, but this often leaves the researcher with a slimmer sample. Benders et al. (2007) provide a helpful discussion of these issues. The use of print media indicators as a proxy for popularity and/or the wider implementation of management ideas is often criticized. Clark (2004) points out that bibliographic research addresses the production of management ideas more than their consumption. However, bibliometric studies have added considerably to our understanding of the

96    d. strang and c. wittrock diffusion of management ideas and can address research questions that other modes of research are not well suited to answer. Bibliometric measures are more temporally fine-grained than repeated surveys and provide insight not only into patterns of attention but to shifts in interpretation. With growing computational power and the increasing availability of large text ­corpora, new approaches to studying discourse are mushrooming. Probabilistic Topic Modelling (Blei, 2012; Mohr and Bogdanov, 2013) and other supervised and unsupervised techniques have attracted much interest across the social sciences. Scholars are increasingly exploring automated readings of texts (Jockers, 2014) and advanced ways of processing corpora (Gries and Stefanowitsch, 2010). We believe that such approaches will increasingly enter management research (for one application, see Strang and Dokshin, forthcoming).

Discourse Analysis Discourse analysis extends bibliometric research by focusing on the content of textual communications and the rhetorical strategies by which authors make ‘the case’ for management ideas. These studies are often based on close reading of large text corpora (e.g. Giroux and Taylor, 2002; Røvik, 1998, 2002, 2007) as well as explicit measurement strategies. In one exemplary study, Giroux (2006) demonstrates the ambiguous character of management rhetoric by identifying multiple inconsistent definitions of ‘quality.’ In another, Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999) utilize computer assisted text analysis to investigate the shifting claims made about quality circles. They employ the Harvard III Psychosocial Dictionary to identify terms related to positive and negative evaluations as well as emotions and thought. Abrahamson and Fairchild show that the upswing of quality circle discourse was characterized by highly optimistic language connected to emotions while the downswing appears characterized by a more reasoned and negative critique. Some research examines communication and influence across discursive communities. Barley et al. (1988) investigate the relation between practitioner and academic notions of culture. They use surveys, expert judgements, cluster analysis, and content analysis to show that academic conceptions of culture move towards those of practitioners rather than the other way around. Edelman et al. (2001) show how managerial discourse influences juristic discourse in the area of diversity and civil rights, and Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) detail broad shifts in managerial discourse from the 1950s to the 1990s in France. Similarly, Hirsch (1986) utilizes a content analysis of journal articles to demonstrate dramatic shifts in the framing of hostile takeovers from deviant violations to normalized corporate contests. Walgenbach and Beck (2002) demonstrate that interest in quality management was at first restricted to specialists, then became a topic for broader management, and lastly became a topic for academics. Scarbrough and Swan (2001) compare the discourses surrounding the learning organization and knowledge

methods for the study of management ideas    97 management, identifying substantial differences in themes as well as connections to the seemingly more distant idea of business process re-engineering. Other studies have documented how management discourse migrates geographically and occupationally (Benders and Van Bijsterveld, 2000; Engwall and Pahlberg, 2001). Strang and Kim (2005) consider the two-way diffusion of management ideas between Japan and the USA, emphasizing how the meaning of management ideas shifts in translation. For example, Japanese firms interpreted Taylorism as a means of building worker skills and strengthening a pre-industrial sense of community—meanings directly opposed to the Taylorist project in the USA. Americans returned the favour by turning Japanese Quality Control Circles that centred on foremen-led workplace improvements into Quality Circles that made suggestions to management. One common framework for the analysis of discourse is Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis or CDA (Chiapello and Fairclough, 2002; Fairclough, 1993, 2005), utilized in studies such as McPhail and Adams (2016), Thomas et al. (2013), and Sidani and Showail (2013). CDA combines a model of mutual influence between discourse and society, a Foucauldian understanding of power, and an elaborate toolbox allowing a detailed linguistic analysis. CDA is one of many branches of discourse analysis, each with their own tools, approaches, and theoretical backbone (see e.g. Alvesson and Kärreman, 2000; Andersen, 2003; Howarth, 2000). Other frameworks that have been applied to management ideas include Furusten’s (1999) ‘ethnographic approach to texts’; Andersen’s (2009) Luhmann-inspired discourse analysis; Czarniawska-Joerges’ (1990) metaphor theory-based study; Jackson’s (2001) application of Fantasy Theme Analysis; and Discursive Devices (Mueller and Whittle, 2011; Whittle et al., 2008). Despite this variety, most discourse analysis scholars argue that the way ideas are propagated has important consequences for organizational life in general, and for power structures and the well-being of organizational members in particular. The implicit assumption is that careful reading of a text can reveal the intentions of its producers and the power structures that lie hidden behind them. In short, there is much more to texts than what they communicate on the surface (Ricoeur, 1981).

Conclusion Research on management ideas is a thriving field. It is a challenging one as well, because ideas cannot be directly observed but must be studied through their embodiment in labels, techniques, policies, claims-making, and the like. Ideas can be mighty weapons, but to become powerful they must be put into talk and action (see also the chapters by Reed and by Salles-Djelic, this volume). As our mapping of methodological approaches illustrates, researchers have pursued this quarry in many ways, from quantitative studies of formal adoption to interview-based analyses of actor meanings to broad-gauged ­historical comparisons, and from bibliometric article counts to investigations of the

98    d. strang and c. wittrock rhetorical tactics of management gurus. This variety of methodological strategies is one of the field’s strengths. All methodologies are both a way of seeing and a way of not seeing. For example, event history studies of organizational adoption generally treat diffusing techniques as  static and homogeneous across organizations, assumptions that scholars working within a translation perspective critique as ignoring the interpretive work of organizational actors that reshapes techniques as they move. This is more a research design issue than a theoretical debate. Large N studies focus on the big picture of causal mechanisms and historical change while sacrificing attention to local modification and framing; Small N studies of translation do the reverse. The solution is not to argue about which simplification is better, but to conduct both sorts of studies and bring them into dialogue. As the parable of the blind men suggests, it is vital for those in contact with different parts of the elephant to communicate and learn from each other. Indeed, this is one of the aims of this handbook. While management researchers have made considerable progress in delineating and investigating management ideas, they can benefit from greater interchange with disciplines at the forefront of the cultural, cognitive, and computational turns. Relatively few management scholars have drawn explicitly on cognitive psychology and linguistics (though see D’Andreta et al., 2016; DiMaggio, 1997; Swan, 1997; Van Rossem et al., 2015). Likewise, computational tools that identify textual patterns in large corpora are only just beginning to be applied in organizational research. These emerging lines of theory, data, and method offer rich opportunities for students of management ideas.

Acknowledgements We thank Eric Abrahamson, Stefan Heusinkveld, and Andrew Sturdy for their thoughtful comments on this chapter, and Abdullah Shahid, Fedor Dokshin, and Radu Parvulescu for sharing their knowledge of bibliometrics and probabilistic topic models. We are indebted to Aliqae Geraci at Cornell and Lars Lund-Thomsen and Annette Graa at Aarhus University Library for their bibliometric assistance. The second author gratefully acknowledges research support from the following foundations: Augustinus Foundation (grant number 14-4910), Christian og Ottillia Brorsons Travelling Scholarship, Oticon Foundation (grant number 15-0043), Torben og Alice Frimodts Foundation, and Cornell University’s Institute for the Social Sciences.

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chapter 5

M a nagem en t Tech n iqu es Andreas Werr and Peter Walgenbach

Introduction Management techniques, defined as formal procedures for carrying out a management task, are a common feature of managerial work. In a survey of business school alumni, Jarzabkowski, Giulietti, et al. (2013b) found that managers used about five out of twenty surveyed strategy tools on average, with those with more business education employing a larger number. In a recurring survey of companies’ use of management tools, Rigby and Bilodeau (2015) found that the surveyed companies in 2014 used on average about eight different management tools with the most common being benchmarking (46 per cent), employee engagement surveys (44 per cent), and strategic planning (44 per cent). The number of tools used has followed a downward trend since 2006 where the average number was over fifteen. There is a surprising lack of stringency in the literature when it comes to the term ‘management technique’. When used, the term is seldom defined and typically used interchangeably with a number of other terms, such as management philosophies, management procedures (Staw and Epstein, 2000), management practices (Chenhall and Langfield-Smith,  1998), management methods (Draulans and Volberda,  2003), and management tools (D’Alvano and Hidalgo, 2012). In this chapter, we view management techniques as a rather specific manifestation of management ideas. As discussed in the introductory chapter of this volume, a distinction is often made between the ideational dimension of management ideas (e.g. management ideology in Guillén’s 1994 terms) and the techniques which provide more concrete guidance for how do deal with certain management issues. As shown by Guillén (1994), management ideologies and techniques often go together, with certain techniques supporting certain ideologies and certain ideologies legitimating certain techniques. But the relationship is loose so that one and the same management technique may be performed in the context of different management ideologies. Management techniques are, thus, more closely related to management practice than the more ideational aspects of management ideas.

management techniques   105 According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, a ‘technique’ is ‘a way of doing something by using special knowledge or skill’. This implies that management techniques involve abstract and explicit knowledge—such as a formal procedure—as well as the application of this procedure in a specific situation. The abstract and explicit (codified) dimension of knowledge about a management technique, however, does not imply that the technique is fully understood—either by those who are called practitioners or by those who for different reasons are interested in managers and management such as consultants or academics in the field of organization and management studies. Many aspects of a management technique can be described, but these descriptions are necessarily incomplete (Schön,  1983). The explicit elements of the knowledge of a technique are usually theorized through chains of postulated cause and effect. They provide accounts of why the use of a certain technique leads to certain outcomes. It is these theorizations that make techniques appear rational, i.e. effective and efficient. It is the abstract and theorized part of management techniques which makes them attractive to managers on the one hand and knowledge carriers, e.g. academics and consultants, on the other. The use of techniques promises predictable results and implies reliability (Huczynski, 1993). The successful performance of a technique, however, requires more than abstract and explicit knowledge. It requires skill in applying the abstract knowledge and the ability to assess the demands of a situation correctly. These skills stem from individual and collective experience in applying a technique or on observations of the use of a technique by other managers. This depends to a large extent on implicit and embodied knowledge of individuals and groups (Schön,  1983). It is the non-explicit part of knowledge on management techniques which practitioners as well as academics are increasingly interested in. Certainly, if asked, managers are usually able to say when they apply a certain ­technique, why they apply it, and what effects this has in general. They believe that the application of a specific technique generally leads to the desired result. Sometimes they are also aware that there are alternative techniques, which they themselves or their colleagues—at different places, in different situations, or at different times—apply with similar effects. However, they—like social scientists—do not know exactly, when, why, and how a certain technique leads to a certain outcome. Research findings on the relationship between the use of specific management techniques and performance are also mixed, to say the least (see e.g. Golicic and Smith, 2013; Nair, 2006). Against the background of this understanding of management techniques as an interplay between formalized and explicit management knowledge and its skilful application in practice the main focus of the current chapter will be to review the research on how management techniques are applied in different contexts. The chapter is structured as follows. The next two sections review the two dominating research perspectives on management techniques—a functionalist perspective that views management techniques as best practices and thus focuses on the effects of techniques on firm performance, and a more critical, institutionalist perspective that mainly considers management techniques as symbols of rationality. We then argue that these

106    a. werr and p. walgenbach representations of management techniques are oversimplified. Consequently, we turn attention to an emerging practice-based perspective which views the enactment of management techniques as an interplay between explicit, formalized knowledge elements and implicit, tacit knowledge elements carried by practitioners within an organizational context (see also Røvik, in this volume). A number of different approaches have been taken within this perspective, including translation studies (Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996), as well as studies of the use and role of formal techniques in organizations (e.g. Paroutis et al., 2015; Werr, 1999; Werr et al., 1997) and individual managers’ use of management techniques (Engwall et al., 2005; Jarratt and Stiles, 2010). A key implication of this perspective is that management techniques may be seen to play rather different roles within an organizational context (e.g. knowledge transfer, communication, collaboration) as well as on an individual level, where different managers, depending on their approach to a management task, may relate to the explicit knowledge elements of a management technique in different ways (e.g. as useful tool, political resource, or sense-making device). We conclude with suggestions for future research.

Management Techniques as Best Practices Implicit in much of the literature on management techniques is a view that they represent recipes to success. Considerable numbers of both scholarly and practitioner-oriented publications have been concerned with arguing for the value of these techniques in solving specific managerial problems. The purpose of management techniques is viewed to support managers in making better decisions and act in more effective ways (Wright et al., 2013). This is well illustrated by the following quote from one of the seminal articles introducing the Balanced Scorecard technique: Think of the balanced scorecard as the dials and indicators in an airplane cockpit. For the complex task of navigating and flying an airplane, pilots need detailed information about many aspects of the flight. They need information on fuel, air speed, altitude, bearing, destination, and other indicators that summarize the current and predicted environment. Reliance on one instrument can be fatal. Similarly, the complexity of managing an organization today requires that managers be able to view performance in several areas simultaneously.  (Kaplan and Norton, 1992: 72)

The main message conveyed by presentations of this and other management techniques is that by applying the proposed technique—in the case of the Balanced Scorecard, designing and following up measures in four different dimensions—organizations will become more successful. While it is acknowledged that the content of different measures implied in the Balanced Scorecard may vary across organizations, how to adapt them or what is required to implement them in a specific context is seldom discussed. Huczynski’s (1993) investigation of popular management ideas and corresponding

management techniques   107 management techniques finds ‘practical applicability’ to be a key theme in this kind of literature. This is achieved by providing managers with a sense of increased control in their area of responsibility, proposing concrete steps or principles for gaining this control, positioning the idea and its techniques as universal and authoritative, and finally arguing for the technique’s applicability in terms of the potential for a quick payoff (Huczynski, 1993: 91ff.). A direct link between the application of certain management techniques and firm performance is thus assumed. Given such an instrumental understanding of management techniques, the question of the link between their use and firm performance has become a salient question that has generated a steady stream of research on management techniques over the years. We will turn to this next and review the empirical evidence for the view that management techniques represent ‘best practices’ that lead to organizational success.

Management Techniques and Firm Performance Management techniques such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Just-In-Time (JIT), or Lean Management and related concepts are often considered to help improve the performance of organizations (see also Wickert et al., in this volume). The many empirical studies on the performance effects of techniques such as Diversity Management, Environmental Management, JIT, or Lean Management, however, do not reveal consistent findings. Recent meta-analyses show that management techniques as well as their individual sub-concepts mostly have a positive effect on performance, albeit often a weak one (see, for example, Bergh et al., 2014; Gerrish, 2016; Mackelprang et al., 2014; Orlitzky et al., 2003; Subramony, 2009; Zimmermann and Foerstl, 2014). However, there are also meta-analyses which show no or even a negative relationship between a management technique, the sub-concepts of this technique, and organizational performance (see the studies in Bell, 2007; Bell et al., 2011; Mackelprang et al., 2014). Interestingly, computational models indicate that these sorts of modest (and inconsistent) positive performance effects promote faddish adoption patterns; the management technique is associated with enough success stories to stimulate a boom in popularity but not enough to maintain it over time (Strang and Macy, 2001; Strang et al., 2015). In addition to the calculation of the overall performance effect, meta-analyses also investigate which moderator variables help to explain inconsistencies in results across studies. Reasons for inconsistent findings which have been identified include ‘sampling errors, unit of analysis, operationalization of key constructs and the research methodology’ (Nair,  2006: 950). For example, organizational structure, breadth of implementation (e.g. entire organization vs. specific organizational sub-units), and industry may influence performance effects (Albertini, 2013; Bell et al., 2011; Mackelprang and Nair, 2010; Nair, 2006; Rhoades et al., 2001; Subramony, 2009). Meta-analytic structural equation models show further evidence that the performance effect of management techniques is  moderated by the respective variables (Bergh et al.,  2014). Meta-analyses provide

108    a. werr and p. walgenbach important insight into factors that influence the effectiveness of a management technique and its sub-concepts. However, other ‘unknown factors’ (Mackelprang and Nair, 2010: 296; Mackelprang et al., 2014: 83) that have not been taken into account in empirical studies so far may also affect the effectiveness of management techniques. We suspect that an important ‘unknown factor’ is the extent to which and how management techniques are used in organizations. In fact, it is noticeable that questions about the process and course of implementation are regularly neglected. In quantitative studies, measures of performance effects are generally based either on managers’ assessment of the influence of a management technique or a specific sub-concept on organizational performance or on financial performance indicators. The former are liable to be positively biased while the latter often result from the fact that investors assume in ‘good faith’ that the management techniques that an organization communicates to the public are actually implemented (Albertini, 2013; Staw and Epstein, 2000). They do not consider that communicated practices may remain decoupled from or only loosely coupled to actual practices (Westphal and Zajac, 1998). However, implementation details are seldom taken into consideration in primary research on the performance effect of a management technique (Sousa and Voss, 2002). Thus, the respective management techniques focused in empirical studies appear detached from organization-specific implementation processes as well as from the traits and behaviours of the managers who implement or who are responsible for the implementation of the respective technique in an organization. So-called ‘infrastructure practices’, e.g. management, leadership, and people management, as Nair (2006: 971) notes with regard to quality management, could explain ‘the lack of evidence of a significant relationship between some quality management practices and performance in large-scale empirical studies (e.g. Powell,  1995; Dow et al.,  1999; Samson and Terziovski, 1999)’.

Management Techniques as Symbols of Rationality Usually, in the functionalist-oriented management literature, a technical or task-related problem-solving power is attributed to management techniques. Institutional theories of organization query whether this assumption generally holds. The task-related or technical problem-solving character of new management techniques is not necessarily at issue. It is, however, highlighted that—over time, i.e. with increasing diffusion of the technique—the technical aspect of problem solving loses importance and increasingly institutional pressures become decisive. Tolbert and Zucker (1983) argue that early adopters of a new organizational structure or a new management technique, such as TQM, aim to increase their efficiency. For late adopters, normative pressures emanating from the institutional environment lead to

management techniques   109 the adoption of a more or less standardized package of a management technique, which has developed through an institutionalization process. Because techniques initially represent solutions that address a specific task-related problem for one or more similar organizations, the technique regularly proves to be successful. Organizations (e.g. competitors in the same industry, or consulting firms and business schools) monitor other organizations in order to identify successful problem solutions, either to implement them themselves or to abstract an identified solution and to specify its general contribution to the efficiency of organizations in the same or other industries. This process of abstraction and generalization is described by Strang and Meyer (1993) as theorization. According to Strang and Meyer (1993), theorization is the basis for the rapid diffusion of new management ideas and their associated techniques. Theorizations of management ideas and associated techniques accelerate, for example, the dissemination of new budgeting and cost accounting systems or leadership training. The higher the degree of abstraction of the theorization of a management idea, the faster the idea  and its associated management techniques may spread. Management ideas and techniques then diffuse—often worldwide. Like fashions, they are diffused rapidly but will eventually also be replaced by new or modified management ideas and techniques (Abrahamson, 1996). At the same time, the belief in the superiority of a technique increases through two interrelated aspects: (1) the initially identified contribution of a management technique to organizational success, and (2) the rapid diffusion of this new technology into increasingly different industries or different locales. At this stage, the primary motor of the diffusion of a new management technique changes from implementing management techniques which are or are perceived to be successful solutions for organizational problems to the adoption of the technique because of a pressure for conformity and the expected legitimizing effects of its adoption. With increasing taken-for-grantedness of a new technique, more organizations are expected to adopt. Use of a rationalized technique which is regarded as effective and efficient lends legitimacy to an organization. By adopting the technique, the organization fulfils the expectation that it is making real efforts to achieve effectiveness and efficiency. Thus, from an institutional perspective, management techniques can be considered as management fashions (Abrahamson, 1996; Kieser, 1997), the adoption of which may help to maintain or increase the legitimacy of an organization. The organization reveals that it has understood what is considered to be modern, appropriate, effective, and efficient in its institutional environment. However, the more the adoption of a new technique is solely based on the hoped-for effect on the preservation or development of the legitimacy of the organization, the more likely it is that the technique turns out to be unsuitable for solving specific taskrelated problems. While initially the technique may—by translation (see below)—be partially adapted to the conditions of an organization, over time the decoupling of the new technique from the organization’s core processes becomes more likely. Decoupling means that a new technique is anchored in the formal structure of an organization, but it  is not used or used very little in the organization’s work processes (Meyer and

110    a. werr and p. walgenbach Rowan, 1977). In this regard, the formalized aspects of management techniques only serve as symbols of rationality. Indeed, many studies have shown that organizations do decouple institutionalized management ideas and techniques from their work activities and have illustrated that decoupling may nevertheless be beneficial for the organization (see Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2008 for an overview). For example, in his study on the adoption of ISO 9000 standards Walgenbach (2007) found that parts of the quality management system led to the introduction of formal structures for work activities which either did not exist or were of minor importance for the organization. In this regard, specific management techniques which are included in the ISO 9000 standard remained decoupled, leading to a symbolic implementation of quality management ideas. ISO 9000 certification nevertheless provided the organization with the image of being capable of producing high quality. A similar point is made by Staw and Epstein (2000) who studied the effects of quality management techniques of empowerment, teams, and TQM on company performance, how the organizations were perceived by different stakeholders, and how their CEO was remunerated. While they found no effect of the techniques on company performance, the companies that were associated with the modern management techniques were more admired, perceived as more innovative, and their CEOs were more well paid.

Management Techniques as Intertwined with Management Practice: A Practice-Based Perspective As a reaction towards both the rational instrumental perspective and the more ‘cynical’ perspective on management techniques as symbols decoupled from action, a third, practice-based perspective concerned with the interaction between management techniques and organizational members has emerged. The studies that take this perspective may be subdivided into three categories: (1) translation studies focusing on how management ideas and techniques are modified as they are applied in organizations by organizational members; (2) studies on the roles that management techniques may play in organizations (e.g. as a common language enabling knowledge exchange and collaboration); and (3) studies focusing on the role that management techniques may play for individuals in organizations (e.g. reducing managerial uncertainty or helping them make sense of a complex reality).

Translation Studies Translation studies are founded in an institutional perspective, but have been concerned with the dynamic relationship between global, institutionalized management

management techniques   111 techniques and local management practices. Rather than viewing this relationship as straightforward—organizations adopt certain management techniques either because they solve a specific problem (instrumental perspective) or because they are fashionable or legitimizing (institutional perspective)—a translation approach views this relationship as well as its key elements such as ‘problems’ and management techniques as complex and locally constructed (see, for recent examples, Drori et al., 2013). In the words of Czarniawska and Joerges (1996: 25): The perceived attributes of an idea, the perceived characteristics of a problem and the match between them are all created, negotiated or imposed during the collective translation process. All three are the results, not the antecedents of this process. With some exaggeration, one can claim that most ideas can be proved to fit most problems, assuming good will, creativity and tendency to consensus.

In this view, management techniques are not ‘adopted’ but translated. This means that the actions taken based on a specific technique may vary considerably in different contexts as the problem to be solved, the actors involved in it, and the technique to deal with it are all negotiated in a process of translation; see also the special issue on ‘The Translation of Management Knowledge’ in the International Journal of Management Reviews (July 2016) for detailed reviews. In this vein, Erçek and Say (2008) studied the translation of TQM in Turkey between 1991 and 2002. They demonstrate how different professional networks involved in spreading this management technique gradually changed its content such that ‘at the end of the period, TQM was significantly deprived of its original connotation as a managerial tool for the betterment of work practices and became an all-encompassing philosophy about good governance of social relations’ (Erçek and Say, 2008: 78). Another example of how management techniques change as they are implemented is provided by Lozeau et al. (2002). They studied the use of private sector tools in public sector organizations. While not applying an explicit translation lens, they find that this transfer of tools from one context to another sometimes leads to a bad fit between tools and organizations. If this misfit is large, tools are found to be integrated into existing organizational dynamics leading to a ‘corruption’ of the technique rather than the desired change in the organization. Recent developments in translation studies include efforts to develop it in a more instrumental direction. By introducing the concept of ‘translation competence’, Røvik (2016) establishes an important conceptual link between the formal aspects of management techniques and their intended consequences in organizations. While previous translation research has mainly had a descriptive focus, demonstrating that management techniques change in the process of application, little has been known about what leads to ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ applications. Translation competence is defined as ‘the ability of translators to translate practices and ideas between organizational contexts in ways that increase the probability of achieving organizational ends’ (Røvik, 2016: 299). This is about choosing among several translation modes (copying, addition, omission, and alteration) in order to fit the specific translation situation. Key aspects to consider in the

112    a. werr and p. walgenbach situation include the source context and practice, characteristics of the knowledge to be transferred, and features of the relation between recipient and source (see with regard to the use of ISO 9000 standards, Walgenbach, 2007). In line with this, scholars within strategy have argued ‘that the successful use of tools requires a deep understanding of the pros and cons of each tool, the creativity to integrate the right tool(s) in the right way at the right time, and the right people and skills to develop the tools to meet the company’s objectives’ (Wright et al., 2013: 95). This focus on the adaption of tools to a specific context, and the complex expertise that underlies it has led some researchers to suggest that managers’ ability to improvise on management techniques is the key aspect (see also Furusten, 2009): Standard repertoires of change need not be disdained, but should be mastered as platforms for improvisation and creativity. Like Bourdieu’s . . . hand of cards, these practices afford potentialities rather than determine responses. (Molloy and Whittington, 2015: 512)

Formal Techniques in Organizations A second stream of research within the practice-based paradigm is concerned less with how management techniques become altered in the process of translation but with the actual use of management techniques and the kind of practices they enable or restrict. This line of research is based on the observation in previous research (e.g. translation studies) that management techniques are seldom used as direct and concrete guides for action, which opens up for the exploration of alternative functions of management techniques. In the context of management consulting organizations, in which management techniques represent central elements of the consultants’ toolbox, Werr et al. (1997) identified a number of functions these play both in the consultants’ interaction with their clients and the internal functioning in the consulting organization (see also Werr, 1999). In the context of strategy, the ‘strategy as practice’ lens has generated an interest in the use of management techniques and it has been suggested that they should be explored with a ‘sociological eye’: A sociological eye encourages close attention to tools as they are used in context, the motivations of actors in using them, the purposes to which tools are put, and their potential to lead to an array of sometimes unanticipated outcomes. (Jarzabkowski and Kaplan, 2015: 537)

These investigations into the use of management techniques have pointed at two main functions that these may play—facilitating knowledge creation and sharing and creating confidence and motivation among organizational members.

Facilitating Knowledge Creation and Sharing Investigations into the roles of management techniques have highlighted their role in enabling and facilitating knowledge processes. In the context of management consulting,

management techniques   113 formal methods and tools have been argued to be one of three central elements in the knowledge system of management consultancies. Formal methods and tools in this context were found to complement the other elements ‘cases’ and ‘experience’ by representing a shared organizational knowledge that enables the storage and communication of explicit knowledge by structuring it and providing a ‘shared language’ that supports the exchange of consultants’ tacit experiences (Werr and Stjernberg, 2003). Hereby, the formalized techniques available in management consulting firms are also an important enabler of junior consultants’ learning. Junior consultants typically start by learning the techniques, which give them a basic knowledge to become active and participate in projects and engage in the so important learning by doing in the consulting firm (Werr and Stjernberg, 2003). To junior consultants, formal techniques may also serve as a cognitive support in their daily work. This is seldom the case among more experienced consultants (Werr, 1999). Through these functions of structuring and to a certain extent standardizing the thinking and working in consulting organizations, formal techniques also play an important role in enabling the practice of global and flexible staffing central to the business model of the global management consulting firm. This practice ensures both the development of individual consultants and the exploitation of the firm’s global knowledge base to the benefit of each client (Armbrüster, 2006). Without a rather standardized approach to projects it would become very difficult for consultants with a background in different disciplines or geographies to interact productively in ever new constellations without substantial preparation and alignment (Werr, 1999). The function of facilitating the transfer and creation of knowledge was also observed in consultant–client interaction where the consultants’ explicit techniques supported the transfer of the consultants’ understanding of a change process (although in a very simplified way) to the client. This facilitated the collaboration between consultants and clients and thereby also the clients’ learning from action. The (simplified) maps of the process that were provided by the consultant through the technique enabled clients not only to better understand the consultants’ actions but also to get actively involved in the process themselves (Werr, 1999; Werr et al., 1997). Similar functions for management techniques were found by strategy as practice research (Jarzabkowski, Spee, and Smets, 2013; Wright et al., 2013). Paroutis et al. (2015) studied the way in which the management technique ‘strategy map’ affected communication in a strategy workshop. Their findings suggest that the strategy map as a visual tool provides a number of affordances that limit and enable the creation and exchange of knowledge. They identify the following affordances: • Tangibility affordance (making content visible and concrete in order to make it a source of negotiation); • Associability affordance (visually relates and identifies issues so that a shared representation of emerging knowledge can be created); • Editability affordance (possibility to modify content instantaneously enabling the manifestation of outcomes of negotiations); and

114    a. werr and p. walgenbach • Traceability affordance (ability to relate contents temporally and structurally which enables opportunities to survey and assemble negotiation agreements) (Paroutis et al., 2015: S63). While this research has depicted management techniques as mainly enabling knowledge creation and exchange (see also Giraudeau, 2008), it has also been argued that they may limit knowledge creation. In some cases management techniques may provide an overly simplified understanding of a complex reality which limits organizations’ ability to deal with such realities (March, 2006) and may ‘lock in’ individuals’ thinking into established patterns of thinking (Worren et al., 2002).

Creating Confidence and Motivation for Change Through their simplified and rationalistic nature, management techniques have further been argued to serve as symbols of expertise that support the uncertain change agent with confidence (Huczynski, 1993) as well as motivate sceptical recipients of change by signalling that the change process may succeed this time (Berglund and Werr, 2000). In a study of consultants’ use of business process re-engineering (BPR) in a client project, Berglund and Werr (2000) demonstrate how the structured, explicit BPR technology was used by the consultants to convince organizational members, who, after several failed change projects were sceptical and tired of change, that this time would be different; that the project this time was based on a tested and proven approach. At the same time the consultants emphasized their own importance in translating the technology to the specific organization thus making them an ‘obligatory passage point’ to a successful change process.

Formal Techniques in Individual Managers’ Work Research has further paid attention to how individual managers use management techniques, and what values they derive from them. The overall consensus is that these values are substantial, but their nature is diverse and varies between contexts. Watson (1994) places managers’ use of techniques (what he calls ‘flavours of the months’) in the context of managers’ ‘double control problem’: Every manger has a responsibility, by virtue of his or her appointment as a member of the control apparatus of the corporation to contribute to the performance of the organization as a whole. But at the same time, they need to control their own personal lives and identities and to make sense of the work they are doing, both on behalf of the employing organization and in terms of their own personal and private purposes and priorities.  (Watson, 1994: 895)

Watson (1994) argues that management techniques may help managers deal with both these issues—they provide new ideas and techniques that can be used to increase performance in the organization, but they also provide them with a way of making sense of

management techniques   115 confusing situations, gain a sense of control, and provide a resource for advancing their managerial careers by exploiting popular management ideas (Watson,  1994; see also Huczynski, 1993). More recently, research has investigated managers’ use of management techniques in more detail and shown how these are used differently by different managers in ­different contexts. In a study of project managers’ use of project management (PM) techniques, Engwall et al. (2005) found that project managers could perceive the task of managing a project in rather different ways, with the consequence that PM techniques were also p ­ erceived differently. When PM was perceived as ‘administrating’ in terms of planning and monitoring formal project progress, the PM techniques were attributed an important standardizing role, which made projects possible to control. When PM was ­perceived as ‘organizing’ in terms of facilitating and leading the enactment of a project’s mission, the formal techniques were seen as a common language enabling collective action as well as formalized best practices that would free energy for exploration of the less standardized aspects of the project. When viewing PM as ‘sense-giving’ in terms of making and communicating sense in a confusing world, PM techniques took the role of a common language for making sense of a perceived chaos. PM could further be viewed as ‘team building’, which moves focus to the individual and social well-being of project members. In this context, the PM techniques were seen as documented best practices that provide focus to team members, and ensure they spend their energy on the right tasks. Finally, when PM was viewed as ‘engineering’, focus moved towards solving the project’s ‘technical problems’. In this context the PM techniques were appreciated as best practices supporting work efficiency but also as an administrative burden that had to be handled. Similar patterns have been found in the context of managers’ use of strategy tools. Jarratt and Stiles (2010) argue based on activity theory that different perspectives on strategy and views on the firm’s operating context create different strategizing practices in which management techniques have different roles to play. While, for example, design and positioning school techniques were used quite extensively and straightforwardly when leaders viewed strategy as stakeholder or market alignment and the environment as predictable, they were used to a lesser extent and more flexibly, innovatively, and reflectively when strategizing was viewed as lived experience and the environment as complex and dynamic. More generally, Wright et al. (2013) set out to investigate what characteristics of strategy tools made managers perceive them as useful. They found that tools were perceived as useful if they helped provide multiple perspectives and helped guide the thinking process. Providing multiple perspectives was supported by considering multiple angles and interconnectivity between entities, identifying critical success factors, dividing all areas to provide a clear picture, supporting the generation of new ideas, and supporting users’ thinking in different perspectives. Guiding thinking was supported by helping managers to understand their competitive advantage, supporting them in reaching and  communicating conclusions, supporting the identification of success factors, and helping users to come up with new ideas.

116    a. werr and p. walgenbach Taken together, this line of research emphasizes the usefulness of management techniques to managers. However, it also points out that this usefulness does not primarily lie in their provision of detailed guides for action or in their ability to provide legitimacy to the organization. Rather, studies point out that managers are selective and reflective in their use of techniques, adapting them to the requirements of the situation as well as their interests. These requirements are to a large extent linked to how the managers perceive the situation they are acting in (Engwall et al., 2005; Jarratt and Stiles, 2010).

Conclusions and Directions for Future Research Management techniques have traditionally been discussed either from a functionalist perspective, treating them as more or less well-founded best practices, or from an institutionalist perspective, representing them as symbols of rationality. Somewhat in the shadow of these two conflicting perspectives, a third perspective that may be labelled practice-based has gained increasing interest in recent years. This perspective turns attention to how management techniques are used in the organizational context and thus enables a more complex understanding. It acknowledges that the outcomes of management techniques are shaped by active agents and the main argument of translation studies has been that during implementation, management techniques are translated to a specific context. However, it is not only the techniques that change in the implementation process, but the techniques also shape the implementation process, the actors involved, and thereby individual as well as organizational outcomes. In the conceptualization of Jarzabowski and Kaplan (2015), outcomes of tools emerge in the interplay between the specific affordances of techniques and the agency of actors. As argued above, these affordances may influence, for example, knowledge creation and sharing in the organization, the confidence and willingness of organizational members to engage in organizational change, or the individual managers’ dealing with the double control problem. Such an understanding of management techniques has informed some research on techniques in management consulting and more recently in strategizing, but several research questions following from this understanding remain to be explored. First, research may elaborate on the different aspects and processes on both an organizational and individual level that are influenced by management techniques. Previous research has, for example, highlighted how management techniques shape communication and knowledge sharing within organizations and strengthen the confidence of individual managers, but what other processes and aspects (e.g. decision-making, creativity, managerial careers, occupational identities, etc.) are influenced in what ways? Second, the perspective on management techniques as both enabling and constraining calls for investigation into whether and—if so—how characteristics of management

management techniques   117 techniques interact with organizational and individual processes. For example, what characteristics enable more inclusive and creative problem solving? What characteristics support managers’ uncertainty reduction? What characteristics drive organizational members’ willingness to act? Third, acknowledgement of the active user of management techniques calls for closer investigations into when and how individuals in different organizational positions mobilize different aspects of management techniques. What may explain different perspectives on managerial tasks and differences in how management techniques are used? Is it possible to identify more or less effective approaches to using management techniques? May differences in the way management techniques are used help reconcile conflicting research findings regarding the performance effects of management techniques? Fourth, extant research has mainly focused on management techniques in the context of management consulting and strategy. However, management techniques are also applied in different management areas such as Human Resource Management, Marketing, Accounting, Information Technology, etc. Techniques in these and other different areas may have different characteristics (more or less quantified, more or less visual, etc.) at the same time as different management occupations vary in their orientation and approaches. There is, thus, a need to extend research on the use of management techniques to a broader set of management disciplines.

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chapter 6

I nstrum en ta l U n dersta n di ng of M a nagem en t Ideas Kjell Arne Røvik

Introduction This chapter focuses upon the instrumental aspects of management ideas. The term ‘instrumental’ evokes associations with devices or tools that are designed and used for particular purposes, or a means to achieve specific effects. The instrument metaphor, when applied to management ideas, drives attention towards two sets of questions. The first set relates to the creation of such ideas: is it reasonable to conceive of management ideas as instruments that are deliberately designed to facilitate specific organizational purposes (McGrath and Bates,  2013; Von Hippel and Katz,  2002), or are they better ­conceptualized as fads that trigger ‘temporarily intensive discourses’ (Abrahamson, 1991), but with modest practical relevance? What characterizes management ideas when viewed as instruments; to what kind of organizational problems are they designed to be solutions? How detailed and precise are various management ideas’ prescriptions for how organizations should act to handle specific problems and to achieve specific goals, and what is the knowledge base and evidence for the prescribed actions (Cascio, 2007; Rousseau, 2006)? The second set of questions concern organizations’ usage of management ideas (Sturdy, 2004). Do organizational actors conceive of such ideas as if they were instruments and sets of recipes for how to act in various situations, and to what extent do management ideas and their associated tool-kits really guide practitioners’ actions (Van Aken, 2004)? Another question related to usage concerns the management ideas and their tool-kits’ plasticity, or the degree of ‘interpretative viability’ (Benders and Van Veen, 2001). Some instruments have a fixed form and function (like a hammer does), while others allow—and presuppose—that the user adjusts and shapes the tool to make

122   k. a. røvik it fit better for various purposes (Ansari et al., 2014). Thus, more than being instruments per se, management ideas are probably better conceptualized as ideas which can be instrumentalized while being implemented. The third question within this set concerns the local actors’ competence to shape and use management ideas. What kind of ­knowledge, training, experience, and skills do organizational actors need in order to calibrate and use the various management ideas effectively as instruments (Røvik, 2016)? The metaphor of management ideas as instruments reminds us that while some tools are rather simple and could easily be used without much competence, others are much more complicated and presuppose highly specialized and competent users. These questions about the creation and the usage of management ideas—all of which are derived from a management ideas-as-instruments metaphor—are important, not least because they touch the core of many debates about the nature of management ideas, and because they are relevant for organizational practices and practitioners (Guillén, 1994). This chapter primarily concentrates on two of the questions related to organizations’ usage of management ideas. First, what can happen to management ideas throughout implementation processes (instrumentalization is only one out of several possible outcomes)? Second, what kind of competence and skills are needed to increase chances for instrumentalization of adopted management ideas? (See also Wickert et al., in this volume.) The chapter is structured as follows: In the first section, the questions about the instrumental status of management ideas are viewed and discussed through the lenses of three broad theoretical perspectives, referred to as a modernistic–rationalistic ­perspective, a social constructionist–symbolic perspective, and a pragmatic perspective, whereof the two first are key foundations of organization theory. In the next section, I take the pragmatic perspective as point of departure, and discuss various trajectories and outcomes of attempts to implement and instrumentalize management ideas. In the final section, the chapter’s insights are synthesized through the lens of a pragmaticinspired translation theory.

Theoretical Positioning A Modernistic–Rationalistic Perspective Western societies and institutions are strongly influenced by modernistic and rationalistic ideas (Giddens, 1991; Meyer et al., 1997). These ideas have also dominated thinking and theorization about organizations in general, and about management ideas in particular (Clegg, 1990; Donaldson, 1995). The modernistic–rationalistic perspective is usually expressed through three highly intertwined ideas and arguments. The first is a strong belief in and optimism regarding the notion of a continuous progress towards higher levels of civilization and welfare, a long march of economic, political, and ­technological developments towards something better of a higher order. This is a

instrumental understanding of management ideas    123 c­ ornerstone in Western thinking about progress and the development of modern societies (Giddens,  1991; March and Olsen,  1989; Meyer et al.,  1997). The second idea is a strong belief in and commitment to the idea of rational organizing and organizations. Deliberately means–end designed formal organizations are a key way of facilitating the modernistic project of continuous progress (Drori et al., 2006). The third feature of this perspective is a strong belief in the value of science, knowledge, and evidence-based practices. For example, organizations must be designed and equipped with best-practice techniques to be effective means for accomplishing desired goals and thereby contributing to progress. Such rational design should be based on science and on documented best practices; that is, based on evidenced knowledge about how various management ideas and principles work in different contexts (Donaldson, 1995; Ethiraj and Levinthal, 2004). Management ideas viewed from the modernistic–rationalistic perspective are conceived of as more or less effective instruments or tools with which to accomplish various organizational goals. The key criterion for evaluating the quality of a management idea is how effective the idea and its appurtenant tool-kit are in bringing about desired results. Thus, when viewed as tools, and in light of this criterion, there will be variations in quality between different management ideas: while some ideas stand out as evidence-based effective tools, others are conceived of as less effective or as ‘just fads’ (Crainer, 1996; McGrath and Bates, 2013). Versions of this argument can be found among proponents for more evidence-based management practices (Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006; Tkachenko et al., 2016). Seen through the lens of the modernistic–rationalistic perspective, the huge variations among management ideas in their diffusion to populations of organizations is likely to be interpreted as resulting from processes of rational calculations and selections. While fads vanish, the management ideas with the best ­evidence-based records in bringing about desired results are candidates for selection and, thus, for wide diffusion and use (Røvik, 2002).

A Social Constructionist–Symbolic Perspective During the last four decades, the very strong and somewhat dominant position of the modernistic–rationalistic perspective in organization theory has been challenged by works framed within the tradition of social constructivism and theories of symbolic actions. This perspective, which is often held up in contrast to the modernistic–rationalistic ­perspective, can be found among scholars from different schools of thought, such as new institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991; Meyer and Rowan, 1977), symbolism (Czarniawska, 1997), phenomenology (Berger and Luckmann, 1966), and management fashion theory (Abrahamson, 1996; Kieser, 1997). The perspective can be recognized by three interrelated sets of ideas and arguments. The first and formative core idea is the notion of socially constructed reality, a heritage from phenomenology (Berger and Luckman, 1966; Schütz, 1962). In contrast to mechanical and biological system images of organizations, which dominate within the modernistic–rationalistic perspective, the

124   k. a. røvik core image here is that organizations are context-based social constructs produced by human beings (Meyer and Scott, 1992). This transcends into the second feature of this perspective, which is scepticism towards attempts to build a positivistic science of organizations. Such attempts are often premised on the notion that ­organizations are mechanical and/or biological lookalike systems, which function more or less according to the same law-like principles, relatively independent of localization in time and space, and could and should therefore be discovered and described by a positivist organization science (Røvik, 2002). The typical social constructionist’s argument is that such a science is hard to establish because organizations are context-dependent social constructions and should be analysed as such. The third feature of this perspective is scepticism towards instrumental tool-thinking about management ideas, as expressed within the modernistic–rationalistic perspective. The key modernistic argument—that organizations are solely instruments, or tools to achieve owners’ and leaders’ goals—is met by sets of arguments that depict organizations as not only instruments, but also as meaningproducing and legitimacy-seeking systems (Daft and Weick,  1984; DiMaggio and Powell, 1991), and which often disturb and impede any instrumental ambitions. The scepticism towards instrumental thinking can also be recognized in social ­constructionist-inspired conceptualizations of management ideas. More than being tools with evidence-based effects, management ideas are conceived of as socially authorized and popularized ideas and recipes for modern organizations. They symbolize commitment and adherence to broad sets of values, such as rationality, justice, progress, e­ ffectiveness, and accountability. Thus, organizations face institutional pressure to adopt circulating management ideas to signal approval to such widely accepted societal norms and values, and thereby to gain legitimacy and acceptance from institutional environments (Parsons, 1956). However, the legitimizing potential of popular management ideas does not necessarily mean that they are effective tools that are widely implemented and used by ­organizational practitioners and with documented results. Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) conceptualization of such ideas as ‘rationalized elements’ or ‘myths’ pinpoints this schism: although popular management ideas are legitimized by rational arguments—that is, about their connection to science, and about their evidence-based effects—they are often not implemented and therefore have few if any consequences for the ­performance of organizational practices (Brunsson, 2002). Within the modernistic–rationalistic analytical frame, the fact that management ideas observed over longer periods come and go is conceptualized as a result of a mix of changing environments, a continuous development of more suited and effective management tools, and organizations’ continuous search for and rational selection of the best tools (Kaul, 1997; Røvik, 2007). However, observed through the lens of a  social constructionist–symbolic perspective, the phenomenon of circulating ­management ideas is likely to be interpreted as stemming from a logic of fashion (Abrahamson, 1996; see also Benders et al. and Reinmoeller et al., this volume). The notion is that the seemingly temporal and transient nature of management ideas ­primarily reflect organizations’ search for symbols to signal for example rationality,

instrumental understanding of management ideas    125 newness and innovation capacity, towards broad institutional environments. This logic can come to expression in bell-shaped curves of booms and busts of circulating management ideas (Benders et al., 2007).

A Pragmatic Perspective Questions about the instrumental quality of management ideas can also be analysed through the lens of a pragmatic perspective. This perspective, which constitutes the main theoretical framing of this chapter, incorporates and also goes beyond insights and arguments that are typical of the two perspectives presented above. Pragmatism in ­philosophy originated in the USA in the early twentieth century, with Charles Peirce (1905), William James (1909/76), and John Dewey (1916) as the most influential contributors. The central notion is that the merit of an idea comes from how it works in practice, and how it works depends largely on whether and how actors interpret and shape general ideas for practical purposes. Thus, a central element of pragmatism is the ambition of synthesizing a Platonic approach (‘the world of ideas’) with an Aristotelian approach (‘the world of practices’). This main argument in the philosophy of pragmatism is echoed in various studies of management ideas, not least in contributions to the rigor–relevance literature (Gulati, 2007; Vermeulen, 2005). A key notion in the pragmatic perspective is that the ‘world of ideas’ and (organizational) practices are highly and intricately intertwined, and therefore should not be analysed separately. Viewed through the lens of a pragmatic perspective, researchers should attune against and try to understand the puzzles and paradoxes that regularly occur when management ideas are translated to practice. While viewed in light of the modernistic–rationalistic perspective and the social constructionist–symbolic perspective, management ideas are conceived of, respectively, as either instruments or as legitimizing symbols, a pragmatic perspective goes beyond this either–or dichotomy. In practice, the two defining logics of management ideas—the rational logic of effective instruments and the institutional logic of legitimizing symbols—often become strongly and complexly interwoven when o ­ rganizations try to adopt management ideas. Thus, when viewed from a pragmatic perspective, it is not possible to decide a priori which management ideas are effective tools and which are ‘just fads’. Whether a management idea is transformed into and used as a tool with consequences for practices depends on what organizational actors do to and with the management idea after adopting it. This means that what happens during the implementation phase is crucial for whether a management idea is instrumentalized; that is, turned into a tool. Therefore, this chapter will focus on the implementation and local processes of interpreting and handling of management ideas that take place in this phase. Viewed through a pragmatic lens, the processes of implementing and of attempts to instrumentalize management ideas can follow different trajectories and have different outcomes. Such trajectories and outcomes are identified and discussed in the next section. In the final section I synthesize the chapter’s arguments and insights in light of a pragmatic-inspired translation theory.

126   k. a. røvik

The Intricate Roads to Instrumentalization What do organizations do to management ideas—do they ignore them, implement them instantly, and use them as instruments to coordinate certain practices, or do they use them mainly as symbols? Organizational responses to management ideas is a wellresearched theme (Abrahamson, 1991, 1996; Birkinshaw et al., 2008; Boxenbaum and Jönsson,  2008; Brunsson,  2002; Davenport et al.,  2003; Strang and Macy,  2001; Sturdy, 2004). A pragmatic perspective on this question includes and also goes beyond insights from the rational modernistic perspective and the social constructionist– symbolic perspective. Thus, a pragmatic perspective zooms in on a rather broad repertoire of possible trajectories and outcomes when organizations try to handle adopted management ideas. A literature review (Røvik, 2011) reveals that at least five such ideahandling processes and outcomes can be identified, labelled here as instant implementation, isolation, incubation, rejection, and dormancy. Instant implementation: One possible idea-handling process is instant implementation, which means that a management idea is rapidly instrumentalized and transformed into practice. This is an optimistic scenario, which is most often found within modernistic–rationalistic approaches to implementation of management ideas (Anthony and Banuelas, 2002; Wilson, 2010). A central notion is that opportunities for instant and successful implementation of management ideas increase if the implementation process is organized in accordance with rationalistic principles, such as prior detailed planning, strong and sustained involvement of leaders, clear orders, tight deadlines, and tight control. However, viewed through the pragmatic lens, instant implementation is only one out of four other possible outcomes of idea-implementation processes. Thus, to understand how some trajectories lead to instant implementation while others do not, one should look at such other, more tricky outcomes and try to trace their typical trajectories. Isolation: This strategy refers to cases where a management idea is formally adopted, but then—for various reasons—resides in certain parts of the organization, such as among leaders and/or in staff units, without being instrumentalized and has few if any consequences for activities in core practice units (Brunsson, 2002; Edelmann et al., 1992; Westphal and Zajack, 1998). Why are management ideas sometimes adopted but not instrumentalized and used in practice? The classic neo-institutional answer is that such decoupling occurs as an organizational response to inconsistent claims, especially towards leaders. On one hand, institutional pressure for conformity, modernity, and newness forces organizations to adopt management ideas with high legitimizing potential. On the other hand, organizational practices are complex and efficiency-oriented, while management ideas often are general and simple. Thus, by adopting but not implementing management ideas, organizations can achieve external legitimacy and preserve internal efficiency (Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2008; Meyer and Rowan, 1977). However, there may also be other more specific reasons for isolation. Local leaders sometimes

instrumental understanding of management ideas    127 distrust public authorities or headquarters who force them to adopt certain management ideas. Thus, they seemingly obey by adopting, but refrain from instrumentalizing and implementing the ideas (Kostova and Roth, 2002). In other cases, isolation is caused by leaders who do not lack the will, but the capacity and competence to make practical use of management ideas. For example, intermediaries such as middle managers can play a crucial role in transforming general management ideas to local problem-solving tools (Birken et al., 2012). In cases where such resources are lacking or not involved in ideahandling processes, it can facilitate isolation of management ideas (Rouleau, 2005). How long can a management idea reside in isolation as discourse among leaders and in staff units? It can, of course, be implemented after a while, but it can also expire through a gradual evaporation process, often without any formal and/or explicit decision, thus suffering a ‘silent death’. Forgetting is often the key process behind expiring management ideas (Argote, 2012; Brunsson, 2009), which is easier when ideas have not been materialized in various organizational practices. Incubation: Using a metaphor from virology, I term the third idea-handling process incubation, which refers to cases where a management idea lingers in an organization, often for a long period, before it is instrumentalized and materialized, leading to a ­gradual slow-phased transformation of the idea into practice (Røvik, 2011). Interestingly, while isolated management ideas sometimes remain in a state of latency or expire, they sometimes follow an incubating trajectory that leads to implementation in the long run. Several studies indicate that the image of management ideas’ incubation through slow-phased processes has an explanatory power. Edelman (1992) studied how a group of American organizations responded to a law in the context of equal employment opportunities and affirmative action. They initially reacted by adopting the appropriate symbols and language, and introducing a new formal structure, but kept it decoupled from practice. After a while, however, incubating processes were released and the adopted symbols were gradually instrumentalized and transformed to organizational routines and practices. Other studies of how organizations respond to claims to adopt  the same management idea have revealed that the length of the incubation period can vary considerably between different organizations (Kjeldsen, 2013; Quist and Hellström, 2012; Wærness, 1993). Sometimes it can take about ten years (Fernler, 1994), or even two decades (Tomson, 2008) from when the idea starts to circulate in an organization until it has been instrumentalized and transformed to practice. Why do some management ideas become isolated and expire, while others gradually incubate? One mechanism that can trigger incubation processes relates to norms of consistency between how one talks and acts. Usually, ideas and discourses cannot remain very different from organizational practices before they are discovered and criticized. Thus, exposure of decoupling can trigger efforts to instrumentalize and implement the idea. Another mechanism relates to the intensity of the implementation efforts—that is, how much resources are allocated (money, personnel, training programmes, etc.)— and the length of the period with sustained implementation pressure. Some studies indicate that high intensity and durable efforts increase the chances that management ideas will incubate and transform into practice (Coburn, 2004). An interesting

128   k. a. røvik question for future research is what happens during periods of incubation. More than being simple delays and waste of time, a slow-phased incubation can be a sign of ongoing learning processes of trial and error where the instrumentalized version of a management idea is gradually refined. Rejection: A fourth observed way of handling management ideas is rejection, which means that an organization—premised on interpretations of how an adopted management idea has worked in practice—decides to stop using it. In contrast to isolation and expiry, rejection embraces cases where efforts have been taken to instrumentalize and implement a management idea, but where the effects are interpreted as dominantly unsatisfactory. A typical trajectory here can start with attempts to move a management idea from leader and staff units—with the aim of materializing it in units where core practices are performed—which subsequently release friction and resistance and then leads to rejection. Employees’ resistance to change efforts have been widely researched (Oreg et al.,  2011). The literature contains three main conceptualizations of reasons for  such resistance. The first is resistance explained as a kind of pathology, painting humans’ search for stability and uncertainty avoidance as an expression of irrationality and weakness in human nature (Bommer et al., 2005; Ortiz, 2012). The second is resistance as a sign of employees pursuing their self-interests (position, competence, salary, etc.) and is often disguised in more legitimate arguments (Stanley et al., 2005). The third is  the resistance that comes to expression when skilled, knowledgeable practitioners experience that leaders’ reform ideas are not satisfactory in practice (Ford et al., 2008). Practitioners’ scepticism is often expressed through incompatibility arguments. A common argument is one of technical incompatibility, claiming that the management idea is too simple and vague, does not have the quality of a practical instrument, and does not fit in with existing technology, experience-based knowledge, and the complex work operations upon which today’s practice are based (Zeitz et al., 1999). Dormancy: Dormancy refers to an identified pattern from longitudinal observations of how management ideas circulate in organizations (see also Abrahamson and Piazza, in this volume). Adopted ideas sometimes remain in a state of latency where they alternate, over long periods, even decades, between active and inactive states (Kjeldsen, 2013; Røvik, 2011). Typical for active periods is that large groups of actors, such as leaders, internal and external consultants, and staff personnel, are mobilized and involved in intense discourses about certain management ideas. Such periods normally also involve attempts to instrumentalize the idea and use it to guide (some) practices. However, observations indicate that inactive periods sometimes follow active periods. When inactive periods occur, enthusiasm and activities connected to the management idea typically decrease and the idea resides in a dormant state, with minimal consequences for organizational practices. Then the dormant idea can be reactivated again. Such alternations between active and inactive states have been observed and analysed in a study of how the MBO (management by objectives) concept circulated in a Scandinavian telecom company from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s (Røvik, 2007). Dormancy processes contain two key mechanisms. The first is inactivation, in which organizational activities related to a certain management idea decrease. The second is reactivation, in which a dormant idea is turned on again.

instrumental understanding of management ideas    129 An interesting question for future research is what characterizes situations where these two ­mechanisms are triggered.

Instrumentalization as Translation In this final section, I synthesize the chapter’s arguments and insights about the instrumental aspects of management ideas through the lens of translation theory. The ‘­sociology of translation’ (Callon,  1984; Latour,  1987; Serres,  1982) was introduced to organization theory in the early 1990s, offering a new and promising conceptual framework to understand the circulation—or ‘travel’—of management ideas (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996; Sahlin-Andersson, 1996). Translation theory is clearly related to the pragmatic perspective, both through its descriptive ­orientation (that is, an interest in what really happens to management ideas throughout the transfer and implementation processes), but also through its instrumental o ­ rientation and potential to guide practitioners’ handling of such ideas.

Illuminating Winding Implementation Paths The pragmatism of translation theory partly comes to expression in its descriptive ­orientation, which means that it goes beyond a priori suggestions about the very nature of management ideas as instruments, fads, or symbols. Contrary to such suggestions, translation theory is characterized by a strong empirical orientation towards revealing, understanding, and explaining what really happens to management ideas throughout the transfer and implementation processes; for example, whether they are instrumentalized, shaped into sharp tools, or not. Translation theorists conceive of management ideas as immaterial accounts that are transformed while being transferred and implemented. When management ideas circulate in various networks of actors and organizations, they trigger a richness of ­interpretations. Thus, local actors are not passive receivers, but active translators. Bluntly, in addition to being interested in the effects that various management ideas cause in ­organizations, translation theorists have been primarily concerned with what organizational actors do to management ideas while implementing them. This corresponds to the key argument in this chapter, derived from a pragmatic perspective, that management ideas are not a priori either instruments or ‘just fads’. Decisive for a management idea’s instrumental status is how organizational actors translate the management ideas during the implementation phase. The power of translations comes to expression in observations of processes of instrumentalization as well as processes of de-instrumentalization of management ideas. Instrumentalization refers to processes where a management idea is concretized into specific rules, procedures, and routines that organizational actors are expected to follow when conducting certain practices. A management idea

130   k. a. røvik can be conceptualized as a package of a certain ideology and a set of values that are loosely coupled to some associated techniques (Guillén, 1994). Local organizational translation processes sometimes lead to instrumentalization, but leaving out the associated ideology and value component (Andersen and Røvik, 2015). However, researchers have also observed that local translations can lead to de-instrumentalization, i.e. that organizations sometimes adopt management ideas’ ideologies and discourses without developing and implementing associated tool-kits (Brunsson, 2002, 2006; Zbaracki, 1998).

An Instrumental Translation Theory Translation theory can also be associated with a pragmatic perspective because of its potential practical usefulness as an instrumental theory; that is, a theory of how translations can be performed to achieve desired organizational ends, for example how a management idea can be translated to an appropriate tool in an organization. While typical social constructionist and symbolist approaches are often characterized by less concern with management ideas’ instrumental status and their implications for practitioners and practices, modernistic–rationalistic inspired works often focus on the instrumental qualities of management ideas (Røvik, 2002). However, such works often conceive of the instrumental status as givens or traits of each management idea. Translation theory represents a pragmatic approach to this question by arguing that the instrumental quality of a management idea is not a trait per se, but depends largely on the local shaping—or translation process. However, even more important in this context is that pragmatism also means toning down the notion that there is and persistently will be a sharp divide between management theory and management practice—and the knowledge managers de facto use to do their jobs (Butler et al., 2015; Kieser et al., 2015). Pragmatism means being open-minded towards the potential usefulness of management theories for practitioners (Bartunek et al., 2006; Romme, 2003; Van Aken, 2004). Thus, I argue that translation theory has the potential to guide, to some extent, practitioners’ deliberate efforts to shape management ideas so they become more suitable as instruments for local organizational purposes. This points towards an instrumental theory of translation, which refers to the development and use of knowledge about how to conduct translations of management ideas to achieve various organizational ends (Røvik, 2016). Such a theory is founded on the three following interconnected arguments: Reframing implementation as acts of translation: The process of adopting and ­implementing a management idea can be conceived of as a series of translation acts. Adoption often involves two main translation processes. One is contextualization, or ‘embedding’ (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996), which is the translation of a general management idea to practice in a recipient organizational context. The challenge of such translation is to interpret, concretize, and embed the idea in structures, routines, and individual skills. The other main translation process is decontextualization, or ‘disembedding’ (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996): organizations sometimes try to imitate and learn from other organizations’ practices and experiences with certain management

instrumental understanding of management ideas    131 ideas. This means translating from an observed practice to representations of the practice (such as images, notions, concepts, or texts). The challenge when decontextualizing is to make sure that the representations contain all relevant information about how the management idea has been implemented and how it works in foreign contexts. Rule-based translations: The second argument is that translation of management ideas, like translations of language and texts, has modes and rules and thus regularities (Røvik, 2016). The term ‘translation mode’ refers to the specific aim and strategy that can drive the adoption and implementation of management ideas. Analytically, three such modes can be identified. The first, the reproducing or foreignizing mode, sometimes echoes a deliberate implementation strategy, where an organization seeks competitive advantage by systematically replicating the way other organizations practise a management idea. The relevant translation rule is copying. The second, the modifying mode, is rooted in a more pragmatic approach and aims to balance information about how a management idea has worked in other contexts with the wish to adjust it to work in one’s own organizational context. The two typical translation rules here are ­addition (adding a few local elements to a management idea) and omission (the toning down or removal of some elements of a management idea adopted from external sources. The third—the radical or domesticating mode—is expressed in organizations’ inclination to act in a relatively unbound manner in relation to information about other organizations’ versions and experiences with a management idea. Correspondingly, within this mode, local actors are likely to exploit the management ideas’ interpretive viability (Benders and Van Veen, 2001) and to make their own instrumentalized version of it, strongly adapted to local conditions. Translations make a difference: The third argument is that translations make a ­difference: the way local actors translate a management idea when adopting and implementing it has consequences for the shaping of the idea and, therefore, for how it works in practice. This means that the translation modes and rules that local actors use when implementing a management idea can be decisive for its instrumental quality and for what comes out of the process.

Translation Competence and Instrumentalization of Management Ideas The three arguments above make translation competence a highly relevant concept (Røvik, 2016). In the present context, it refers to translators’ and organizations’ capacity to shape management ideas, adopted from external sources, into appropriate means for local problem-solving. The term ‘translator’ includes all actors involved in the ­interpretation and shaping of the local organizational version(s) of a management idea. Three features of translation competence relate to the task of instrumentalizing management ideas. The first is the translator’s knowledge of the management idea in focus, which can include knowledge about how the idea has been outlined in classic and/or frequently cited works. The second is the translator’s knowledge of source and

132   k. a. røvik target contexts—of which the most important is knowledge of the target context (Nida, 1964); that is, the organizational unit where attempts are made to implement the management idea. A target context is always filled with other management ideas and practices—sometimes competing and sometimes complementary when related to the new management idea. Thus, the translators’ knowledge about the target context can be decisive for the outcome of the implementation (and the instrumentalization) process; for example, for whether and how the new management idea is coordinated and configured with existing ideas and practices. Organizations sometimes try to transfer and learn from other organizations’ experiences with a certain management idea. In such cases, translation competence must also include knowledge about the source context; for example, about characteristics of the local source version(s) of the management idea and how it has worked there. As in language translation, a skilled translator of management ideas combines thorough knowledge of both the source and the target context. The third characteristic of translation competence is translators’ knowledge about translation rules and about how various rules can be applied with which effects when implementing management ideas. Although the translation of ideas is a rule-based activity, translation competence refers to the more conscious and deliberate usage of the repertoire of translation modes and rules, the importance of which when implementing and instrumentalizing management ideas can be briefly illustrated as follows. Copying is a translation rule that aims to exactly replicate a source version of a management idea and its effects in a recipient organization. However, copying is difficult; contexts vary and it is often hard for actors in recipient organization to gain thorough knowledge about the source version of a management idea. Therefore, the degree of similarity between recipient and source contexts on variables such as the type of ­organization, country localization, culture, etc., seems to be a very important condition for the appropriateness of copying (Lillrank, 1995). Thus, the more similar o ­ rganizational contexts are, the safer it is to copy others’ versions of a management idea. Within the modifying mode, addition and omission are translation rules that aim to balance concerns for replicating other organizations’ best practices with a management idea and adjust it to one’s own organization. In such cases, adding some elements when implementing the management idea—for example, from existing well-functioning practices in the recipient organization—can be an appropriate translation rule (Lam, 1997). Omission means toning down some recognized elements of a management idea when implementing and instrumentalizing it in a new context. This can be an appropriate translation rule in cases where the transferred management idea contains elements that do not fit with the recipient’s organizational context (Røvik, 2002). Within the radical translation mode alteration is the translation rule and refers to the comprehensive transformation of a management idea; that is, making a unique local version of it. This rule can be appropriate, for example, in cases where it is hard to identify a best practice of the management idea concerned among other organizations, and/or where a best practice is performed in an organizational context that differs considerably from the recipient context. Thus, it can be hard to account for context-specific factors, and consequently, wise to deliberately domesticate and make one’s own maximally adjusted version (Røvik, 2016).

instrumental understanding of management ideas    133

Concluding Remarks From a pragmatic perspective, the instrumental quality of a management idea (that is, how it works in various organizational contexts rather than being a trait per se) depends on how the idea is shaped and materialized throughout the implementation process. Empirical research shows that such implementation—or idea-handling processes—can have very different trajectories and outcomes (including instant implementation, isolation, incubation, rejection, and dormancy). I have highlighted the importance of actors’ translation competence in processes of instrumentalizing and making practical use of management ideas. A core argument is that the transfer and implementation of ­management ideas are rule-based processes and that the ways such translations are ­performed have consequences for outcomes for the shaping and the instrumental quality of a management idea. This calls for competent translators who combine thorough ­knowledge of organizational contexts with (more) deliberate usage of translation rules, that is, consciousness about the repertoire of rules, with the capacity to choose appropriate rules to fit the specific situations. The translation approach to implementation and instrumentalization of management ideas opens up several avenues for future research. More attention to o ­ rganizations’ translation capacity (not only individual translation competence) is required. We need to know whether and how such capacity can be created and organized. A pragmatic lens reveals that adopted management ideas can face long and winding paths before they are eventually used in practice. We therefore suggest that future researchers investigate how idea-handling processes (i.e. instant implementation, isolation, incubation, rejection and dormancy) relate to each other. By better understanding these potentially tangled connections, we may gain new insights about the complex trajectories and consequences of translation processes (Røvik, 2011). Such insights can also add value to the management field overall, in the sense that they may guide practitioners in their attempts to implement and instrumentalize management ideas.

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pa rt i i

AC TOR S

chapter 7

Thought L ea ders a n d Fol l ow ers the impact of consultants and advisers on management ideas Christopher Wright

Introduction Management consultants and advisers are portrayed as central actors in the ­ development and application of management ideas. Indeed, given their boundaryspanning role between management practice, education, and research, consultants are often seen as more influential than other actors within the broader management advice industry (Clark and Fincham, 2002). Here, they are characterized as powerful business ‘fashion setters’ (Abrahamson, 1996; Jung and Kieser, 2012), globalizers of business ‘best  practice’, and even ‘Masters of the Universe’ (Films of Record,  1999). However, this all-powerful vision of the management consulting industry has also been subject to significant critique (Sturdy, 1997). Rather than ‘confident consultants’ dominating the thinking and actions of ‘gullible client’ managers, researchers have highlighted how these external agents often follow rather than lead business needs (Kipping, 2002a), and that much consulting work is often more structured, mundane, and routinized than the ‘thought leadership’ and innovation that the consulting industry promotes as its key contribution (Kitay and Wright, 2007). This chapter explores the roles and activities of consultants and advisers in the development, dissemination, and legitimation of management ideas over time. While the field of business advice now includes coaches, mentors, technical specialists, and professional services such as accountancy and legal services, the foregoing analysis focuses specifically on the example of management consultancy; itself a ‘broad church’ of functional expertise and advisory and implementation services (Kitay and Wright, 2004; O’Mahoney and Markham, 2013). Through a review of the normative and critical

142   c. wright literature on management consulting, the chapter identifies how management consultants have sought to promote an image as knowledge innovators and the process through which consultants identify, popularize, and diffuse new management ideas. Here, emphasis is placed on their role as popularizers of management ideas and ‘fashion setters’, specifically their ability to identify relevant and timely concepts and then commercialize these into products that can be sold to management and corporate clients. However, just as historically, management consultancies often faced problems in responding to changing economic and technological circumstances, so the current era of radical social, political, and economic change places major constraints upon the ability of management consultancies to maintain their role as leaders in the application of new management ideas. The twenty-first century thus represents not only an era of crisis for capitalism but also for ‘capitalism’s commissars’ (Thrift, 2005: 93).

Management Consultancy: Innovation and Legitimation of Management Ideas Management consultants and business advisers have often been seen as central to the  production, dissemination, and legitimation of management ideas. For instance, McKenna (2006: 78) in his history of the management consulting industry has argued that ‘management consulting firms have become, and continue to be, a crucial institutional solution to executives’ ongoing need for outside information’. Similarly, Fincham and Clark (2002: 1) argue that consultancy-led initiatives of excellence, total quality management, corporate culture, and business process re-engineering have fundamentally shaped the very ‘character of modern organizations’, such that ‘[F]ew people, whether in their roles as employees or as citizens, will have avoided the effects of some kind of consultancy-led initiative.’ This view of the pervasive impact of consultancy on management thinking and practice has been reinforced both by consultants themselves and their critics. For instance, consultancy firms have over time presented an image in their marketing and client interactions as elite and influential ‘knowledge brokers’; able to not only bring cosmopolitan expertise to clients but also work with them in diagnosing and solving the most complex of business problems (Alvesson and Robertson,  2006; Kitay and Wright, 2007). This view of consultancy influence over management has been mirrored in popular critiques of consultancy within the business press where consultants are presented as modern-day ‘Svengalis’, whispering in the ear of corporate executives, selling management fads and fashions, and, in the process, shaping the very nature of management and organizations (Micklethwait and Wooldridge,  1996; O’Shea and Madigan, 1997; Pinault, 2000; Shapiro, 1996). Three themes predominate in assessing the role and impact of consultants and advisers over management ideas. First, the role of management consultants in the codification

thought leaders and followers     143 and subsequent colonization of different aspects of management knowledge over time. Second and related to this, the way in which consultants and advisers have become management ‘fashion setters’ not only in forms of specific management knowledge, but also in the reshaping of managerial careers. Third, at a broader level, how consultancies and business advisers have become increasingly influential in government and policy circles shaping the very political economy within which businesses operate.

Codification and Colonization of Management Knowledge The processes through which management consultants affect management knowledge occur through multiple means. For instance, the literature on systems of management knowledge accords consultants and business advisers multiple roles in relation to other actors such as business schools, professional associations, management gurus, the media, and publishers (Alvarez, 1998; Engwall, 2012; Engwall et al., 2016). Suddaby and Greenwood (2001) argue that large professional service firms such as the accountancy and consulting majors (the so-called ‘Big Four’) have over time engaged in a process of commodification and colonization of management knowledge. Through commodification, these large consultancies engage in a cycle of abstracting management knowledge from its specific context and simplifying it into more generic templates and models that can then be sold as consultancy services amongst corporate clients (Wright, Sturdy, and Wylie, 2012). However, commodification also means these generic management models become widely known and more easily imitated, resulting in increasing competition. As a result, a second process of colonization results, where consultancies seek to expand their ­activities into new knowledge domains resulting in jurisdictional disputes (and potentially alliances) with other management knowledge providers. There is significant empirical evidence to support these claims. Historical studies of the emergence and development of management consultancy highlight the unique advantages consultants have enjoyed within the broader management knowledge industry given their cosmopolitan nature, their ability to span industry and occupational divides, and their entrepreneurial skills in selling management ideas as products and services to corporate clients. For instance, the early management consultants with their focus on shopfloor efficiency improvement and scientific management techniques proved adept at commodifying factory practice into defined proprietary models that could then be marketed and sold to corporations as an essential means of competitive success (Wright and Kipping, 2012). Later waves of consultancy followed a similar model of commodification, from the marketing and diffusion of the ‘M-form’ model of corporate restructuring popularized by McKinsey & Co in the 1950s and 1960s (Kipping, 1999), through to the quality management models promoted by business advisers Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran (David and Strang, 2006), or the 1990s implementation of ‘business process re-engineering’ programmes across global ­corporations at the behest of the new global IT consulting majors (Benders et al., 1998; Grint and Case, 1998). While there is debate over the degree to which consultancies were the genuine originators of the

144   c. wright founding ideas underpinning these techniques, they were critical in the commodification process of developing abstract or locally-embedded management ideas into practices, methodologies, and techniques that could be applied across a broad range of organizational and industry settings. A good example of this activity was the first wave of operational efficiency consultants. While the idea and practice of scientific management had been developed and popularized by early management theorists such as Fredrick Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, it was the later role of consultants such as Charles Bedaux in the 1920s and 1930s that built these techniques into more widespread application across American and European industry (Wright and Kipping, 2012). Bedaux exemplified the skill of the consultant as a knowledge entrepreneur, creating a proprietary model of scientific management and building relationships with multinational companies that enabled his Bedaux system to become a global phenomenon that extended as far as pre-war Japan and Australia (Kipping,  2009; Wright,  2002). Later waves of consultants followed a ­similar pattern of knowledge codification and colonization that was informed not only by the nature of the management ideas they commercialized, but also the types of employees they recruited and trained, as well as the business models they developed. For example, while operational efficiency consultants focused on hiring older, experienced engineers to implement productivity solutions for clients, second-wave strategy consultancies like McKinsey & Co and later Boston Consulting Group focused on recruiting young business graduates who they trained in their specific problem-solving methodologies (David et al., 2013; Kipping, 2002a). Commodification of management knowledge was even more pronounced amongst ‘third-wave’ global IT consultancies like Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and Deloitte where large teams of young consultants were inculcated with these firms’ consulting methodologies. At the same time, specialist knowledge management systems sought to harvest further insights from client projects (Davenport and Prusak, 2005; Dunford, 2000). Consultancies also acted as critical intermediaries in the diffusion of new management ideas. For instance, firms often followed multinational corporate clients into new geographic markets and then sought to expand their service offerings amongst local businesses. The pre-war Bedaux consultancy, for example, spread from the USA to Europe based on its productivity work for US multinational Kodak Eastman. Similarly, post-war UK consultancy firm PA established a thriving Australian business on the back of work for subsidiaries of UK multinationals British Tube Industries and Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) (Wright, 2000). This international diffusion of management ideas often involved attempts to build relationships with local business and political elites as a way of highlighting their appeal as management experts. Kipping (1999) for instance, notes how McKinsey & Co spent significant time and resources embedding itself within British elite circles as part of its expansion into the UK in the 1960s, later enabling work with major UK institutions such as British Steel, the BBC, and the National Health Service. The role of consultants as intermediaries was also evident in the way in which they could act as ‘brokers’ in accessing new management ideas (Bessant and Rush, 1995) and

thought leaders and followers     145 developing strategic partnerships as a way of broadening their expertise. For example, post-war Australian consultants W.  D.  Scott built a close relationship with US ­operational efficiency consultants H. B. Maynard & Co, licensing the use of a number of proprietary techniques, including the work measurement system Methods-TimeMeasurement (MTM). This enjoyed widespread use in manufacturing industry during the 1950s and 1960s (Wright, 2000; Wright and Kipping, 2012). While alliances provided one means through which consultancies could expand their knowledge base and colonize new areas of expertise, mergers and acquisitions provided a more long-term means of renewal. As the history of the accounting majors has illustrated, mergers and acquisitions have been a critical part of the process of knowledge expansion over decades of regulatory and technological change (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001). Beginning with the creation of ‘Management Consulting Services’ divisions within many of the former ‘Big Nine’ accounting firms, these consulting groups grew in size and profitability, rivalling the revenues of their accounting parent organizations. Over time, they expanded their service offerings from advising over information technology to a growing range of change implementation activities and a ‘one-stop shop’ diversified model of consulting activities. While some accounting firms eventually ‘spun-off ’ their consulting divisions, the regulatory interventions post the Enron scandal of 2001 forced a far more fundamental separation of consulting and auditing practices (McDougald and Greenwood, 2012). In the ensuing years, the ‘Big Four’ accounting majors of Deloitte, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG have reinvented their consulting practices and grown dramatically through the absorption of small and medium-sized consultancies.

Consultancy, Fashion, and Management Careers Researchers have demonstrated how large, global consulting companies have proven central to the creation, promotion, and global circulation of a range of ‘management fashions’ (Abrahamson, 1996; Jung and Kieser, 2012). The global consulting majors are particularly adept as ‘management fashion setters’ in sensing managerial concerns and then developing a marketing rhetoric that emphasizes the innovation of their services and how this responds to their client’s problems. Examples of such consultant-led management fashions include techniques such as ‘quality management’, ‘business process re-engineering’, ‘Six Sigma’, ‘world-class manufacturing’, and ‘knowledge management’ (Benders et al., 1998; David and Strang, 2006; Jung and Kieser, 2012). Critics point out that while the terminology may vary between consulting firms, often the underlying ideas and approaches are remarkably similar (Werr et al., 1997). However, through their work with client companies, new innovations and potential product offerings may be identified and developed (Anand et al., 2007). Consultancies, thus, may harness both the ideas of management thinkers and gurus who identify or popularize a particular concept (e.g. ‘business process re-engineering’; Hammer and Champy, 1993), as well as develop new ideas and products through their work with client organizations. They

146   c. wright have proven adept at marketing these insights and innovations through advertising and publication of magazines and books which not only promote the consultancy brand but also serve to signal to management consumers their ‘thought leadership’ (Davenport and Prusak, 2005; O’Mahoney and Sturdy, 2016). Global management consultancies have also become central contributors to the broader circulation of management ideas through their role as major employers of managerial labour in their own right; acting as ‘finishing schools’ for graduates from the world’s top business schools (Lemann, 1999). While there has long been a reciprocal relationship between the top business schools and consulting firms (Engwall, 2012), some have argued that leading professional service firms have now largely ‘captured . . . elite business schools to serve the specialized needs of their own quasi-professions’ (McKenna, 2006: 2). For example, Northwestern University’s Kellogg Business School and INSEAD have around 40 per cent of their MBA graduates accepting jobs in management consulting (Byrne, 2012). The business school curriculum is also heavily slanted towards business case studies which further engrain a consulting mind-set upon graduates (Armbrüster, 2004). This influence extends beyond just the shaping of business education, in that the business graduates who go into consulting as a career, often later move out of consulting into managerial roles. For instance Sturdy and Wright (2008) have documented what they term a ‘consulting diaspora’; the growing movement of former consultants into managerial roles in industry. These ex-consultants are particularly attractive to corporate employers for their skills in overseeing the process of large-scale organizational change, specifically in the management of complex projects and internal and external client relations. For consultancies, these former employees may also operate as external referents for future consulting assignments. As a result, the influence of consultancies on management thinking is increasingly pervasive not only through their client work and broader marketing and publications, but also in their redefinition of managerial careers and work.

Shaping Policy and Political Economy Finally, there is growing evidence that management consulting’s influence upon management ideas has had even broader impacts in terms of social and economic policy. For instance, Kipping and Wright (2012) highlight how consultancies have been central to the process of economic globalization (or more accurately ‘Americanization’) over time. Not only have US-based consultancies dominated the global consulting industry in terms of their size and number, they have also defined the image and identity of consulting as an occupation and activity (e.g. Higdon, 1969; O’Shea and Madigan, 1997). Thus, consultants can be seen as key constituents of the transnational elite promoting neo-­ liberal capitalism and globalization (Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 2003; Morgan, 2001). This has been outlined most succinctly by Thrift (2005: 93) who defines management consultants as ‘capitalism’s commissars’, since they are a central part of the ‘cultural ­circuit of capital . . . able to produce constant discursive-cum-practical change with considerable power to mould the content of people’s work lives’.

thought leaders and followers     147 While the broader political and economic impact of consultancy is noticeably under-researched, examples can be found in a number of contexts. One of these has been the way in which some consultancies have established research and policy bodies through which to promote particular agendas. One of the best known in this regard is McKinsey & Co’s Global Institute which has been highly active in compiling country reports and analysis which have fed into broader macroeconomic reforms of different countries such as Sweden, France, Germany, South Korea, Brazil, and Russia (McKinsey Global Institute,  1995,  1997,  1998). A dominant neo-liberal economic agenda has informed these reports with an emphasis upon greater market freedom, foreign direct investment, and the adoption of management ‘best practices’ which together also reinforce the need for consulting services. For example, in Australia, McKinsey & Co was a key contributor to the reshaping of industry policy and labour market deregulation during the 1980s which radically altered the traditional patterns of tariff protection and industrial relations (Wright and Kitay, 2004). Consulting advice and the implementation of efficiency measures often feeds into broader market-driven agendas. For example, O’Shea and Madigan (1997: 146–82) ­outline how Boston Consulting Group played a central role in the redesign of US healthcare during the 1980s and 1990s through cost-containment measures which shaped the debate around healthcare reform towards allegedly more efficient market-based alternatives. Similarly, O’Mahoney and Sturdy (2016) have documented the role of McKinsey & Co in the advocacy and implementation of healthcare privatization in the UK. Likewise, as Bock (2014) has demonstrated, management consultancies often provide a form of ‘politicized expertise’ which enables the further diffusion of neo-liberal policy outcomes on a global scale (see also Frenkel and Shenhav, 2012). For instance, developing countries often hire Western consultancies to demonstrate to foreign financial donors that they comply with international standards and neo-liberal conventions. In his case study of McKinsey & Co’s advice to developing countries in Africa and Asia over deforestation, Bock (2014) found that the consultancy modelling inflated the potential for deforestation and inherently favoured outcomes that supplanted smallhold and community farming in favour of large, industrial agriculture. The result was ­paradoxically even greater levels of deforestation despite the intent of global policies aimed at limiting further environmental degradation (Greenpeace, 2011; also Morgan et al., forthcoming).

Challenges to Consultants as Providers of Management Ideas The assumed and claimed power, influence, and elite position of consultants and advisers in shaping management ideas and practices is coming under sustained challenge. This relates to three key themes: management scepticism and resistance to consultancy

148   c. wright as both an activity and a source of knowledge; the rise of new competitors in the management advice industry; and new economic, political, and environmental uncertainties that challenge conventional consultancy and management assumptions.

Management Scepticism and Resistance Management consultancies have always faced the ‘burden of otherness’ (Kipping and Armbrüster, 2002). While their legitimacy as outside experts was reinforced by claims to specialist knowledge and a professional image different from that of their clients, this ‘outsider’ status also carried with it the liability that business expenditure on c­ onsultancy was ultimately discretionary and that many of their recommendations and methods could be deeply challenging to existing organizational practice. For instance, Kipping and Armbrüster (2002) note how historically management consultants often faced resistance not only in selling their wares to an often sceptical business clientele, but also within client organizations in implementing organizational change amongst hostile and obstructionist middle managers, employees, and trade unions (see also Wright, 2002). This has been particularly evident in the case of specific consultancy interventions which stress workplace and organizational restructuring (e.g. operational efficiency, business process re-engineering, and enterprise resource planning systems) as well as more direct cost reduction and delayering initiatives which threaten employee and management job security and autonomy (Harley et al., 2006; Wright et al., 2012b). Historically, the consulting industry in the USA, UK, Europe, and Australia was able to overcome initial resistance and establish a reputation as a legitimate ‘managerial profession’ (evident in the trend for the best and brightest business graduates to view management consulting as the preferred career option) (Lemann, 1999). Nevertheless, even global, brand-name consultancies continue to face managerial scepticism and an ­ongoing critique of their activities in the media and popular culture. Cartoons and satirical analyses of the dubious nature of consulting advice and the latest management fashions are an enduring feature of the business press (Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 1996; O’Shea and Madigan, 1997; Pinault, 2000), and even television shows (e.g. House of Lies, 2012–16) highlight an image of consultancy as an ethically dubious and greedfocused activity (Sturdy, 2009). While there is little evidence to suggest these damning characterizations have limited the uptake of consulting services, the more fundamental issue of consulting’s discretionary nature continues. Unlike accountants and lawyers, the services of management consultants are not required by regulatory or legal requirements. Added to this, much consulting work is inherently transferable. While hiring a consultant may sometimes be cheaper than maintaining a particular skill or expertise within an organization, there is nothing to prevent activities performed by consultants being internalized within a business (an issue we will return to shortly). As a result, management ideas are not something easily monopolized by consultants. As some researchers have noted (Sturdy, 1997), while there has been a focus on the susceptibility of managers to ‘confident

thought leaders and followers     149 c­ onsultants’, many consultants also suffer from uncertainties and anxieties around the vulnerability of their work to competitors and clients alike (see also Fincham et al., 2013; Kitay and Wright, 2007). More generally, while consultancy is often presented as a global phenomenon and consultants as globalizers of management ideas, the global uptake of consultancy is still remarkably variable. As Sturdy (2011) has noted, one indicator of this is that around 82 per cent of global consultancy fee income derives from North America (49 per cent) and Europe (33 per cent), and that within Europe, the vast majority (92 per cent) of c­ onsulting revenues comes from just three key economies (Germany 47 per cent, UK 31 per cent, and France 14 per cent). Indeed, in other parts of the world such as Asia and Africa, institutional and cultural dynamics have proved more resistant to the appeals of Western management consultancies. For instance, in Korea, the large family-owned conglomerates (chaebol) were sceptical of the benefits of Western consulting advice, having undergone dramatic modernization in the 1970s and 1980s through internally developed strategic planning (Amsden, 1989). It was only in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian economic crisis that Western consultancies were able to establish a presence in Korea, as part of the World Bank’s requirements for financial assistance (Wright and Kwon, 2006). In Japan, a similar story of reticence to Western consultancy was also ­evident (Kipping, 2002b), and it was not until after the contraction of the Japanese economy in the 1990s that Western consultancies and ideas of downsizing and re-engineering really took hold (Schlender and Kano, 1994). The path of consultancy growth has also been far from simple in the world’s fastest growing economy, China. Here, institutional constraints limited the uptake of consultancy within state-owned enterprises and it was through their associations with Western multinationals that the global consulting brands built their China presence (Wang,  2009). As a result, the non-use of management consultants in different geographic and industry settings is an area requiring much greater research. Management consultants do not have a monopoly on managerial expertise and much local knowledge remains embedded within organizations and workplaces resistant to attempts to replace it with more cosmopolitan, standardized consultancy models.

New Models of Consultancy As we noted earlier, one of the key impacts of consultancy on management has been the increasing adoption of consulting discourse and practice by managers themselves. Management consultancy has not only become the preferred career option for many business graduates, but the consultancy language of ‘clients’, ‘projects’, and ‘change’ has become endemic within organizations. Part of this relates to the large numbers of former consultants who are now employed in managerial roles (Sturdy and Wright, 2008), as well as attempts by specific ‘management professions’ (e.g. human resource, project and IT managers) to present a more ‘strategic’ vision of their contribution to organizational success (Hodgson, 2002; Wright, 2008). Indeed, these more recent trends hark back to a long-term logic in which weak levels of professional closure in consulting have

150   c. wright enabled different management occupations such as accounting and information technology to colonize large segments of the consultancy industry over time (Galal et al., 2012; Greenwood et al., 2002). This broadening of the impact of management consulting on managerial thought and  action has also resulted in the emergence of alternatives to traditional models of external consulting. One example of this has been the way in which large business organizations have increasingly internalized consultancy expertise in various forms. While the concept of ‘internal consultancy’ has a long historical pedigree (Baker and Schaffer, 1969; Dekon, 1987), over the last several decades, more and more large organizations appear to be developing internal consulting capabilities in areas such as ­strategic analysis and change and project management (Sturdy et al.,  2016; Wright, Sturdy, and Wylie, 2012). For instance, through an extensive analysis of large corporations in the UK and Australia, Sturdy et al. (2015) argue that not only are significant aspects of managerial work becoming more like consultancy (what they term ‘management as consultancy’), but that this poses a strategic threat to traditional models of external consultancy as internal consultants take on aspects of the work of externals as well as act as intermediaries in brokering relationships between managers and external consultants (see also Sturdy and Wright, 2011). The internalization of consultancy is not the only competitive threat. For instance, Christensen et al. (2013) argue that the traditional business model of management consulting is now being fundamentally disrupted. Increasingly sophisticated client ­managers (and internal consulting groups) are challenging the traditional opacity of the major consultancy firms through the disaggregation of consulting services, utilizing smaller, specialized consultants for defined activities, and adopting formal procurement procedures in engaging consultants (O’Mahoney et al., 2013). In response to these more discriminating client demands, new consulting business models such as facilitated consulting networks have also emerged, utilizing IT-brokering models to quickly assemble teams of independent consultants for specific client projects on a just-in-time basis (Wylie, 2016).

New Challenges and Uncertainties Beyond the threat posed by new business models and the internalization of consultancy within management, consultants also face the problem of engaging with new sociopolitical and environmental issues. As we have seen historically, while management consultants have sought to adapt their services to the changing needs of business, they also suffer from a level of rigidity driven by their leverage structures and human resources which limit their ability to learn ‘new tricks’; that is, they often become ‘trapped in their wave’ of previous success (Kipping, 2002a). So while consultancies have in recent decades proved adept at identifying new ideas and techniques to market to potential business clients (Shapiro, 1996), these involve essentially variations on older ideas of cost cutting, efficiency improvement, technological innovation, culture change,

thought leaders and followers     151 and market and competitive analysis, rather than fundamentally new approaches to business and management. However, there are clear signs that the twenty-first century involves major socio-political tensions that go well beyond just the efficient operation of the business organizations. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and continuing weak global ­economic growth, the signs of growing social and political anomie have become increasingly evident: the Arab Spring of 2011 and spread of the Occupy movement; growing opposition to fossil fuel-based energy and an organized campaign of divestment (Klein, 2014); and most recently the shift to populist politics in Europe and the USA, symbolized in the 2016 Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Donald Trump as US President. Aware that many of the old certainties of capitalist success may now be waning, some management thinkers have already sounded the alarm. For instance, business professor Michael Porter and consultant Mark Kramer published a widely-referenced article in Harvard Business Review in 2011 which argued that, ‘the capitalist system is under siege. In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems’ (Porter and Kramer,  2011: 64). In a ­similar vein, McKinsey & Co Managing Director, Dominic Barton (2011: 86) argued that, ‘business leaders today face a choice . . . We can reform capitalism, or we can let capitalism be reformed for us, through political measures and the pressures of an angry public.’ In both cases, the recognition of a potential crisis in the capitalist system has resulted in calls for an adaptation of the dominant neo-liberal model of the economy: the need for a longer-term focus in business; greater awareness of stakeholders rather than just shareholders; and finding areas of common interest between profit-making and social benefit (what Porter and Kramer term ‘creating shared value’). There are signs in business and consultancy of some adaptation and new ideas evolving in these directions. So for instance, over the last decade or more, the discourses of ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR), business sustainability, and corporate citizenship have grown in prominence (Crane et al., 2008; Hoffman and Bansal, 2012). Not only have many global businesses embraced this language, but driven by the fear of government regulation and social critique, many have also institutionalized this focus through the creation of specialist CSR/sustainability functions, green/ethical marketing a­ ctivities, and voluntary reporting of their social and environmental impacts (Dauvergne and Lister, 2013; Wright and Nyberg, 2015). Following this growing business activity in CSR/sustainability, a new breed of consultancies have also emerged promoting services in these areas (Brès and Gond, 2014). Typically, these consultants focus on assisting corporate clients with their regulatory and reporting requirements in social and environmental responsibility, as well as advising on operational and market dynamics. As has occurred historically, as this new area of consulting has grown, so larger ­consultancies (like the Big Four accounting majors) have moved into this space through the acquisition of smaller, boutique sustainability consultancies and repackaging traditional products (Furusten et al., 2013). Consultancy reports on so-called future ‘megatrends’ and ‘resilience’ have also become increasingly fashionable (Ernst & Young, 2016).

152   c. wright There are clearly limits in the extent to which business corporations and c­ onsultancies can engage with the more substantive and critical challenges now facing the world. For instance, while research has highlighted how, by acting as translators and boundary spanners between social movements and corporations, consultants can lead to limited progressive change (Brès and Gond, 2014), others have argued that sustainability consultants are ultimately constrained around the need to demonstrate a clear business case and shareholder value in proposing initiatives to their clients (Wright, Nyberg, and Grant, 2012). Moreover, consultancies are often engaged in these spaces simply to provide ­legitimation for businesses and governments in an activity which often leads to even greater social and environmental destruction (Nyberg and Wright, 2013; Bock, 2014). The disconnect between consultancy and future challenges is particularly stark in the case of major environmental threats. Despite growing awareness that climate change, biodiversity collapse, and associated ‘planetary boundaries’ now threaten the future viability of humanity (Whiteman et al., 2013), there is a notable reluctance by business to engage with the implications of these changes (Wright and Nyberg, 2017). While these issues often surface at annual economic forums and other elite global events (Garsten and Sörbom, 2016), the tangible implications of social instability, disruptions to supply chains and consumer markets, energy security and geopolitical conflict remain strangely absent from business ‘thought leadership’. When these issues are ac­knowledged by consultancies, responses are inevitably framed within the existing neo-liberal logic of greater economic growth, business self-regulation, and corporate innovation (Enkvist et al., 2008). Thus, there appears to be a strong element of ‘magical thinking’ within the business world that despite the alarming scientific projections, economics will continue much as it has. Given that elite management consultancies pride themselves on their strategic insight and ability to anticipate future risks and opportunities, this ‘business as usual’ imaginary appears particularly ironic.

Conclusion Management consultants have emerged over the latter half of the twentieth century as important players within a growing management advice industry. In terms of how management ideas are popularized and disseminated, consultants are particularly wellplaced with respect to other knowledge providers through their boundary-spanning role in the spaces between organizational practice and research and education, as well as their strong commercial focus on identifying and selling ‘new’ concepts and practices to potential management clients. For many observers, the inexorable rise of the global management consulting industry highlights their pervasive impact upon organizational practice and management as a ‘profession’. Indeed, some have argued that management itself is increasingly shaped upon a neo-bureaucratic, consultancy approach which stresses ‘client’ relationships, project-based working, and ongoing management of organizational change (Sturdy et al., 2015).

thought leaders and followers     153 As this chapter has demonstrated, there is significant evidence of the impact of c­ onsultancy upon the spread of management ideas. This has occurred through the ways in which consulting organizations have commodified and colonized management ­knowledge over time; their propagation of a diverse range of management fashions; their increasing role in the implementation of structured programmes of organizational change; and their reshaping of management education and careers. Moreover, while currently under-researched, the broader impact of consultants on political and economic policy (particularly the diffusion of a dominant neo-liberal model of global ­capitalism) indicates they may well be having a far more profound impact upon the world more generally. And yet despite their apparent centrality in the practice of contemporary corporate life, there are a range of factors that suggest the influence of consultants on management ideas may be waning. First, consultants continue to face ongoing scepticism and resistance not only from critics in the media and academia, but also from many managers themselves who question the need for outside expertise. While consultancy’s ‘burden of otherness’ has been a long-term trend (Kipping and Armbrüster, 2002), rival management occupations and the internalization of consultancy models of organizational change pose a real competitive threat to an activity which is ultimately discretionary. In contrast to the late twentieth-century model of large, global consultancy firms parachuting into client organizations to implement change, new models of client-managed consultancy have evolved based on the disaggregation of consulting services and tight procurement procedures. Here, consultancy may well become less about elite, strategic advice and far more about routinized and constrained service work (Kitay and Wright, 2007). Lastly, there is the question of the degree to which conventional consulting and management ideas can engage with the profound social and environmental challenges that are enveloping the world. While consultants and management gurus increasingly acknowledge emerging ‘megatrends’ and disruptive challenges, the proposed responses involve at most incremental changes to a dominantly neo-liberal vision of the future. Market forces and technological innovation are argued to be sufficient to solve these emerging challenges. As this chapter has concluded, perhaps the most profound of these emerging existential threats is the scientific consensus that humanity now faces an ­escalating environmental crisis. These biophysical perturbations will result in profound social, political, and economic changes within the next several decades. Despite the huge business risks involved (Gordon, 2014; Nyberg and Wright, 2016), this is a future that management consultancy and the broader business world currently appear unwilling to imagine, let alone plan for. Clearly, this is an area ripe for future research: the degree to which management and business knowledge established in an era of economic growth and expansion can cope in a world of growing political instability, resource scarcity, and ecological crisis.

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thought leaders and followers     157 Nyberg, D. and Wright, C. (2013). ‘Corporate Corruption of the Environment: Sustainability as a Process of Compromise’, British Journal of Sociology, 64: 405–24. Nyberg, D. and Wright, C. (2016). ‘Performative and Political: Corporate Constructions of Climate Change Risk’, Organization, 23: 617–38. O’Mahoney, J., Heusinkveld, S., and Wright, C. (2013). ‘Commodifying the Commodifiers: The Impact of Procurement on Management Knowledge’, Journal of Management Studies, 50: 204–35. O’Mahoney, J. and Markham, C. (2013). Management Consultancy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Mahoney, J. and Sturdy, A. J. (2016). ‘Power and the Diffusion of Management Ideas: The Case of McKinsey & Co’, Management Learning, 47: 247–65. O’Shea, J. and Madigan, C. (1997). Dangerous Company: The Consulting Powerhouses and the Businesses They Save and Ruin. New York: Times Business. Pinault, L. (2000). Consulting Demons: Inside the Unscrupulous World of Global Corporate Consulting. New York: Harper Business. Porter, M. E. and Kramer, M. R. (2011). ‘Creating Shared Value’, Harvard Business Review, 89: 62–77. Schlender, B. and Kano, C. (1994). ‘Japan’s White Collar Blues’, Fortune, 129: 97–101. Shapiro, E. (1996). Fad Surfing in the Boardroom: Managing in the Age of Instant Answers. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Sturdy, A. (1997). ‘The Consultancy Process: An Insecure Business?’ Journal of Management Studies, 34: 389–413. Sturdy, A. (2009). ‘Popular Critiques of Consultancy and a Politics of Management Learning?’ Management Learning, 40: 457–63. Sturdy, A. (2011). ‘Consultancy’s Consequences? A Critical Assessment of Management Consultancy’s Impact on Management’, British Journal of Management, 22: 517–30. Sturdy, A. and Wright, C. (2008). ‘A Consulting Diaspora? Enterprising Selves as Agents of Enterprise’, Organization, 15: 427–44. Sturdy, A. and Wright, C. (2011). ‘The Active Client: The Boundary-Spanning Roles of Internal Consultants as Gatekeepers, Brokers and Partners of Their External Counterparts’, Management Learning, 42: 485–503. Sturdy, A., Wright, C., and Wylie, N. (2015). Management as Consultancy: Neo-Bureaucracy and the Consultant Manager. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sturdy, A., Wright, C., and Wylie, N. (2016). ‘Managers as Consultants: The Hybridity and Tensions of Neo-Bureaucratic Management’, Organization, 23: 184–205. Suddaby, R. and Greenwood, R. (2001). ‘Colonizing Knowledge: Commodification as a Dynamic of Jurisdictional Expansion in Professional Service Firms’, Human Relations, 54: 933–53. Thrift, N. (2005). Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage. Wang, Y. (2009). ‘Global Management Consultancy in China’. MPhil dissertation, School of Organization and Management, University of New South Wales. Werr, A., Stjernberg, T., and Docherty, P. (1997). ‘The Functions of Methods of Change in Management Consulting’, Journal of Organizational Change Management, 10: 288–307. Whiteman, G., Walker, B., and Perego, P. (2013). ‘Planetary Boundaries: Ecological Foundations for Corporate Sustainability’, Journal of Management Studies, 50: 307–36. Wright, C. (2000). ‘From Shopfloor to Boardroom: The Historical Evolution of Australian Management Consulting, 1940s to 1980s’, Business History, 42: 86–106.

158   c. wright Wright, C. (2002). ‘Promoting Demand, Gaining Legitimacy and Broadening Expertise: The Evolution of Consultancy–Client Relationships in Australia’, in M. Kipping and L. Engwall (eds.), Management Consulting: Emergence and Dynamics of a Knowledge Industry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 184–202. Wright, C. (2008). ‘Reinventing Human Resource Management: Business Partners, Internal Consultants and the Limits to Professionalisation’, Human Relations, 61: 1063–86. Wright, C. and Kipping, M. (2012). ‘The Engineering Origins of the Consulting Industry and its Long Shadow’, in T. Clark and M. Kipping (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Management Consulting. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 29–49. Wright, C. and Kitay, J. (2004). ‘Spreading the Word: Gurus, Consultants and the Diffusion of the Employee Relations Paradigm in Australia’, Management Learning, 35: 271–86. Wright, C. and Kwon, S.-H. (2006). ‘Business Crisis and Management Fashion: Korean Companies, Restructuring and Consulting Advice’, Asia Pacific Business Review, 12: 355–73. Wright, C. and Nyberg, D. (2015). Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, C. and Nyberg, D. (2017). ‘An Inconvenient Truth: How Organizations Translate Climate Change into Business as Usual’, Academy of Management Journal, 60: 1633–61. Wright, C., Nyberg, D., and Grant, D. (2012). ‘ “Hippies on the Third Floor”: Climate Change, Narrative Identity and the Micro-Politics of Corporate Environmentalism’, Organization Studies, 33: 1451–75. Wright, C., Sturdy, A., and Wylie, N. (2012). ‘Management Innovation through Standardization: Consultants as Standardizers of Organizational Practice’, Research Policy 41: 652–62. Wylie, I. (2016). ‘Competitors Forced to Work Together to Tackle Complexity’, Financial Times, 1 December. .

chapter 8

Busi n ess Stu die s a n d M a nagem en t Ideas Lars Engwall and Linda Wedlin

Introduction Business schools, schools of management, and departments of business studies today constitute a significant part of higher education all over the world. Indeed, they play a substantial role in the diffusion of management ideas and significantly influence presentday management practice in corporations and public organizations. They therefore require particular attention in a volume dealing with management ideas. However, it has to be admitted that the strong position of business studies is a relatively modern phenomenon, with its main expansion both in terms of number of institutions and enrolment of students taking place after the Second World War (see also Salles-Djelic, in this volume). In this chapter, we elaborate on the role of academic business studies in the diffusion of management ideas. First we summarize the development of academic business studies, and then discuss the diffusion of management ideas as well as the role of business studies as a provider of these ideas. This, in turn, paves the way for a discussion of the scrutinizing of business studies through internationalization, accreditations, rankings and institutional evaluations as well as various alternatives to academic business studies. At the end, we will provide our conclusions and some thoughts for future research and developments.

Institutions of Academic Business Studies Efforts to study and teach economic sciences at an academic level can be found as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century in the form of chairs in the economic sciences at the European universities of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder (1727), Halle (1727), Rinteln (1730),

160    l. engwall and l. wedlin and Uppsala (1741) (Gunnarsson, 1988: 121). At the time, the ideology behind these steps was mercantilism, i.e. the advancement of the self-sufficiency of countries. In relation to modern economic disciplines, Gunnarsson (1988: 137), after an analysis of the writings of the Uppsala professor Anders Berch, concluded that the chair at the time had considerable affinities with present-day management ideas in that it offered practical advice. Despite these chairs, for a long time, business training was more or less explicitly considered a matter of learning through practical experience, often through apprenticeships abroad. In addition, in the nineteenth century a number of trade schools at the grammar school level were created (Gunnarsson, 1988). These traditional ways of ­preparation for a business career constituted an obstacle for the introduction of academic business studies. Businessmen (there were few women) questioned the need for such education, when practice and trade schools had been so good for their own careers. In addition, according to Richard Hofstadter (1962: 237), business was considered as ‘the vanguard of anti-intellectualism in our culture’. Nevertheless, early foundations of what could be regarded as institutions for academic business studies were laid in Paris (1819), Antwerp (1852), and Vienna (1858). They were followed from the 1870s onwards by the establishment of a number of French institutions, among which l’École des hautes études commerciales (1881) in Paris has become the most significant. A similar development occurred on the other side of the Atlantic, where the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania (1881) is often mentioned as a forerunner. The foundations of these schools of commerce were not only met with scepticism by the business community as mentioned above, they were also subject to considerable resistance from the academic community. The sociologist Thorstein Veblen for example wrote just after the First World War that a college of commerce ‘belongs in the corporation of learning no more than a department of athletics’ (Veblen, 1918: 209–10). Despite attitudes such as these, business schools were founded in the USA inside universities, while in Europe— where the negative attitudes seem to have been even stronger—they usually appeared as stand-alone institutions outside universities (Engwall et al., 2010). Eventually European stand-alone schools tended to be integrated into universities. This development started in Germany as early as the 1910s (Meyer, 1998: 21), thereby removing Handelshochschulen from the scene. However, the label was transferred to the Nordic countries, where it is still in use (Engwall, 2000). Like all young organizations, the new institutions for business studies had difficulties in their early life (cf. Engwall, 2009). The recruitment of faculty members was problematic, since there was a lack of competent teachers. Likewise, students were hard to enrol, since the value of such education was unknown, with uncertain labour-market prospects. However, in time, an increasing number of institutions for business studies were created on both sides of the Atlantic. A contributing factor was the development of large corporations, the governance of which, in the terminology of Alfred Chandler (1962, 1977, 1990), was characterized by ‘the visible hand’ rather than ‘the invisible hand’ of Adam Smith. These large corporations required managers on different levels dealing with marketing, economic control, and administration. In this way, the demand for

business studies and management ideas    161 business graduates came to increase, thereby signalling an advantageous labour market for prospective students. Thus, business studies has become a significant part of systems of higher education all over the world. An important reason for this has been the strong and rapid development and diffusion of management ideas. As pointed out by Sturdy et al. (2006), these ideas have become a widely spread language that is spoken in an increasing number of contexts, irrespective of ownership, politics, and culture. One Western country deserves particular mention, namely the UK. Even though Birmingham University taught accounting early in the twentieth century, top managers had long been recruited from Oxford and Cambridge graduates. In the 1960s, this was considered to be an obstacle to the economic development of the country and, after two reports (Franks, 1963; Higher Education, 1963), business schools were set up in 1965 in London and Manchester. Eventually, they inspired many followers (see also Engwall and Danell, 2011).

Content of Business Studies Having above explored the institutional development of business studies, here we focus on the content, i.e. the ideas that these institutions were teaching. It is evident that, particularly in Germany, business studies was to a large extent originally oriented towards accounting, which had become very important for the governance of stock ­corporations, both for shareholders and for tax authorities (e.g. Forrester,  1977; Schmalenbach, 1919, 1929). They also had a strong bent towards economics (e.g. Fisher, 1906). Over time and with the growth of corporations, there was an increasing interest in the organization of the work flow (e.g. Taylor, 1911) as well as the allocation of costs and revenues between different units and products (e.g. Dean, 1951). The latter in turn implied a better knowledge base for pricing at the same time as the organization of distribution systems and market communication came to the fore (e.g. Cox and Alderson, 1950). For this development, economics was still the basic theoretical basis for business studies. However, from the 1960s and onwards, business studies has become more and more interdisciplinary. Behind this development were two reports in 1959 from the Carnegie Corporation (Pierson, 1959) and the Ford Foundation (Gordon and Howell, 1959) that argued for improvement in the scientific standards of US business schools. As a result, these institutions started to recruit faculty members with a background in political science, psychology, sociology, statistics, etc. In this way, many of these schools, particularly in the USA, had faculty members with backgrounds in a wide variety of disciplines. The 1960s and the 1970s also saw an increasing use of quantitative methods within a tradition referred to as ‘operations research’ or ‘management science’ (e.g. Wagner, 1969). Later on, problems were observed with these methods, labelled as ‘implementation problems’, i.e. people behaved in a way that did not fit with the assumptions of the model builders. This moved business studies towards a more behaviourally

162    l. engwall and l. wedlin oriented mode, even in accounting, manifested by the foundation of the journal Accounting, Organizations and Society in 1975. The field also saw the expansion of a number of other journals: a study in 2015 of the then forty-five journals on the Financial Times list showed that more than half had been founded after 1965 (Engwall et al., 2016: Table 15.3). The increasing focus on research was not, however, widely supported. In the late 1980s, Porter and McKibbin (1988) complained about the drift of business studies away from relevant practical problems. They prompted a number of followers who discussed the problem of rigour and relevance in business research (e.g. Fincham and Clark, 2009; Hodgkinson and Rousseau, 2009; Kieser and Leiner, 2009). As one of the largest disciplines in modern universities, business studies is today taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels, although not always in the same institution. A degree that has achieved a particular status throughout the world is the MBA, which comes in two varieties: MBA for non-experienced students and the Executive MBA. Particularly the latter, often in combination with consulting experience, has for some time been important for business careers. In terms of teaching, the old conflict between practice and academia can still be seen in present-day business studies. Those who are more inclined towards practice tend to favour case-based teaching, while those who are less so stress the dissemination of specific methods. Obviously, there are various mixes of the two approaches, and these mixes tend to vary over time and location. The development described here has led to a specialization in business studies into the subfields of accounting, administration, and marketing. In addition, most institutions of business studies today have specializations that cut across these subfields, such as entrepreneurship and international business.

Business Studies as Providers of Ideas Having established the development of business studies in terms of institutions and content, we can now turn to the way management ideas are provided by business schools to business practice (Figure 8.1). First, ideas are provided directly through the graduates from degree programmes as well as various other courses (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001). Over time, these graduates have increasingly made it to the top: Fligstein (1990) reports that while the early CEOs in large US corporations were ­engineers solving technical problems, their successors have increasingly had business school backgrounds, oriented first towards marketing and later on towards finance (see also Engwall et al., 1996). This success in labour markets has provided strong signals to prospective students, thereby contributing to the continuing demand for business studies, particularly at institutions that have assumed an elite status on the basis of their delivery of top leaders. Since recruiters have a tendency to appreciate candidates with the same background as their own, we can expect that they subscribe to similar thoughts, thereby reinforcing the diffusion of management ideas.

business studies and management ideas    163 Media

Business Practice

Business Studies

Consultancies

Figure 8.1  Business studies providing management ideas

Second, in addition to providing ideas directly by means of graduates, the ideas from management education find their way to practice through two mediators: consultancies and the media (Figure 8.1) (see also Wright and Barros and Rüling, in this volume). It is well known that the large consultancies hire a number of fresh business graduates to work for them on the basis of ‘up or out’, i.e. a few will stay and become partners while the majority will leave for other jobs, mostly in management (McKenna, 2006: 206–8). And, for many of the recruits this is not a difficult process, since they expose themselves, through their contacts with clients, to the wider labour market. In the words of Henry Mintzberg (1996: 66): ‘After the M.B.A., you work as a consultant with some prestigious firm for a time, skipping from one client organization to another [and] then you leap straight into the chief executive chair of some company.’ Needless to say, these business graduates often become significant missionaries of management ideas, both those learnt during their business studies and those they have picked up from their employers and clients. The provision of ideas through consulting can also occur as a result of business professors giving advice to clients. This is not uncontroversial, since it tends to take time from teaching, research, and other obligations of faculty members. US and some other universities therefore often have strict rules regarding how much consulting a faculty member can do in a week or year. At the same time, the consulting of professors has the advantage that their institutions become known, thereby enhancing their prestige, while the professors in their consulting take advantage of their affiliation to a prestigious academic institution (see also, Engwall, 2012). As pointed out by Huczynski (1993) this symbiosis may constitute the basis for the creation of academic gurus. A key role of the media is to spread ideas developed by business faculty through their publications, which may eventually reach practitioners. The extent to which this happens is due to the above-mentioned rigour-and-relevance dilemma. In other words, the more business professors move towards sophisticated analyses of problems with limited practical relevance for publication in high prestige journals, the less their ideas will influence practice, at least in the short run. On the other hand, the more business professors publish popular texts and take part in the media debate, the more likely it is that they will have an impact on practice.

164    l. engwall and l. wedlin

Business Studies as Producers of Ideas The Role of Practice, Consultants, and Media While we focused on the provision of ideas in the previous section, we will now look more closely at the origins of the management ideas that business studies provides, i.e. where ideas are produced. Again, the model used earlier will be useful, although with a different focus regarding the flow of information (Figure 8.2). First, as we established above, there is a direct link from practice. To a considerable extent, the research of business faculty is based on empirical studies of corporations and public organizations. In this way, methods and ideas used in management practice are systematized in research publications and brought to students in textbooks. In so doing, these researchers accomplish, as pointed out by Suddaby and Greenwood (2001), the important task of due diligence, i.e. quality control, at the same time as they contribute to innovation. Likewise, institutions using the case-study method, like the Harvard Business School, try to bring practice to their students through their teaching methods. Sometimes, people from practice are brought into classrooms. Together these means bring in ideas and problems from practice into business studies. In addition, consultancies and the media play key and perhaps increasing roles in the infusion of ideas and problems into business studies. In terms of consultancies, it is well known that they learn from their clients and in this way develop solutions to observed problems primarily to enhance their business (e.g. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 1996). In their business, they then use this knowledge when giving advice to other clients. However, there is also an increasing tendency among consultancies to publish their insights in popular monographs, like In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982), or in their own journals, like the McKinsey Quarterly and websites, as ‘thought leadership’. In this way, the ideas of consultants find their way into business studies through the media. Another way for consultants to provide input for business studies is by taking part in teaching, which has the added attraction for them of providing opportunities to meet prospective recruits. More generally, again as pointed out by Suddaby

Media

Business Practice

Business Studies

Consultancies

Figure 8.2  Sources of the ideas that business studies diffuse

business studies and management ideas    165 and Greenwood (2001), consultancies play an important role by commodifying business ideas through codification, abstraction, and translation as well as colonizing these ideas for use in wider contexts. The media, in turn, constitute intermediaries to business studies from practice, consultancies, and institutions of business studies themselves. In terms of practice, the most frequent kind of publication is the memoirs of successful CEOs, who typically tell the world how they managed to make a particular company successful (e.g. Iaccoca, 1984). A similar role is played by monographs portraying corporate leaders (e.g. Crainer, 1999) and the above-mentioned publications by consultants, who are often influenced by other publications from practitioners as well as business professors. The latter play a similar symbiotic role with the media in terms of the infusion of ideas. Media ­companies are thus highly dependent on business-studies faculty, like professors of all disciplines, as authors of textbooks and journal articles, reviewers as well as gatekeepers with the power to select course literature (see further Engwall et al., 2016: chapter 15). Professors are also highly dependent on media companies, a condition that is manifested by the fact that they review research without any remuneration and then urge their universities to subscribe to expensive packages of journal subscriptions. This in turn is the result of academic competition for recognition of ideas arising from research. So, although there are a number of sources for the ideas and methods of management, the research work of professors is fundamental to the ideas that institutions diffuse. The tendency of modern academic institutions to create strong internal media departments may help these ideas find their way into practice (cf. Engwall, 2008).

Business Studies under Scrutiny Along with the increasingly prominent role that business studies has taken over the past few decades, the conditions for institutions for academic business studies have changed. One of these, reinforcing the expansion noted above, is internationalization. This has further stimulated a general interest in global standards and comparisons of programmes in business and management (McKee et al., 2005), driving new mechanisms for evaluation and scrutiny of business programmes. In the following, we will explore the role of internationalization along with the possible ways that new forms of scrutiny influence the role of business studies education as providers and producers of management ideas.

The Role of Internationalization Internationalization has been a major force for idea development in the field of business studies, as in the scientific world in general. In terms of research, the international exchange of ideas has increased considerably through the formation of various ­professional associations in the management field (the Academy of Management,

166    l. engwall and l. wedlin European Academy of Management, EGOS, EIBA, etc.) and the launching of journals (AMJ, AMR, OS, JIBS, etc.) as well as technological change. Scientific entrepreneurs who meet resistance among their national peers often get ahead by finding and collaborating with international colleagues who think in line with their own ideas (see also Engwall and Hedmo, 2016). However, internationalization also plays a major role in education (see also Engwall and Kipping, 2013). Here, the importing of ideas to curricula appears particularly significant, i.e. the teaching of students in a national context by using foreign textbooks and other teaching materials (e.g. Engwall, 2000). This often neglected mode of internationalization is the product of strong publication efforts of the large global multimedia ­companies (Engwall et al., 2016: chapter 15). Obviously, this phenomenon constitutes a significant channel for the diffusion of management ideas. The negative side of this internationalization is that it might not give sufficient attention to context. Some publishers have therefore launched national or regional editions (e.g. Kotler et al., 1996). Another feature of internationalization that has attracted more attention is student exchanges and the recruitment of foreign students. Obviously, this means that students are exposed to different perspectives than they are at home, and by going back to their home country they may contribute to the diffusion of management ideas. This is particularly the case for students who take part in whole programmes. However, in this case, the transfer may sometimes be hampered by the fact that the labour market of their home country gives little recognition to foreign degrees, or at least those from specific countries. As a result, the returning students risk becoming highly educated taxi drivers rather than pursuing careers as managers and potential missionaries of management ideas. Yet another mode of internationalization is constituted by the setting up of university subsidiaries or joint ventures in foreign countries, something that also contributes to the diffusion of management ideas. Such overseas campuses have been set up in places like Dubai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. However, as shown by Alajoutsijärvi et al. (2014) these ventures can be associated with a number of problems, which for a considerable number of institutions has led to their withdrawal from the foreign market. This has been a consequence of an over-establishment of subsidiaries, but also of difficulties in recruiting faculty (who may prefer to teach in their home institution), as well as students (who prefer to be taught by the ‘stars’ of the main institution). All these efforts have increased the prevalence of teaching in English, which in turn has made it easier for faculty members to move between institutions in different countries. However, cultural differences between countries and business systems seem to have some moderating effects on internationalization and as a consequence on the diffusion of management ideas (Sturdy and Gabriel, 2000).

Accreditations Accreditation is a form of scrutiny that can best be labelled a certification process, where external recognition and quality control are the guiding principles. Developed and

business studies and management ideas    167

Table 8.1  List of accredited schools and programmes Accreditor AACSB AMBA EQUIS Total

Founded 1916 1967 1997 –

1997

2007 (estimates)

2017

n.a. 0 19 pioneers

410 n.a. 95

786 (53 countries) 240 (70 countries) 170 (42 countries)

n.a.

> 500

1,196

expanded by private agencies, accreditation provides, for significant fees, a certification of programmes and schools. Gaining one or more of these certificates has become an important aim for institutions of business studies aspiring to attain international recognition (Zammuto,  2008). As shown in Table  8.1, accreditation has expanded ­considerably in the past twenty years. While the total number of accredited institutions was limited in 1997, in 2017, the three dominating agencies awarded together 1,196 accreditations (AACSB 786, AMBA 240, and EQUIS 170). In 2017, there are 77 business studies institutions that hold accreditation from all three agencies, also known as the ‘Triple Crown’ (MBA Today, 2017; see also Zhao and Ferran, 2016). Accreditation has become a means to strengthen the role and legitimacy of institutions as providers of management ideas to the business world (Julian and Ofori-Dankwa, 2006). It also influences the form and content of those ideas. One of the most noted developments is an increasing standardization of the field that results from the increasing adoption of the same or similar standards and assessment principles. In this process, cultural and national differences are downplayed or ignored (Thomas et al.,  2014). The  result is a form of homogenization, sometimes also labelled ‘Americanization’, where ready-made models become the norm, including the American-type MBA programme as the role model for management knowledge and training. This is likely to limit the development of new (more local) ideas and practices (cf. Lejeune et al., 2015; also Rasche and Seidl, in this volume).

Rankings A further type of scrutiny of business studies is constituted by international rankings. Mainly performed by large media outlets such as Business Week and the Financial Times, rankings serve as a public form of assessment of business schools and programmes. The proliferation and increasing importance of rankings have implications for the role of institutions for business studies as providers and producers of management ideas in two ways. First, rankings supplement accreditation in legitimizing institutions among businesses and in society at large, perhaps the American ‘business school’ model in particular. Rankings yield the greatest rewards in terms of reputation and status to those at the top, thus supporting the process of creating distinction for the leading business schools (Espeland and Sauder, 2007; Mills et al., 2006). We can also hypothesize that this creates

168    l. engwall and l. wedlin a form of hierarchy also of the management ideas produced and/or promoted in these institutions; for example, ideas stemming from the leading schools are assigned greater worth (Engwall, 2007). A second way that rankings influence the role of business studies as providers of ideas is by creating a selection mechanism for business graduates. Businesses are increasingly using school rankings as a means to choose which graduates they recruit (Wedlin, 2006). Thus, we find that the media play another significant role as mediator in the movement of management ideas between business practice and business studies: the rankings help legitimate business graduates—the outcome of business studies—to an external audience, most notably businesses, at the same time as they provide a selection tool for recruitment purposes. From this, we could hypothesize that graduates from top-ranked management-education institutions are likely to have greater access to leading positions in society at large, making those institutions and the ideas they produce comparatively more influential (at least over time). Both these processes also create pressures for standardization of the ideas being produced. The reproduction of elite structures among business schools, with the leading American business schools often holding the majority of top positions, further strengthens the standardization processes described for accreditation. We also find that these systems tend to reinforce each other, and provide an upward spiral or polarization of status and reputation.

Research Evaluations The research work of professors—fundamental for some of the ideas that management education institutions produce and provide—is also under scrutiny. New and ­elaborated systems for quality evaluation and assessment have put an increasing focus on academic publications, particularly publication in ‘top-tier’ journals. Such evaluations include those that are part of larger, national research or teaching evaluation practices, such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK (Whitley and Gläser, 2007), but also evaluations initiated inside universities, as well as peer-review processes of individual scholars (Lamont, 2010). Together with an expansion and increasing use of bibliometric systems of measurement in evaluations of various kinds (Blockmans et al., 2014), publishing in international ‘leading’ journals has become increasingly important for business scholars. However, this development may inhibit or limit their role in providing ideas to practice. As strong emphasis is put on scholarly publications in ‘top’ academic journals, the knowledge developed risks losing some of its relevance for management practice. This has to some extent reinvigorated the debate about rigour or relevance, or what use (and for whom) the management ideas produced and provided by management education institutions should have. Evaluations, in this sense, favour the academic reputation system rather than one promoting practical and useful, hence relevant, knowledge for management practice (Van Aken, 2004) although some evaluation systems seek to incorporate both academic and wider impact.

business studies and management ideas    169

Alternatives to Academic Business Studies The vast expansion of formalized management training through academic business studies undeniably plays an important role in diffusing management ideas into practice, as noted above. The majority of this education and training, most significantly the MBA, is aimed at business leaders and managers, or potential ones, taking on top-management positions in various forms of organizations. However, other forms of training also supply management ideas for management practice, perhaps more notably for training at lower hierarchical levels. Such training can be performed in many ways. We will discuss two forms of training that both supplement and, to some extent, compete with the training provided by academic business studies.

Non-Academic Training One form of non-academic training is run by large training organizations operating in many countries, through seminars and pre-packaged training programmes, thus aiding the transfer of knowledge across contexts and settings (Sturdy, 2002). Another form is the smaller, tailored training programmes run in close collaboration with corporations, often using expertise from the outside. This latter type comes close to the managementconsulting practice (see also Sturdy, 2011, for an overview of forms and functions of consultancies) and to corporate universities, which will be discussed below. Non-academic training, particularly that aimed at lower hierarchical levels, helps to translate management ideas and models into practice and to embed them in the context of the organization at hand (Mueller and Whittle,  2011). A number of studies have detailed the role of training in the context of organizational change processes and implementation of quality principles (Ansari et al.,  2014; Kelemen,  2000; Zbaracki,  1998). Studies of the diffusion of customer service ideas and models, for instance, show how training programmes play a significant role in anticipating and bridging contestations of new ideas as they are introduced. Through the deliberate use of rhetorical techniques, trainers in these programmes help to validate and justify new ideas as they are introduced into new contexts (Sturdy, 2002). Similarly, analysing the effects of a customerservice training programme, McCabe (2011) shows how such programmes can both draw on but also modify and adapt popular ideas as these are introduced in practice. Particularly, this study highlights how ideas taken from management gurus and popular management books can be partially adopted, reformulated, and also resisted as they are implemented in management-training programmes (McCabe, 2011: 194; also Collins, in this volume). Such processes can best be described using the concept of ‘translation’, denoting the process whereby generalized management models or specific management techniques

170    l. engwall and l. wedlin or practices alike spread, become adapted and perhaps altered or modified, and embedded into local organizational practice (Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996). Training programmes play a central role in such translations, as they can be used to present, promote, and persuade a large number of employees (or ‘trainees’ in such programmes) to adopt and perhaps also adapt the management models and concepts in the organization at hand. A large number of studies detail, for instance, the translation and adaptation of quality-management tools and ideas, such as TQM, Lean production, and Six Sigma (e.g. Dahlgaard and Dahlgaard-Park, 2006). Non-academic training programmes for business apply to a diverse set of issues and practices. The Training Registry (), an online training resource directory for businesses, lists training organizations (or ‘vendors’) in areas such as Accounting and Finance, Customer Service, Human Resources, Project Management, Quality, and Sales and Marketing. The most prominent category is Management and Leadership, which lists 71 training ‘vendors’, along with the category ‘Business Training’, with 63 training vendors. Together, the number of programmes exceeds 5,500 in these business categories. These training organizations and their programmes thus fulfil an important role in continuous diffusion and implementation of popular management ideas and practices. Despite processes of translation, their pre-packaged form likely enhances standardization of management ideas to a certain extent.

Corporate Universities By the turn of the century, it became increasingly common for large corporations to start what they called ‘corporate universities’ (Crainer, 1999). While General Electric is claimed to have set up the first corporate university in 1956, other well-known examples of such training organizations include the Hamburger University of McDonald’s, Apple University, and Disney University. While they use the label of ‘university’, they cannot be regarded as such, but rather as units for the continuing training of their employees. Thus, instead of sending the employees to academic business studies, the corporations do the training in-house. Often this means that they buy competence from academia, i.e. that corporations engage faculty from leading institutions to teach classes or courses for a limited time. In other words, business faculty come to the corporation rather the employees going to the academic institution. In this sense, this development represents a return to the practice ideals prevailing before the growth of academic business training. Besides drawing on the term ‘university’, or similar concepts such as ‘school of management’, ‘academy’, or ‘college’, there is little in these organizations that resembles ­traditional universities (Blass, 2001; Walton, 2006). In contrast, corporate universities tend to present their activities in a rather instrumental manner: stressing ‘training’ to achieve ‘competitive advantage’ and develop ‘strategic competences’, for instance, and with very few references to ‘research’ or general references to intellectual activity and wisdom (Walton, 2006: 18). Rather, their activities are generally specifically suited to fit the needs, aims, and values of the particular corporation. While running the risk of

business studies and management ideas    171 standardizing thinking and learning within the corporation, such programmes are more likely to counteract standardizing tendencies for management thought more generally, thus perhaps offsetting some of these tendencies produced by the elite business school programmes and the widespread non-academic training programmes available. Although significantly different from academic business training, corporate ­universities may constitute a form of competition to traditional institutions for business studies in two ways: (1) taking potential students from Executive MBA courses (by refusing to sponsor admission fees and instead offering in-house training) and (2) by restricting the market for academic institutions to create lucrative in-house training programmes for corporate clients. For the latter, there is competition both for students and potential clients, but also for business faculty that could otherwise be developing courses for their own institution that could be sold to clients. Among the ideal-type forms of organizations found in the corporate universities versus the academic institutions, there are a large number of hybrid forms of organizations offering programmes in business studies. These include management schools and learning organizations offering mainly executive education and tailored management education programmes for clients. Some of these organizations have tight linkages with specific organizations, having been founded by or in close collaboration with them. An interesting example in this respect is the Hult International Business School, formally formed in 2015 through a merger between the Hult Business School (earlier Arthur D. Little School of Management) in the USA, and the Ashridge Business School in the UK. It indeed highlights the sometimes blurred boundaries between consulting and business training by having its origin in an institution founded by a consulting firm (Arthur D. Little). The other partner, Ashridge, developed the other way; it started as a business school, but established (in 1986) Ashridge Consulting as a way to offer consulting services to their clients (). In these hybrid forms, we can expect that both the production and the provision of management ideas to practice are influenced by both academic work procedures and those of consulting practices (see also Legge et al., 2007 on diverse corporate MBAs). Thus, we can conclude that corporate universities may provide an additional channel to the diffusion of management ideas through education that competes with u ­ niversities, but also overlaps and benefits from them in terms of human resources and reputation as well as the legitimacy of the term ‘university’. The hybrid forms of organizing further highlight the often-tight linkages between academic business training and consulting practices.

Conclusions Ideas about how economic activities should be managed have long traditions. However, the industrial revolution and the creation of corporate laws have been instrumental in the development and diffusion of such ideas. The emergence of large corporations

172    l. engwall and l. wedlin operating on a global scale then created a demand for management ideas in the labour market. As a result, various kinds of institutions for academic business studies have appeared from the late nineteenth century onwards, particularly after the Second World War. These have been, and are, important for both the production of management ideas and their provision to businesses, mainly through furnishing business practice with business graduates directly as well as indirectly through consultancies and the media. The ideas that these institutions produce and promote are to a large extent based on direct observations of business practice as well as indirect input through consultants and the media. These interactions between business studies and business practice reinforce a homogenization of both. An increase in scrutinizing activities, such as accreditations and rankings, further strengthens this process. This is to a certain extent counterbalanced by alternative actors such as those providing non-academic training and c­ orporate universities. By being run more closely to practice and even inside corporations, such programmes may be able to translate, thus modifying or adjusting, the general ideas to local practice. In concluding we should also note that the earlier research on business studies has particularly focused on various aspects of their development across the world. Less attention has thus far been directed towards the effects of business studies on business practice. (See also Wickert et al., in this volume.) For the future, we therefore suggest that more studies should pay particular attention to the dual processes of providing and producing management ideas, and the role of intermediate actors in these processes. New perspectives on the practices of management education can help to explore the different ways that business studies sets norms and ideals for management practice, or impacts business training and thus management and organizational practices. In addition, researchers should investigate the effects of the increasing spread and prominence of business education and management training. The impact of business studies is becoming even stronger through the scrutiny associated with internationalization, accreditations, rankings, and evaluations. As a result, the particular context of individual corporations, particular industries, or different countries, is often largely neglected in the programmes of academic business studies. Business studies—which today constitutes a dominant part of systems of higher education—is thus a phenomenon present both in academia and practice. In this way, management ideas diffuse in a never-ending interaction between the two worlds. There are no signs at present that this interaction will fade, rather that it is likely to be reinforced.

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chapter 9

M u lti nationa l a n d Tr a nsnationa l Orga n iz ations the role of globalizing actors Philipp Kern, Phil Almond, Tony Edwards, and Olga Tregaskis

Introduction Multinational corporations (MNCs) play a crucial role in the internationalization of management ideas—adopting and spreading the management ideas created or advanced by actors such as consultancies, business schools, or ‘best practice leaders’ in industry. They take nascent management ideas and convert them into corporate practice across borders, establishing new norms of behaviour and ultimately helping institutionalize them. They do so both by integrating their own operations across borders (Edwards et al., 2013) and coordinating across firms within global production networks and value chains (e.g. Riisgaard and Hammer, 2011). Within the sphere of human resource management (HRM) for instance, they commonly seek to establish global norms on issues such as performance management, career development, work o ­ rganization, and labour standards (e.g. Pudelko and Harzing, 2007). The ability to develop such global norms, and to manage the tension between the advantages of standardizing norms across countries and those of adaptation to local context, is widely considered as crucial to MNCs’ competitive advantage (Gupta and Govindarajan, 2000). The ways in which MNCs are involved in the (re)production, use, and contestation of management ideas are manifold, and we do not aim for exhaustive coverage here. We focus on the various parts of the literature related to the mechanisms, processes, and dynamics associated with firms standardizing their practices across borders (see also Rasche and Seidl, in this volume). In other words, we examine the role of MNCs as a conduit for

178    p. kern, p. almond, t. edwards, and o. tregaskis spreading management ideas and organizational norms internationally. Related research has examined how MNCs develop structures to standardize HRM and other practices and enable cross-national learning (e.g. Brewster et al.,  2008; Tregaskis et  al.,  2010). Similarly, institutionalist research has revealed the socially embedded nature of power relations, as global norms are negotiated by actors at different levels of the MNC (Almond and Ferner, 2006; Edwards et al., 2007). Elsewhere, work has examined the orientations and values of those in international positions (Chhokar et al., 2013) and the management of international assignments (Collings et al., 2007). However, we shall argue that some of the existing literature takes a rather ‘depersonalized’ view of the process of global norm-making in MNCs, treating firms as singular entities without asking who the actual actors are within firms that pick up new management ideas, spread them across borders, and contribute to establishing them as behavioural norms. In this chapter, we argue that although research increasingly highlights the important role of individuals within MNCs in international positions and those tasked with coordinating between headquarters and international subsidiaries, we still lack an integrated approach to these ‘globalizing actors’ and what they actually do within their institutional and organizational contexts. Individuals in diverse roles may have elements to their work that make them globalizing actors—from travelling salespeople who interact with offices around the world, to those in functional roles with international remits, and senior executives with global leadership responsibilities. Although we aim to consider individuals in a broad range of roles, our main focus is on managers that are globalizing actors. This chapter has two parts. In the first part we discuss three strands of the international management literature that pertain in some way to the roles and actions of ­internationally mobile or cross-border coordinating staff, namely those concerned with: (1) knowledge transfer in MNCs, (2) international assignments, and (3) global elites. Considering their contributions and limitations in terms of aiding our understanding of globalizing actors and their actions in relation to management ideas, we argue that these three strands of work hold important insights but say very little about actors’ skills and resources, and how they mobilize these to navigate diverse organizational and institutional contexts. To address this gap, the second part of the chapter widens the scope to draw on a more diverse range of research in order to bring the context and person of these intermediaries back into focus.

Globalizing Actors in the International Management Literature The international management literature has not used the term ‘globalizing actors’ nor has it studied systematically internationally mobile or cross-border coordinating staff, but has given consideration to some relevant issues. In particular, research on k­ nowledge transfer in MNCs, staff on international assignments, and on global elites helps us shed light on certain aspects of the role of globalizing actors.

multinational and transnational organizations    179

Knowledge Transfer in MNCs A large body of research has explored how MNCs transfer knowledge and expertise across borders and the conditions needed for this process to be effective. Along with the wider literature on headquarter–subsidiary relationships in which it is embedded, this line of research has shifted from a focus on the HQ and its formal means of transferring knowledge to subsidiaries, towards a stronger emphasis on the role of subsidiaries and informal knowledge diffusion mechanisms (Kostova et al., 2016). Thus, recent research has focused on knowledge coordination across subsidiaries (e.g. Williams and Lee, 2011), reverse knowledge transfer (e.g. Edwards and Tempel, 2010), and the micro-foundations of knowledge creation and transfer processes by building on the role of international managers (e.g. Johnson and Duxbury, 2010). Much research on knowledge transfer in MNCs emanates from a focus on transaction costs. For instance, Teece (1981: 85) argued that knowledge—particularly uncodifiable or tacit knowledge—cannot easily be transferred between organizations across borders ‘because of the problems of disclosing value to buyers in a way that does not destroy the basis for exchange’. Consequently, the management structures and associated processes of the multinational are a relatively efficient way of engaging in technology transfer. Gupta and Govindarajan (2000) operate in a similar tradition, demonstrating that such factors as the ‘richness of transmission channels’ and the ‘absorptive capacity’ (defined as the ability to understand knowledge generated elsewhere, assimilate it and apply it) of units are crucial factors in the effective flows of knowledge across MNC borders (see also Asmussen et al., 2013; Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1998). While the focus of most of this work is on knowledge flows between units, the ­importance of individuals has only begun to be explored in more recent contributions to this literature. Teece (1981), for instance, recognized that the transfer of technology required the transfer of ‘skilled personnel’, noting that these people require ‘team support’. Such early work in this literature, however, does not say much about the nature of the work of the globalizing actors who are central to our focus on creating, disseminating, and implementing ideas and establishing global norms. Its primary focus is on the capacity of subsidiaries and it is largely an organizational, ‘depersonalized’ view of the multinational. More recent contributions have begun to explore the micro-foundations of knowledge creation and transfer in MNCs, indicating a trend towards recognizing the role of individual actors in this line of research (Foss, 2006; Johnson and Duxbury, 2010). This literature addresses an area—knowledge transfer—that globalizing actors might be involved in, but work remains to be done on individuals whose roles are transnational in nature as well as the nature of the transnational work. A related shortcoming of this strand of literature is its limited treatment of the internal politics of knowledge transfer. Gupta and Govindarajan (2000), for instance, begin to explore the differences of interest within MNCs that knowledge transfer may generate and be obstructed by. They conceptualize the ‘motivational disposition’ of the donor unit, acknowledging that know-how can be ‘the currency through which they acquire and retain relative power within the corporation’ (Gupta and Govindarajan, 2000: 475),

180    p. kern, p. almond, t. edwards, and o. tregaskis resulting in potential donors being reluctant to share their unique knowledge. Their empirical results were ambiguous, however, quite possibly because their measure of the motivational disposition was confined to how the subsidiary president’s bonus was constructed as a proxy for the unit’s motivation—a rather blunt tool to assess the factor in question. Similarly, Asmussen et al. (2013) review a number of potential barriers to effective knowledge transfer, including the level of ‘distrust’ in the relationship between units. Both of these studies concentrate on the aggregate organizational level, thereby ignoring the variety of actors that is relevant. While there is some limited reference in such studies to the contested nature of transfer, this is not followed through fully in the empirical work. Overall, this research has demonstrated that knowledge does not readily transfer and that the attributes of senders and receivers (or different units in an organization) are important antecedents of transfer outcomes. However, it is limited in its treatment of the social dynamics of the causal mechanisms at play. It has not been especially revealing concerning the contexts that globalizing actors inhabit, the skills they need, or contestation between actors. More recent contributions have begun to shift the focus to the micro-foundations of ­knowledge creation and transfer, highlighting the need to move from treating MNCs in general and subsidiaries in particular as largely homogeneous groups of staff to seeing them as comprising multiple groups whose interests sometimes diverge.

International Assignments While the ‘knowledge transfer’ literature in MNC research is only in part focused on individual actors, the second strand is concerned precisely with this group. The mainstay of the international HRM area is the study of those on international assignments. This literature is rooted in the seminal work of Edström and Galbraith (1977), who identified the key role played by expatriates in controlling and coordinating between various units (HQ and subsidiaries) of MNCs, and in particular how they transfer knowledge and perform strategic functions. The interest of this literature has been with expatriates as a group, their career patterns and the roles they play (Bonache et al., 2007). One issue dealt with in this literature is the vexed question of whether international assignments have a high failure rate. For many years, there appeared to be a consensus that international assignments commonly failed, i.e. the assignee returned prematurely (for contrasting views, see Forster, 1997; Harzing, 1995). Recent research into ‘expatriate failure’ has explored particular sources or types of problem, such as breaches of the psychological contract in explaining expatriate behaviour (Kumarika Perera et al., 2017). A second issue is what it takes to be ‘multicultural’ (Fitzsimmons, 2013) or ‘bicultural’ (Zhang, 2015). This is often defined as individuals who have more than one cultural schema, who identify with more than one culture. This work has distinguished between bicultural behaviours (such as knowing how to fit in with local manners, speaking the language, and being appropriately deferential or assertive), and going deeper by ‘­internalizing the values of the host country culture’ (Zhang, 2015: 76). A third issue is

multinational and transnational organizations    181 employer strategies in using international assignments. For instance, Gong (2003) has argued that Japanese MNCs have a greater use of parent country nationals in culturally distant subsidiaries, and that they tend to decrease their use of them over time as the information asymmetry problem associated with cultural distance decreases. Fourth, research has thrown light on the changing nature of such assignments (Shaffer et al., 2012). Collings et al. (2007) point to multiple types of international assignment, arguing that the notion of a long-term expatriate manager is outdated. They highlight the importance of short-term international assignments, frequent flyer assignments, commuter and rotational assignments, and global virtual teams. Indeed, international assignments are often short-term in nature and only rarely part of a coherent career plan (Forster, 1997). A connected strand of literature is that on international mobility. It is concerned with recruitment, retention, and repatriation of internationally mobile staff—and the ­barriers arising. It is often situated in the field of economic geography and therefore tends to consider questions of spatiality and how expatriates benefit from, and contribute to, the cities, networks, and organizations they inhabit. Parts of this work have focused on linking international mobility to the knowledge transfer literature. Adopting Bartlett and Ghoshal’s (1998) seminal typology of MNCs (multinational, global, ­international, transnational), Beaverstock (2004) analyses the role of expatriation in ­knowledge management through empirical evidence from professional service legal firms. He finds that expatriation plays an important role by enabling such firms to ‘develop, manage and diffuse idiosyncratic knowledge from the centre to the subsidiaries, and between all units in the network, with the major objectives being to service the client and increase profitability, and market share’ (Beaverstock, 2004: 174). Different expatriation typologies were evident depending on the region of the globe: in East Asia, a ‘multinational’ typology was found, with knowledge flowing only one way to the foreign subsidiary with important roles taken by expats; in Europe and North America a ‘transnational’ typology was found, with network relationships dispersing the ­knowledge created and diverse management actors and the creation of ‘transnational communities’ within the company. Research on international assignments contributes to our understanding of the individual capabilities that those on international assignments need when working in unfamiliar national settings. However, there are three limitations. First, while it has told us something about the nature of the assignments (e.g. short-term or commuting), it is not sufficiently grounded in the material job context. Second, large parts of this literature do not say much about the corporate contexts within which these actors operate and how they strategize and contest the positions of others. In this sense, the first two problems are linked; it is not a depersonalized approach as was the case with foundational work in the knowledge transfer literature, but it is often a rather decontextualized approach. Third, while there has been work on the differences in cultural values between expatriates and locals, little attention has been paid to the cultural norms which management ideas and practices are embedded in. Consequently, it is lacking systematic consideration or conceptualization of ideas, norms, and institutions.

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Global Elites The third strand shares the focus on individuals adopted by the second, but is pitched at a different level through a focus on elites. Largely addressed by sociologists, there has been a debate concerning the extent to which elites in society are now organized on a global basis. Some argue that there is a coherent and influential class of executives, politicians, regulators, and advisers who share an interest in the globalization project and who identify with global ways of doing things, becoming detached from national capitalisms. Sklair (2002) argued that these developments have led to the existence of a ‘transnational capitalist class’ which manages global rather than national patterns of economic activity and has an orientation that is largely detached from particular ­territories and politics (see also Carroll and Sapinski, 2010). Others argue that those running big companies are strongly enmeshed in national economies. For instance, Harvey and Maclean argue that ‘elite organisation and networking are still very different [in France and the UK]’. Indeed, they make the case that their ‘research points overwhelmingly not to convergence, but rather to continuing diversity among national business systems, to the persistence of national distinctiveness and the strength of cultural reproduction’ (Harvey and Maclean, 2008: 117). In a similar vein, Andreotti et al. (2013) investigated the material elements of the working lives of senior managers across several European cities. This included the extent of their experience of working in different countries, how much they travel, where they get news from, the spread of their friendship networks, and membership of associations. They found that the vast majority had strong links with the country, and in some respects city, in which they had their primary base, arguing that ‘the image of free-floating, upper-middle-class workers, suspended in their transnational networks, is very different from the managers’ actual lives’ (Andreotti et al., 2013: 42). This is not to say that individuals who are rooted in particular communities are not becoming more mobile. Andreotti et al. (2013) highlighted the way in which many of their research subjects were part of ‘virtual transnational’ networks, heavily reliant on digital technologies. Accordingly, Savage et al. (2005) argue that increasing mobility and exposure to new networks throws up fresh opportunities and can lead to changes in how individuals relate to their original community. This behaviour can also be understood as ‘partial exit’ strategies, with actors simultaneously experiencing greater mobility whilst seeking to hold ‘on to the reins of power in their local communities’ (Andreotti et al., 2013: 41). Explicitly linking the global elites literature with research on international assignments, a strand of work has analysed expatriates as a class and the wider impact they have on the locales and societies they inhabit. For instance, Beaverstock (2002) has examined transnational elites of expatriates in international financial centres (IFCs) and argues that they are ‘major agents in the accumulation and transfer of financial ­knowledge in the IFC, and that such processes are undertaken through expatriate global-local knowledge networks and other social practices’ (2002: 525). Beaverstock

multinational and transnational organizations    183 (2005) has also shown how expatriates reproduce ‘transnationality’ in major financial centres through their career paths, mobility, and their professional and social networks. Put differently, expatriates constitute a class of elites that plays an important role in spreading knowledge, ideas, and norms across borders and establishing them within their professional environment. This work documents what actors do through tracking the material elements to their work. It therefore avoids the dangers of the depersonalized and decontextualized approaches that related to, respectively, parts of the knowledge transfer and ­international assignments literatures. Moreover, some of this literature has shed light on how globalizing actors form international networks without giving up their original national identities, and how they play a part in creating new global norms within their professional environment. However, the focus on elites is different from our own level of ­analysis. We focus on those who initiate and drive the creation and dissemination of new ideas and global norms affecting work within organizations. Those among ‘elites’ are generally not doing this; they may be shaping the rules of global and national capitalism by, for example, coordinating with their peers in other countries or ‘exporting’ norms to other countries, but this is more at the macro level. In other words, this body of work does not provide a conception of the environment inhabited by the globalizing actors who are likely to establish norms related to everyday organizational practices.

Bringing Context and Person Back Into Focus The international management literature contains some important insights on the question we are interested in here—how MNCs transfer their organizational norms of practice across borders and thereby act as conduits for spreading management ideas. We have argued that our focus should be on the people actually involved in creating, disseminating, or challenging such global norms, and how they do so within their ­organizational and institutional contexts. While we consider a broad range of roles that such globalizing actors may inhabit, our primary focus is on those in managerial roles. The three strands of the literature we have discussed so far do this only to a limited extent, prompting us to consider relevant contributions from a wider range of research. To this end, we turn to work related to how actors interact with multiple organizational and institutional domains, and how they navigate these through social identity, power resources, and other personal capabilities. Integrating work on these issues allows us to move closer to a better conceptualization of globalizing actors and, consequently, the globalization of organizational norms including those embedded in management ideas.

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MNCs in their Professional and Institutional Context Researchers within organization studies, and sometimes economic geography, have addressed the ways in which contestation, power, and social structures are crucial to how MNCs operate in general and to how novel practices are transferred in particular. One aspect to this work has shown how actors in senior positions create, influence, and exploit a homogenized corporate context. For instance, Faulconbridge and Muzio (2012) set out their notion of a ‘transnational sociology of the professions’, one element of which was the rise of the global professional service firm. In many areas of business services, such firms provide a ‘vehicle for the sustained interaction between different national varieties of professionalism and the rescaling of the mechanisms of the control of production of and by the producers’ (Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2012: 143). The actors driving these developments at firm level interact with ‘supra-national governance actors’ towards further strengthening the ability of those within firms to adopt a common strategy across borders. This could include working with those at EU level on such issues as reciprocal recognition of national qualifications across the Union, allowing those in certain professions to work in other EU member states. Applying these ideas in the context of English law firms in Italy, Faulconbridge and Muzio (2016) argue that following the acquisition of Italian firms, the English parents undertook a policy of ‘field relocation’. This involved a series of organizational tactics that presented a way of circumventing local institutions that did not fit with the globalized ‘one firm’ model (see also Boussebaa, 2015). This indicates that a key skill that globalizing actors need to possess and utilize is the ability to navigate effectively through national and supranational institutional configurations. While such research often points to the ways in which organizations and the globalizing actors within them can avoid institutional arrangements, it raises the question to what extent they can actively shape their institutional environment. Seabrooke (2014b) argues that the power of professionals (and professional service firms) to exert influence on transnational policy and institutions can be linked to a micro-level process termed ‘identity switching’. This refers to actors switching between various network domains they are part of, such as their identity as a member of a corporation, a policy entrepreneur, a social activist, or a scientific expert. Within each identity, they can draw on their experience, knowledge, and social ties from other identities to bolster their claims on what constitutes appropriate knowledge and meaningful action regarding the issue at stake. This process is referred to as ‘epistemic arbitrage’ and enhances professionals’ authority on knowing an issue well and what should be done about it. Seabrooke (2014a) argues that organizations have demand for epistemic arbitrage, either from managers seeking to control knowledge production or firms seeking to standardize across borders based on expert advice. Epistemic arbitrage enables transnational professionals to build stronger networks in the domain concerned and influence decisions for their strategic advantage. Examples of this behaviour include the ‘revolving door’ between politics, regulators, and academics, or in setting emerging agendas such as the ‘Tax Justice Network’ that is influencing EU and G8 tax reform. While much of the work on o ­ rganizations

multinational and transnational organizations    185 and professionals affecting their institutional environment has focused on purposive institutional entrepreneurship, more recent research has also considered how day-to-day practices can lead to institutional change. Smets et al. (2012) develop a practice-driven model of institutional change based on their study of English and German lawyers in a newly-created international law firm, who in an effort to integrate their services across countries effected change in conflicting field-level institutional logics. Along similar lines, Henriksen and Seabrooke (2016: 723) examine how transnational institutions are organized and suggest that transnational organizing occurs through ‘semi-autonomous interactions between professionals and organizations’, within and between professional and organizational networks. ‘Issue professionals’ move between these two levels of networks, competing and cooperating over control of issues. This work on practice-driven institutional change and issue professionals and their role in shaping global norms provides micro-level granularity to how MNCs incrementally shape their institutional environment—an issue of increasing focus in the institutional change literature (Kern, 2016). The increasing application of institutional approaches to understanding MNCs has also attracted criticism. Kostova et al.’s (2008) influential article argues that much of the literature has adopted concepts from neo-institutional theory (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991), such as organizational field, isomorphism, legitimacy, and decoupling, without critical reflection of their suitability to the MNC context. The special conditions of MNCs—fragmented and potentially conflicting external environments due to operating across borders and complex internal environments due to diverse languages, cultures, and power struggles—limit the applicability of neo-institutional concepts (Kostova et al., 2008). Indeed, as an ecological rather than actor-centred approach, neo-institutionalism is unable to adequately deal with power and control-related issues (Ferner and Tempel, 2006). Instead, Kostova et al. (2008: 1001) advocate that concepts from ‘old’ institutionalism could usefully be incorporated and combined with neo-institutional concepts: ‘Rather than being merely exogenous constraints that organizations have to consider, institutions are considered as enacted and socially constructed shared understandings and as outcomes of a social process in which the organization and its subunits and actors are actively involved.’ In other words, they argue for affording MNCs a much more active role in shaping their institutional environment than typical neo-institutionalist approaches allow, shifting more towards agency than structure.

Intra-Organizational Dynamics of Idea and Norm Adoption While a focus on strategizing at the corporate level reveals how firms interact with their environment, it tends to treat firms as reified entities rather than complex constellations of individuals and groups with divergent interests. It therefore needs to be complemented with a recognition of how new ideas are taken up and adapted to the organizational context, allowing for patterns of resistance and deviance at subsidiary or workplace level to these emerging norms.

186    p. kern, p. almond, t. edwards, and o. tregaskis New management ideas may be taken up by an organization from a range of sources, including their peers, consultancies, and management experts. Research in ­organization studies suggests that firms adopt the ideas and behaviours of their peers for the legitimacy created by blending in with others; the status that comes with adopting perceived best practice; reduction of uncertainty; and the taken-for-granted nature of some behaviours (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991). Professional services firms and the consulting services they offer represent a special case of peers—they are MNCs that often need to solve similar organizational problems as other companies, but that are in the business of selling solutions through new management ideas. In other words, they specialize in knowledge transfer among MNCs. Management experts or ‘gurus’ are another source of novel ideas (Groß et al., 2014). Once new ideas and practices reach an organization, the question arises how they are taken up and adapted to the context and requirements of the firm. A strand of work rooted largely in Scandinavian institutionalism has examined this issue. Ansari et al. (2010) develop a framework of variation in practices as they spread and are implemented, which takes the fit between practice and adopter based on technical, cultural, and political factors into account to predict timing and form of practice adaptation. Similarly, Reay et al. (2013) provide further micro-level detail through their model of how ideas are translated into workplace practices through habitualization processes that connect micro-level behaviour to organizational-level strategizing. While this line of work offers a useful conception of how ideas and knowledge become translated into corporate practice, it is not focused on the specificities of MNCs—bridging diverse cultural and institutional contexts makes them more prone to internal conflict and resistance to particular new ideas or practices when they clash with local context. Research within the organization studies field has examined MNCs more explicitly by studying ways in which local actors use sources of power to contest the control or influence from higher levels of management. This has led some to characterize the MNC as a ‘contested terrain’ (Edwards and Bélanger, 2009). Geppert and Dörrenbacher (2014) adopt a socio-political perspective that highlights the career patterns of key actors together with their ambitions, resource mobilization strategies and their political sensemaking approaches. They argue that ‘global “best practices” always need to be locally adapted which involves often lively and dynamic political activities of key actors, making the MNC, once again, a “contested terrain” (Geppert and Dörrenbächer, 2014: 235). This work builds on a tradition of research on strategizing and resistance within MNCs (Ferner et al., 2004), which, however, did not have a specific focus on the career patterns of individuals. Operating in a different tradition but examining a similar issue, Kostova and Roth (2002) analyse how institutional pressures affect the adoption of organizational practices and to what extent subsidiaries push back against HQ-enforced practices that do not fit the local institutional environment. They argue that subsidiaries find themselves subject to ‘institutional duality’, i.e. isomorphic pressures of conforming both to the MNC/HQ as well as the host country. Adopting an active agency perspective, they propose a model that allows for symbolic or ceremonial adoption of the imposed practice

multinational and transnational organizations    187 which the subsidiary has to adopt in order to comply with the HQ, but sees the practice as incompatible with local demands. Institutions are seen to influence adoption of practices through exerting direct influence (pressuring the subsidiary to adopt a practice irrespective of HQ demands) and through subsidiary employees, who are described as ‘carriers of institutions’. While Kostova and Roth (2002) thus acknowledge that employees play a role in the adoption of organizational practices, their analysis remains firmly on the sub-unit level. They do not focus on individual actors, their diversity, or the ­variety of roles they might play. However, their work does show how the adoption of ­organizational practices is institutionally bound, which has important implications for the spread of new management ideas (Almond and Gonzalez Menendez, 2014): if ideas are incompatible with the local institutional environment, subsidiaries are likely to resist their adoption or adopt only symbolically (Ferner et al., 2012; Guillén, 1994). Indeed, some argue that overt attempts at control can lead to the emergence and use of new ideas in response (Barley and Kunda, 2011), suggesting that coercion is unlikely to succeed if globalizing actors seek to create truly global norms. A related line of research concerns the expectations and perceptions formed in the relationship between HQs and subsidiaries. Kostova and Roth (2003) apply a social capital approach to understanding informal HQ–subsidiary coordination and control mechanisms. Social capital is defined here as ‘the benefits that social actors derive from their social structures’ (Kostova and Roth, 2003: 297). They distinguish between private and public social capital, the former primarily benefiting the individual who possesses it, the latter as a feature of successful communities creating benefits for all members. The required levels and form of social capital vary with the type of interdependence between HQ and subsidiary and thus the model of MNC. Social capital is seen to be formed through a micro-macro process relying heavily on ‘boundary-spanning individuals’ whose private social capital is transformed into unit-level public social capital. Kostova and Roth (2003: 304) define a boundary spanner as ‘an individual employed at a subunit who currently has, or has previously had, direct contact(s) with a headquarters representative (or representatives)’. These are not limited to managers but include anyone with direct HQ contact, such as engineers and salespeople. Boundary spanners form social capital through personal interactions with HQ staff, forming beliefs and attitudes about them and the wider HQ. In turn, these beliefs and attitudes, which could include views on HQ’s willingness to cooperate with or coerce the subsidiary, are shared amongst subsidiary employees and thereby transform the boundary spanner’s private social capital into a public good within the subsidiary. The same processes also occur in the other direction. Boundary spanners therefore play an important role in shaping the nature of the relationship between HQ and subsidiaries, which has implications for the extent to which norm creation and idea diffusion is a uni- or bi-directional process. While Kostova and Roth (2003) apply the concept of boundary spanners to the between-unit interactions within MNCs, the wider literature on boundary spanners does not have an explicit MNC focus. Here, boundary spanners are conceptualized as individuals whose roles link their organization to its environment, differentiating between their information processing function (filtering and interpreting information

188    p. kern, p. almond, t. edwards, and o. tregaskis from the external environment) and external representation function (responding to environmental influences by adapting, compromising, or resisting) (Aldrich and Herker, 1977). Boundary spanners’ effectiveness has been linked to the extensiveness of their personal networks internally and externally, perceived technical expertise, and interpersonal skills in relating to different stakeholder groups (Tushman and Scanlan, 1981). More recent work on boundary spanners has examined their role in shaping the capacity of organizations to absorb new knowledge (Jones, 2006), and the different roles they play in managing and mediating knowledge flowing into the o ­ rganization from external management consultancies (Sturdy and Wright, 2011). There is substantial overlap between the concept of boundary spanners in MNCs and that of globalizing actors, but they are not equivalent. If we follow Kostova and Roth’s (2003) definition of boundary spanners in MNCs, they are primarily characterized by their day-to-day contact with other constituent parts of the MNC. The defining characteristic of globalizing actors, however, is that they have a role in creating or influencing norms across the MNC. Having day-to-day contact with other sub-units may have norm-shaping impact, even if only in subtle ways, but some boundary spanners may lack the power (due to nature of role or lack of social capital) to affect cross-border norms. In other words, boundary spanning individuals are not always globalizing actors. If we take a narrow focus on managers, then it is more likely that boundary spanners are also globalizing actors in our sense, as they will have managerial duties that likely include implementing HQ-mandated policies, or to feed back to HQ from their local operations. Similarly, not all globalizing actors are necessarily boundary spanners in the sense of this literature; managers in the HQ may have no regular contact with subunits, but the ideas, knowledge, or norms they create may nevertheless be spread across the organization through administrative means or at the behest of senior management.

The Role of Individuals in Corporate Decision-Making If individuals play an important role in mediating the relationship between a firm and its environment, and between various constituent parts of the MNC, the wider question emerges how individuals affect corporate decision-making and thus change. The issue selling literature examines how managers attract attention from superiors to influence decisions in their favour. Issue selling can be defined as ‘the process by which i­ ndividuals affect others’ attention to and understanding of the events, developments and trends that have implications for organizational performance’ (Dutton et al., 2001: 716). Drawing on a range of different ‘moves’, players affect top management’s attention and time, shaping, in turn, organizational actions and changes. Dutton and Ashford’s (1993) seminal work theorized three categories of issue selling moves: ‘packaging’ refers to relating issues to wider organizational issues, ‘involvement’ relates to how issue sellers engage others in their effort, and ‘process’ refers to the use of formal procedures and timing of the intervention. Later work (Dutton et al., 2001) analysed these moves’ real-world relevance and efficacy, finding issue selling to be a highly political and commitment-building process.

multinational and transnational organizations    189 This requires sellers to have deep knowledge of the organization and its norms, and social networks to build support and to choose whom to sell to—‘a combination of relational, normative, and strategic knowledge’ (Dutton et al., 2001: 730). This also resonates with research on organizational change (e.g. Buchanan and Badham, 1999) and work on what might be seen as professional issue sellers—management consultants and their various forms of rhetoric (Sturdy, 1997). Issue selling is dependent on context, i.e. whether issue sellers deem circumstances to be favourable to sell an issue. Dutton et al. (1997) show that context is affected positively when top management is open to suggestions and listens, and when there is a supportive culture, but affected negatively by concern over negative consequences such as personal image risk, when the firm is downsizing, or when faced with uncertainty. Insider–outsider group dynamics also influence how issue sellers assess the favourability of the organizational context (see also below). Examining selling of gender equity issues, Dutton et al. (2002: 359) found that the willingness of female managers to raise such issues hinged on the exclusivity of the corporate culture, i.e. ‘the degree to which i­ ndividuals believe that they are excluded from interacting with a dominant in-group (in this case, men)’. Women are hence unlikely to raise and attempt to sell gender equality issues when they see the tables as stacked against them. This has important implications for our understanding of the creation and dissemination of new management ideas: members of outsider groups are unlikely to champion ideas and practices that challenge insider– outsider divisions or do not resonate with cultural norms (Guillén, 1994). More recent work on issue selling has sought to apply it to the specific context of MNCs. Ling et al. (2005) develop a model in which subsidiary managers seek to steer the attention of top management at HQ towards issues. They argue that the subsidiary managers’ cultural environment shapes the extent to which contextual cues influence their issue selling intention and what issue selling strategies they use. Conroy and Collings (2016) investigate how subsidiaries use different forms of legitimacy to increase positive attention and decrease negative attention from HQs. Seeking attention from HQ is seen as competitive among subsidiaries which thereby gain material resources to boost their performance and future prospects. At the same time, subsidiaries seek to avoid negative attention in the form of direct or indirect interventions that destroy value at the subsidiary level, such as increased monitoring and control, expatriate deployment, or mandate removal. Conroy and Collings (2016) argue that subsidiary managers draw on three forms of legitimacy—personal legitimacy of subsidiary managers, consequential legitimacy vis-à-vis other subsidiaries, and linkage legitimacy from the subsidiary’s local environment—to reduce the risk of attracting negative HQ attention when seeking positive attention. We can expect globalizing actors to engage regularly in issue selling behaviour as part of their norm creation and dissemination activities. The literature suggests that these are highly political in nature and subject to organizational and cultural constraints, requiring globalizing actors to draw on their personal networks, social status within the firm, knowledge of the organization, and skills in deploying a number of ‘moves’ to successfully sway other decision-makers.

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Conclusion By integrating management ideas in the fabric of corporate knowledge and practice, MNCs can play a crucial role in transforming nascent ideas into global organizational norms. The competing pressures to standardize practices as much as possible, while adapting to local differences as much as necessary, is an important way in which MNCs contribute to the diffusion and translation of ideas, knowledge, and norms across borders. We argued that we still lack a coherent understanding of the individuals or ‘globalizing actors’ involved in these processes. We conceptualized globalizing actors as individuals within organizations who play a significant role in creating, disseminating, or challenging norms of corporate practice at the international level. Our analysis of the existing international management literature shows a range of conceptual resources that are useful in exploring these actors. However, we argued that overall, it has not yet developed a systematic focus on individuals and their complex transnational environments. Future research therefore needs to develop a sociologically informed perspective on individuals and their roles in generating, promoting, disseminating, and negotiating ideas within the international firm. This should be based on a materialist approach, that is, it needs to analyse what ‘globalizing actors’ actually do, and the multiple contexts within which they operate. In dealing with these contexts, research would also benefit from a more sustained engagement with concepts developed outside the neo-institutionalist frame which has tended to dominate research on policy transfer with MNCs. In particular, dialogue with broader literatures on the creation, ‘cascading’, and eventual possible broad acceptance of norms, and the platforms that individuals and ­organizations use to promulgate such norms, may be fruitful. This has been developed in the international relations literature (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998) and also has some parallels with neoGramscian approaches (e.g. Levy and Egan, 2003) in moving towards combining a treatment of organizational, institutional, and ideological pillars of power. Finally, is it possible to speculate about the substance of ideas which may be strategically selected by corporate actors for internationalization? The MNCs literature tends to suggest that international ‘norm entrepreneurs’ have often tended to attempt to internationalize ideas originally developed as responses to concerns in dominant countries. Corporate ‘diversity’ is a clear case of this, as has been the internationalization of ideas about human resource management borrowing from liberal American norms (systematic performance management, etc.) and also from Japanese norms of production and quality control. At the same time ‘codifiable’ ideas about managerial systems tend to be easier to internationalize than those that are strongly context-dependent. This partially explains why ‘American’ ideas about management have internationalized more easily than, for example, those from economically successful but institutionally dense countries such as Germany. The future of such ideas is obviously uncertain, given current and developing economic, social, political, and environmental challenges. However, uncovering the ideas underpinning the models of management of globalizing firms from outside the Global North, and how these may challenge existing normative

multinational and transnational organizations    191 understandings, is a worthy and necessary theoretical endeavour of future actor-centred research within international firms.

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chapter 10

busi n e ss m edi a from gatekeeping to transmediality Marcos Barros and Charles-Clemens Rüling

Business Media: From Gatekeeping to Transmediality Previous literature has emphasized the role of traditional business media in the creation, transmission, and consumption of management ideas. Yet, although many publications have shed light on specific media roles and groups (e.g. Alvarez et al., 2005; Engwall et al., 2016; Furusten, 1999; Nijholt et al., 2014), a theoretical framework allowing us to understand the impact of Internet technology and social media is still missing. This chapter proposes an integration of previous business-media research, which is relatively fragmented and lacks a discussion of important changes in the media field over the past decade. We discuss how these transformations have weakened traditional gatekeeping roles, into which Internet technologies have enabled new kinds of business media (e.g. social-media platforms) to emerge. We argue that growing technological convergence is leading to transmediality and multimodality—respectively, the movement of content through different types of media, and its translation into different sign systems (text, video, images etc.)—in producing and disseminating management ideas. We first provide an overview of previous business-media research, then introduce the concept of ‘media logic’ (Altheide and Snow, 1979). Next, we contrast traditional business-media logics with social media and the overall tendency towards technological convergence. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for future research on business-media and management ideas.

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Business-Media Research Building on long-standing interest in the development of management knowledge (e.g. Barley et al.,  1988; Barley and Kunda,  1992), business-media research has addressed three main areas since the mid-1990s: the historical development and broader societal influence of business media, their impact on organizations, and their role in the production, diffusion, and consumption of management knowledge. Business-media studies point to an increasing influence of media in the business world, reflecting a growing ‘mediatization’ of contemporary societies (Hellgren et al., 2002; Ihlen and Pallas, 2014); they emphasize that business media play a critical role in developing management ideas (Engwall et al., 2016; Mazza and Alvarez, 2000). Business media have contributed to the emergence of a global management-knowledge industry (Ainamo et al., 2006), fuelling a massive expansion of management knowledge and the emergence of popular management culture (Kjær and Langer, 2005; Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002; Wood and Paes de Paula, 2008). In interaction with the development of business schools and management consultancy, business media contributed to the commodification of management ideas (Engwall et al., 2016), reflecting a global ideological shift towards managerial capitalism (Furusten, 1999; Kjær and Langer, 2005) and a crisis of traditional forms of formal knowledge (Alvarez et al., 1999; Lischinsky, 2008; Mazza and Alvarez, 2000). The development of broad-audience business media (e.g. newspapers, magazines, and books) has played an important role here—undergoing professionalization, increasingly weighing on managers and ­organizations, and becoming actors in the development of management ideas.

Historical Development of Business Media A first stream of business-media research focuses on business media as organizations, fields, and professions. Two types of media have attracted attention in this tradition: business press/journalism and management books. The first business newspapers and magazines—such as The Economist, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal—were established in the nineteenth century (1843, 1888, and 1889, respectively) to provide market information and to support liberal economic ideas (Engwall et al., 2016). As the business press expanded after the 1920s, and particularly after the Second World War, business journalism ‘comprising specific newspapers and magazines dealing with economic, business or management issues’ established itself as a unique field within the news media (Ainamo et al., 2006: 617). From the 1960s onwards, business journalism shifted from simple reporting towards more elaborate content and an increasingly important role for business journalists and for well-known business newspapers and magazines (Grafström, 2006; Kjær and Langer, 2005). Ainamo et al. (2006) showed that business journalism in Cold War Finland

business media: from gatekeeping to transmediality    197 became increasingly professionalized after the 1970s, giving business journalists an active role in promoting financial capitalism and market economy. Besides mediahistoric questions regarding the development and professionalization of the business press in particular regions (e.g. Ainamo et al., 2006; Alvarez et al., 1999; Grafström, 2006), previous work focusing on the business press emphasizes the interconnection between business media and the development of society-wide collective norms and ideologies—leading, for example, to a change in attitude to corporations (Pallas and Fredriksson, 2013). More recently, research has also addressed the internal practices of business-media organizations, focusing on editorial norms and decision-making procedures within business magazines (e.g. Nijholt et al., 2014). As a second media type, management books—in particular guru-authored bestsellers— have attracted attention from business-media scholars. From the early twentieth century, publishing houses such as Wiley (founded in 1807) or Harper (in 1817) played an important role in the diffusion of early management ideas, especially the writings of Frederick Taylor (Engwall et al.,  2016). After a period of limited growth during the interwar period, the number of management book publications (including textbooks to address the needs of the growing management education sector) greatly increased after the late 1950s (Engwall et al., 2016), culminating in the 1980s in the publication of influential management bestsellers such as In Search of Excellence (1982) by Peters and Waterman, and a series of autobiographies by CEOs like Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca (Iacocca and Novak,  1984) and Apple’s John Sculley (Sculley and Byrne,  1987) (Freeman, 1985; Furusten, 1999). While early critical voices deplored ‘thousands of readers a day loosening their purse strings to buy their dollops of management wisdom’ (Freeman, 1985: 345), management bestsellers provided unprecedented visibility to ‘standardized ideological representations of managerial life’ (Furusten, 1999: 119), helping their authors to gain the status of ‘management gurus’ (Clark and Salaman, 1996; Huczynski, 1993; Jackson, 1996). Management ideas put forward by management bestsellers were characterized by their normative stance, emphasis on practical relevance, and reliance on personal accounts and success stories, using simple arguments and metaphors to appeal to broad audiences (Clark and Greatbatch, 2004; Furusten, 1999). By adopting an enthusiastic view of the business world, of managerial abilities, and of the possibilities of organizational transformation (Freeman, 1985: 347), management books contributed to standardizing managerial discourse and diffusing packaged management approaches (Gill and Whittle, 1992), as well as to establishing and reproducing a new social order (Furusten, 1999), sustaining the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ and the neutralization of critique in contemporary societies (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). The increasing importance of the Internet since the mid-1990s, together with the growing integration of Internet services and the business press since the turn of the century, has been hinted at in previous research (e.g. Engwall, et al., 2016; Mazza and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2004). This emphasizes the need to develop a better understanding of how the increasing integration of traditional and electronic media transforms the

198    m. barros and c.-c. rüling business-media landscape (Alvarez et al.,  2005: 131), questioning established actors’ positions and access to content (Engwall et al., 2016), as well as the nature of management knowledge itself.

Business-Media Impact on Organizations The second stream of business-media research focuses on the impact of business media on organizations, and (less so) on how organizations respond to media influence. Its main theoretical emphasis is on business media as organizational stakeholders, as constructors of reputation (Deephouse, 2000; Deephouse and Heugens, 2009), and as sources of support for internal and external change agents (Birkinshaw et al., 2008). Business media are seen as information intermediaries (‘infomediaries’) that play a central role in the growing mediatization of corporations by linking organizations to larger societal issues (Deephouse and Heugens, 2009; Ihlen and Pallas, 2014; Pallas and Fredriksson, 2013). Business media impact the construction of corporate legitimacy (Ihlen and Pallas, 2014; Vaara et al., 2006) as well as the evaluation and discursive legitimization of corporate practices such as organizational structures (Pollock and Rindova, 2003) or corporate restructuring (Vaara et al., 2006). Media reputation, defined as ‘the overall evaluation of a firm presented in the media’, functions as a firm-level strategic resource influencing other stakeholders and their opinions about a firm (Deephouse, 2000: 1099). An oftencited early study (Chen and Meindl, 1991: 543) showed how the popular press enhances ‘the reporting of hard, factual news . . . via soft constructions of various organizational processes and attributes, including images of organizational leaders’. This research stream ties into the much larger discussion on signalling (e.g. Bergh and Gibbons, 2011; Spence, 1974) and on legitimacy (e.g. Deephouse et al., 2017; Suchman, 1995). The influence of (business) media on organizations is not one-way. The question of firm influence on business media plays a lesser role in the previous literature, but some contributions also identify mechanisms of reverse influence (e.g. Kjær and Langer, 2005; Nijholt et al., 2014). The more general process of mediatization is most often understood as a process of co-construction, involving both media and corporate influence (Pallas and Fredriksson, 2013).

Business Media as Carriers and Co-Producers of Management Ideas The third area of business-media research addresses the role of business media in the production, diffusion, and consumption of management ideas. Early research in this stream emphasized business media as ‘carriers’ or ‘channels’ (see Nijholt et al., 2014, for a review), connecting management-knowledge producers such as gurus, consultants, and

business media: from gatekeeping to transmediality    199 academics with its consumers. Business media ‘carry knowledge, ideologies, norms, values, notions, standards and institutions of managerial and organizational life between individuals, organizations and societies’ (Furusten,  1999: 5). Media-specific forms of textuality strip management ideas of their contextual elements and enable them to ‘flow’ (Røvik,  2002). Thus, business media not only function as passive transmitters of management ideas, but also engage in ‘translation’ (Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996, 2005), a concept borrowed from actor-network theory (e.g. Callon, 1986) to emphasize that knowledge and practices change as they travel across fields and are adapted to specific contexts (Ansari et al., 2010; Røvik, 2011; Spyridonidis et al., 2016). Later contributions have reinforced the idea that business media play an active part not only in disseminating, but also in producing management ideas (Kjær and Langer, 2005; Mazza and Alvarez, 2000). As gatekeepers, business media select and process ideas (Nijholt et al., 2014), and establish collective beliefs that an idea responds to norms of rationality and progress (Abrahamson, 1996; Ainamo et al., 2006). Not all media play the same role in co-constructing management knowledge. Various media have been shown to produce different types of knowledge (Alvarez et al., 2005; Kjær and Langer, 2005; Raub and Rüling, 2001) and to follow different temporal logics (Rüling, 2005; Spell, 2001). Mass media, for instance, play an important role in the longer-term formation of professional identities (Frenkel, 2005), whereas management books contribute to the standardization of management discourse and practices (Furusten, 1999), and popularization media (such as Harvard Business Review) ‘contextualize scientific knowledge claims into media-specific criteria’ (Schulz and Nicolai, 2015: 34), enabling them to feed back into both managerial practice and scholarly debates. Taken together, studies into media as carriers and co-producers of management ideas have shed light on their role in translating and co-producing management ideas. Business media shape audience expectations, cast ideas in media-specific formats, contribute to constructing legitimacy for ideas and practices, and play an active role in producing content for particular audiences. Most empirical research in this stream focuses on macro-level diffusion (or translation), and researchers have only recently sought to open the ‘black box’ of business media by studying media-specific micro-level processes that drive the construction of management ideas in practice (Nijholt et al., 2014). Previous studies provide important insights into single media (such as business newspapers or management books), but fail to address the production and dissemination of management ideas through connections and interactions between media types. Earlier contributions highlighted the role of connections between various media (Freeman, 1985; Mazza and Alvarez, 2000) and hinted at the growing integration of Internet services and the business press (Engwall et al., 2016; Mazza and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2004); however, calls to systematically analyse these phenomena by ‘bridging organizational theory and communication studies’ (Alvarez et al.,  2005: 131) have until now been unheeded. The growth of social media and its consequences for the development of management knowledge have only recently been examined, for example in studies on the role of social-media platforms and new forms of interaction between knowledge producers and consumers in developing management fashions (Madsen and Slåtten, 2015).

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Towards a Media-Theoretical Framework This section advances prior work on business media by joining different strands and proposing a media-theoretical framework. We bring together traditionally unrelated studies of the historical development of business media, impact on organizations, and role in co-producing management ideas. We argue that these elements must come together to explain the current business-media landscape and the multiple nature, role, and impact of different business media related to their distinct cultural, technological, and economic characteristics. We address this challenge first by analysing the specific ‘media logics’ (Altheide and Snow, 1979), characterizing the various traditional media studied in previous research. We propose to draw on work within media theory and particularly the sociology of media (McQuail, 1985) to offer a framework emphasizing the multiple types of businessmedia logic present in previous research. Contributions from the sociology of media have been used in the previous literature on business media; the two literatures share many recent developments, preoccupations, and debates. However, current developments around the multiplicity of media logics (Couldry, 2008; Landerer, 2013) and their interaction merit exploration.

What is Media Logic? The concept of media logic comes from the sociology of media and was proposed by Altheide and Snow (1979). The authors originally built the concept around the evolution of mass media, proposing that the media logic imbued in this phenomenon started to dominate other social, cultural, and political actors. The influence of media logic as the accepted ‘rules of the game’ (Esser, 2013) would establish media companies as the sole actors with the legitimacy to ‘present and interpret institutional phenomena’ (Altheide, 2006: 10). This initial insight was later developed by other authors into the idea of ‘mediatization’, defined as ‘the process whereby society to an increasing degree is submitted to, or becomes dependent on, the media and their logic’ (Hjarvard, 2008: 113). The concepts of media logic and mediatization have been used to discuss social media and their effect on areas like journalism and political communication (Dahlgren, 1996). Additionally, as suggested above, researchers have also proposed that organizations have themselves undergone corporate mediatization (Ihlen and Pallas, 2014; Pallas and Fredriksson, 2013), with media influencing the knowledge, promotion, and overall role of business within modern societies. In essence, we live in a media society (Mazzoleni, 2008) where ‘traditional mass media, as well as the new online media, are pervading all spheres of social life and have thus become the central precondition of exchanges and interactions among individuals and organizations of society’ (Esser, 2013: 155).

business media: from gatekeeping to transmediality    201 Social interactionists have criticized the concept of media logic for its deterministic and linear character (Best, 1992), proposing instead a more nuanced view of its power and evolution. First, critical authors suggest a different portrait of media organizations, not as simple conduits but as organized actors who ‘pursue certain goals and act in the interest of realizing these goals’ (Esser, 2013: 150). Meanwhile, the domination of media over other areas of social interaction has been questioned: audiences may actively participate in and influence content production and interpretation in a dialectical dynamic (Hepp, 2012). While these elements of co-production are also present in the business-media literature, we suggest that media sociologists’ idea of multiple media logics brings an ­important unexplored contribution: different media represent distinct logics reflecting particular cultural, organizational, and technological contexts of production and consumption (Couldry, 2008; Landerer, 2013). According to Hepp (2009: 144), ‘there are different specificities of different media that we have to have in focus’ in order to understand the media landscape and its evolution. Motivated by these questions and by the increasing specialization and commercialization of media (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013), the definition of media logic was importantly transformed. Altheide and Snow (1979) originally equated media logic with the question of format (and not content), representing ‘rules for the recognition, organization, and presentation of information and experience’ (Altheide, 1995: 38) that would in turn influence audiences’ basic assumptions regarding information. The original focus on basic ­elements of news creation was eventually changed by the authors themselves and other media scholars (Altheide, 1985, 1995, 2004; Altheide and Snow, 1991; Dahlgren, 1996). Now, a new perspective on media logics incorporates the influence of diverse ­technological, cultural, and organizational elements on the production, distribution, and consumption of content in different media. Media logic thus represents ‘the particular institutionally structured features of a medium [that impacts] what gets represented in the medium and how it gets done’ (Dahlgren, 1996: 63).

Media Logic and the Evolution of Business Media Based on these ideas, we propose a three-dimensional framework of media logic reflecting contributions from both business-media scholars and media sociologists. The framework distinguishes between cultural-normative aspects, technological affordances, and organizational economic elements (Esser, 2013). Cultural-normative aspects represent the specific purposes, rules, and ethics related to the work of content creators (such as objectivity and closeness to practice). Who counts for each specific media outlet as a ‘real’ producer and what is accepted as legitimate content (Deuze, 2008) are central here. The technological aspect explores the conditions surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of content, pointing to how specific technological affordances govern the producer–consumer relationship (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013). Finally, the economic aspect explores the commercial rationale that

202    m. barros and c.-c. rüling motivates ­organizations leading this process (Klinenberg, 2005), how media monetize their services, and how this impacts their relationships with partners and audiences. We suggest that each aspect of our framework is connected to previous businessmedia research. The cultural-normative aspect links to the historical development of business media through its perspective on the institutionalization of legitimate content and its producers. The technological facet links to the evolving role of these ­organizations as gatekeepers (Nijholt et al., 2014), carriers, or co-producers of management ideas. The economic side mediates the impact of business media on corporations and their more active role in maximizing audience and visibility. The cultural, technological, and economic aspects of media logic are not isolated from each other, but are mutually constituted and not necessarily in harmony. In fact, scholars have commonly noted tensions between media commercialization’s push to maximize audience/visibility and information producers’ professional ethics (e.g. Landerer, 2013). Furthermore, studies on the recent conversion to online media have shown how new technologies impact media professionals and can profoundly change the nature of their work (Hall, 2001). In general, research suggests that business media reach a specific equilibrium over time between different media-logic aspects. During periods of rapid change (such as technological convergence, new forms of ­commercialization, etc.), however, this equilibrium can be destabilized, and contradictions can arise between professional ethos, economic imperatives, and technical characteristics.

Traditional Business-Media Logics and Convergence This section takes up the media-logic framework developed in the previous section to explore four types of traditional business-media logics, and to discuss how ­technological convergence leads to new forms of tensions and contradictions.

Sources and Postures of Legitimate Knowledge Claims We propose two distinct dimensions to explore the cultural-normative aspects of ­traditional business-media logics. At the core of a media logic are claims regarding the legitimacy of knowledge production, specifically the nature of the knowledgeproducer and origin of legitimate content. As a first dimension, we differentiate between claims based on the legitimacy of a media logic itself, and claims based on the recognition of a particular author. Second, we propose to distinguish between stances of distance from the ‘business world’ and of proximity to firms, executives, policymakers, etc. (see Figure 10.1).

business media: from gatekeeping to transmediality    203 Media-based legitimacy

Business news Stance of objectivity and distance

Management magazines

Popularization media Investor newsletters

Stance of proximity and closeness Management books

Author-based legitimacy

Figure 10.1  Sources and postures of legitimate knowledge claims

Media versus author-based legitimacy: The first dimension concerns the origin of legitimacy claims. Some previously analysed media derive their legitimacy claims from the taken-for-grantedness of the media itself. For example, business news has evolved into a highly institutionalized organizational field in which knowledge production is strongly associated with business journalism as a profession (Kjær and Langer, 2005). Outlets such as Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist enjoy high reputation, with their knowledge claims stemming more from the legitimacy of the media than from individual authors. The same holds for management magazines such as Forbes or Bloomberg Businessweek, whose legitimacy is based largely on the respective media’s ability to provide insights into successes and failures of iconic firms, individuals, and management practices. Conversely, in some business media (such as management books and investor newsletters), the legitimacy of knowledge claims is strongly associated with the status, position, or expertise of particular authors. Bestselling management books, for example, are widely regarded by publishers as ‘starbased products’, thriving on author recognition and brand-building (Clark and Greatbatch, 2004: 408). Authors and their knowledge, expertise, or success validate the media-produced knowledge. Successful books in turn help make an author a management guru (Furusten, 1999), often leading to follow-up publications (Clark and Greatbatch, 2004; Freeman, 1985). This also applies to popularization media such as Harvard Business Review, which served as a role model for California Management Review and MIT Sloan Management Review (Engwall et al., 2016), with a high share of authors affiliated with elite business schools, and contributions that emphasize authors’ expertise and authority (as highlighted, for example, in Harvard Business Review’s guidelines for authors).

204    m. barros and c.-c. rüling The degree to which the legitimacy of a knowledge claim is associated with an author or with the media itself has consequences for the technical and economic aspects of the media logic. In the case of media-based legitimacy, high publication frequency seems the norm, and both business news and management magazines are characterized by well-established, recurrent content categories and sections. Economically, media-based legitimacy coincides with a combination of subscription and advertising revenue, ­enabled by publication regularity and subscriber/reader base. Such multisided business models seem more difficult to develop in the case of author-centred business media in which the (partial) dependence on advertising revenue risks undermining an author’s legitimacy. There, complementary monetization strategies—based, for example, on seminars, talks, or consultancy—seem more common. Objectivity and distance versus proximity: The second dimension of traditional ­business-media logics concerns the specific stances taken in relation to knowledge production. Business media using a stance of objectivity and distance emphasize traditional criteria of news quality such as objectivity, independence, and reliability (e.g. Kjær and Langer, 2005), and claim a separation between the media/authors and the object they report on. Content production is entrusted to expert staff journalists who scrutinize and discuss economic, business, and policy issues. Following their professional ethos and standards, journalists carefully avoid conflicts of interest, and most business-news media distinguish between news reporting/editorials by staff authors and commentaries/ op-eds by external authors. This stance is shared by several traditional business media (e.g. business news and investor newsletters) and to some extent also by ­popularization media, which tend to emphasize the foundation of their knowledge claims in systematic scholarly research. Conversely, we find business media that link knowledge production to claims of proximity to corporate initiatives and leaders, revealing the foundations of corporate and managerial success. This logic is present in most management books and magazines that focus on providing first-hand insights into corporate life, uncovering the ‘hidden secrets’ of success. Management books in particular tend to focus on clearly identified, labelled, and packaged sets of ideas and practices—including business process re-engineering (Hammer and Champy, 1993) and the balanced scorecard (Kaplan and Norton, 1996). There, the use of examples and anecdotes advocates particular management solutions as conducive to success. An emphasis on revealing processes and practices ‘behind the scenes’ distinguishes management magazines from the objective, distanced stance of the business press, and makes readers feel exposed to privileged knowledge. This can go hand-in-hand with adopting an explicit opinion or position on an issue, often based on claims of superior knowledge or insight (Chen and Meindl, 1991). The distance-versus-proximity dimension also affects the technical and economic aspects of traditional business-media logics. Most investor newsletters, for example, maintain a stance of distance by rejecting third-party advertising and by adopting an economic model based on revenue from subscriptions (and sometimes from fund management). Conversely, proximity is demonstrated through executives’ endorsements of management books, or through attractive features on organizations’ or individuals’

business media: from gatekeeping to transmediality    205 projects in management magazines. In the latter, this coincides with a more general advertising-driven business logic, whereas the economic model of management books—anchored in a traditional logic of book publishing—instead seeks to complement per-unit sales with revenue from reprints and the sale of international publishing rights; authors ­typically seek to monetize their book success through talks, training seminars, and consultancy. Table 10.1 summarizes the logics of selected traditional business media, contrasting them with Internet and social-media platforms. A defining cultural-normative feature of all traditional business media is their emphasis on playing a gatekeeping role in producing and disseminating management ideas, concomitant with (typically) limited room for audience interaction and feedback, and a lack of recognition of knowledge co-production—although actual corporate influence on business-media knowledge production can be significant (e.g. Grafström, 2006; Kjær and Langer, 2005).

Shifting Business-Media Logics: Internet and Social Media In recent decades, emerging virtual technologies have impacted how information is produced, consumed, and distributed. Consequently, some authors propose the idea of a specific virtual and social-media logic (Dahlgren, 1996; Van Dijck and Poell, 2013) to substitute, complement, and even subvert traditional media logics (Chadwick, 2017). Nevertheless, scholarship has just started to touch upon the impact of social-media tools on the creation, circulation, and adoption of management ideas (Madsen and Slåtten, 2015). Culturally, virtual and social tools transform the distinctions between senders and receivers since, in this technological environment, ‘there is no directional bias’ (Dahlgren, 1996: 65). New forms of co-production and co-consumption (Heusinkveld et al., 2011; Madsen and Slåtten, 2015) suggest a loss of authorial control over management discourse—and so a potential power shift in the field. Furthermore, content dramatically changes from traditional text-based printed material to multimodal content exploiting audio-visual functionalities with a greater focus on connectivity possibilities. Cultural changes in producers and content directly affect the role of media in this new environment. Idealistically, the technology of social media constructs a more democratic space where any user can circulate ideas. Realistically, a relative and inconspicuous gatekeeping power remains relegated to digital platforms (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013). Social-media platforms can ‘trigger and steer users’ creative or communicative contributions’ (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013: 5) as well as influence which connections are established between different contents. Conversely, users maintain an additional degree of agency through which they can try to influence communication flows and information matter. In fact, social media—with its increasing amount and density of information (Dahlgren, 1996)—highlights a new economic measure of impact. The fight for visibility demands that knowledge producers play the game of viral popularity, and use different virtual strategies to boost likes and shares (Madsen and Slåtten, 2015). In this intensified

Table 10.1  Selected business media logics Business news Culturalnormative aspects

Technological aspects

Management magazines

Emphasis on magazines’ Tradition and independability to provide ence ensuring inside views into traditional news corporate life quality (objectivity, Content production independence, based on closeness to reliability, timeliness) featured ­organizations Content production based and issues; focus on on expert knowledge successes and failures of staff journalists; of iconic firms and separation between individuals; importknowledge producers ance of reader and consumers experience Overall cultural-normative Overall cultural-­ logic: media-centred normative logic: legitimacy, stance of media-centred objectivity and distance legitimacy, stance of proximity and closeness Periodical (weekly or Periodical (daily or monthly); idiosyncratic weekly); stable content stories combined with categories (e.g. news established content sections, columns, categories (including editorial and op-eds, firm rankings, financial information) awards . . .) Strong, visible gatekeeping Gatekeeping role role (news selection) moderated by strong Limited visible audience dependence on feedback (letters to the advertising editor, invited op-eds) Limited audience feedback

Management books

Investor newsletters

Popularization media

Social media platforms

Emphasis on successful ­organizations, individuals, and practices Content production based on high prestige authors with intimate knowledge of successful ­organizations and novel management practices Overall cultural-­ normative logic: author-centred legitimacy, stance of proximity and closeness

Advice on market development and firm strategies Content production based on editors’ expertise and ability to outperform established stock market indices Overall cultural-­ normative logic: author-centred legitimacy, stance of objectivity and distance

Emphasis on proposing new concepts and tools for management practice (‘thought leadership’) Content production based on academic research and analysis of ­organizations and management practice Overall cultural-­normative logic: c­ ombination of media and authorcentred legitimacy, stance of objectivity and distance

Disappearance of separations between producers and consumers Content can be produced by anyone Content follows the logic of virality and immediacy Overall cultural-­ normative logic: virality, popularity, connectedness, capacity to attract attention and create a quick impact

Uniqueness of books and event character of publication; development of follow-up publications Strong invisible gatekeeping role of publishers Audience feedback limited to testimonials and examples of successful implementation

Periodical (wide range of periodicities); emphasis on analysis of past trends and forecasts for industries and firm types; in-depth features on selected firms, technologies, or trends One-way diffusion, absence of audience feedback

Periodical (monthly or quarterly); emphasis on single articles and their authors; some recurrent content categories Limited audience feedback; involvement of ­practitioners through commentaries, case studies, and endorsement of methods

Traditional business media gatekeeping role disappears Hidden gatekeeping by social platforms Capacity of actors to influence content and connection

Economic aspects

Circulation-driven business logic; development of large readership; additional revenues through seminars and events

Advertising-driven business logic; additional revenues through seminars and events

Examples

Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist

Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fortune

Per-unit sales revenues combined with reprint and licensing revenues Additional author revenues through talks, ­consultancy, and seminars Reengineering the Corporation (Hammer & Champy, 1993), The Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan and Norton, 1996)

Subscription-based business logic; fund management income

Subscription and reprint driven business logic, limited advertising; additional revenues through book publishing, seminars, and consultancy

Subscription + advertisement (motivated by number of hits, likes, and shares)

Nate’s Notes, The Turnaround Letter, Warren Buffet’s annual Letter to Shareholders

Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review

LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube

208    m. barros and c.-c. rüling competition for attention, a content producer can ‘measure popularity at the same time and by the same means as it tries to influence or manipulate these rankings’ (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013: 7). Rapidly developing Internet technologies enabled the emergence of new kinds of business-media organizations such as social-media platforms (e.g. LinkedIn and The Conversation). These business-specific platforms—and more-general ones (e.g. YouTube and Twitter)—present different types of content (scholarly, practitioner, and popular), actors (scholars, consultants, managers, and the general public), and even degrees of interaction that engender different dynamics of production, diffusion, and consumption (Madsen and Slåtten, 2015). The virtual business media generally entail shorter publishing time-lags, with a quicker and more unstable lifecycle following viral dynamics of the Internet. Meanwhile, they allow for the creation of online niche groups (e.g. LinkedIn Leadership & Organizational Development group) where management ideas and practices can be presented, debated, and disseminated.

Business-Media Logics and Technological Convergence: Towards Transmediality The double nature of the Internet and social media as both business media and core ingredients of recent management ideas (Bergquist et al., 2013) suggests they now form an inescapable part of organizational reality. We propose that the desire to integrate new social technologies into the workplace—together with the legitimacy these have acquired over recent years—fundamentally impacts processes of idea production, dissemination, and consumption, and thus leads to a transformation of the nature, role, and impact of traditional business-media organizations. The current power of social media points towards a growing convergence of business media around Internet technologies. The demands of visibility have impacted how ­traditional business news, management books, and magazines create and format management ideas to better attract a fleeting online audience increasingly concentrated into ‘multiple mini-public spheres’ (Dahlgren, 1996: 69), in which everyone acts as a knowledge-producer, and in which a captive reader population has been substituted by the number of ‘likes’. We believe that increasing technological convergence (Bardoel and Deuze, 2001) is producing tensions in all cultural-normative dimensions (see Table 10.2). Business news and management magazines, which controlled the production of content through media-based legitimacy and explicit editorial gatekeeping, are losing an important part of their power to social platforms influencing trends and content diffusion through more hidden algorithmic regulation. Conversely, author-centred legitimation of content creation in management books and popularization media is also losing its ­dominance to more collective and more distributed forms of knowledge production. In cyberspace, where everyone masters tools of knowledge production and diffusion, the persuasive power of expertise gives way to the intense and dense flow of information

business media: from gatekeeping to transmediality    209

Table 10.2  Traditional business media logics and technological convergence Traditional business media logics

Tensions under conditions of technological convergence

Media-based legitimacy

Emphasis on openness of access and contribution in electronic media contradicts traditional, explicit media gatekeeping roles.

Author-based legitimacy

Multiplicity of authorship in electronic media enters into conflict with beliefs in the superior knowledge of expert authors.

Stance of objectivity and distance

Multiplication of viewpoints and of interpretation of facts in electronic media undermines claims of objective representation of reality.

Stance of intimacy and closeness

Expression of personal experience in electronic media contradicts the assumption that privileged access is scarce.

among multiple potential content creators, consumers, and disseminators (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Social-technology convergence challenges the objectivity claims of business news and popularization media by opposing multiple perspectives and collective interpretations asserting more polysemic management practices and ideas (Aral et al., 2013). Conversely, the claim to exclusive access and inside knowledge cultivated in management books and magazines equally loses its relevance in virtual social space. In fact, the firms and individuals that were traditionally covered by the management magazines also increasingly produce their own accounts of internal processes and experiences for their online audience with no need for traditional intermediaries. The control of business media and content creators over the production of knowledge is not absolute; on the contrary, strategies in line with social-media logic might be used by those actors to influence content creation, diffusion, and consumption. In this battle, transmediality is defined as the unfolding of ideas ‘across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole’ (Jenkins, 2006: 95–6): in other words, the flow of creators, content, and audiences across media becomes a defining feature. Management ideas that have been traditionally created, diffused, and consumed in specific business media now demand to be offered in multiple outlets following different logics. The pressing question for business scholars and practitioners becomes: how do management concepts travel across media, and how are ideas translated (and transformed) when they move back and forth between different business media? Within that question, the element of multimodality—defined as the presence of communicative artefacts and processes that combine various sign systems (Stöckl, 2004), as is typical of social media—increases the complexity of the transfer. As audiences are less attracted to text and turn to attention-gathering formats such as images and videos, management scholars—as well as consultants and gurus—increasingly need to understand how ideas flow not only through different outlets but also through different modalities. This content-type transformation requires new and adapted skills

210    m. barros and c.-c. rüling of ­traditional content producers, who have been trained in crafting texts or presenting orally in non-virtual single-mode environments.

Towards a Renewed Agenda for Business-Media Research Business-media research has focused on particular media and separated questions about the historical development, nature, and institutionalization of business media from inquiries into how business media impact organizations, and from studying the roles and mechanisms by which business media shape the production, dissemination, and consumption of management ideas. Furthermore, many of the theoretical issues dominating business-media research were settled during the noughties. We believe that the time has come to pursue a new research agenda for studying business media and their role in developing management ideas. The concept of media logic—together with our discussion of social media, convergence, transmediality, and multimodality—highlights the necessity of connecting previous research streams to explore the new linkages and interconnections between traditional business media, their interaction with organizations, and their role in developing new kinds of management ideas. Traditionally, gatekeepers (business media, consultants, business schools, etc.) controlled the flow of management ideas for public consumption. Since social media arrived, user-generated content and the platform algorithm challenge gatekeeping control by influencing the production and distribution of knowledge. Business-media research must also address the tensions in business media as ­technological convergence progresses, and as well-established logics (including author and media-based legitimacy, and stances of objectivity/distance and proximity/closeness) come under pressure. Here, key research questions concern how traditional media adapt to convergence; transform media logics; and give rise to new, hybrid forms and formats, constellations of agency, strategies, and skills. This also questions the assumption in much business-media research that the development of management ideas and practices can be meaningfully captured by studying media content. Our discussion in this chapter suggests that the novel media logics might also fundamentally change the nature of management ideas. Here, future research must address to what extent the notion of relatively well-bounded, packaged ideas and practices gives way to thinking about management knowledge as fluid and constantly shifting, as ideas are translated across platforms, formats, audiences, etc. Carefully packaged managerial material gives way to virtual polyphony (and cacophony), creating greater content diversity, and multiplying clusters of specialized practices and ideas. Some theoretical and methodological paths might help researchers explore these new mediascapes of convergence, transmediality, and multimodality—which highlight the

business media: from gatekeeping to transmediality    211 multiplicity of media logics, and the effects of their interaction on how ideas are created, transmitted, and consumed. Theoretically, management researchers might want to collaborate with different disciplines that have been grappling for longer and (we ­suggest) more deeply with the effects of social media on knowledge production and consumption. Important works in the fields of media (Ryan and Thon, 2014) and communication studies (Thurlow and Mroczek, 2011) have been discussing transmediality and multimodality for some time. Methodologically, transmediality and multimodality demand different tools to understand the connectedness, mobility, and multiplicity of current management ideas (see also Strang and Wittrock, in this volume). Therefore, researchers might want to turn first to contemporary online methods that change emphasis from place to movement and invite them to ‘follow the subject’ as it flows (and mutates) in cyberspace. Some options would be network ethnography (Howard, 2002) and topical network analysis (Highfield et al., 2011), where the researcher gathers data from ‘the collection of sites commenting on a particular event or issue, and the links between them’ (Highfield et al., 2011: 341). Multimodality brings its own set of challenges since research can no longer rely on pure textual analysis and more contemporary discussions on visual ­analysis (Van Leeuwen and Jewitt, 2001) to understand how management ideas are translated (and portrayed) in these new media. Previous research has provided an important path towards understanding of the role of business media for the creation, diffusion, and consumption of management ideas. In the same way as the development of the business press and the explosion of business book publishing have influenced management ideas and ideologies during the second half of the twentieth century, social media and transmediality will shape management ideas to come.

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chapter 11

M a nagem en t’s Gu rus David Collins

Introduction Until the early 1980s, the non-fiction ‘bestsellers’ lists in the USA and the UK were largely dominated by books which documented the lives of celebrities; by investigative journalism that probed the misdeeds of its business and political classes; and by manuals which offered advice on sex and nutrition (Collins, 2007; Economist, 1985; Foltz and Resener, 1985). Since then, however, texts designed to advance and applaud the practice of management have attracted a significant audience and have, consequently, figured prominently in the listings of bestsellers published by newspapers such as The Economist, The New York Times, and The Times (of London). Commenting on the rapid growth of this market segment, Pagel and Westerfelhaus (2005) note that by 1991 there were already 1,421 ‘popular management’ titles available in the USA alone. By 2001 the US consumer could select from some 5,023 popular management titles and did so enthusiastically, generating $938.3 million in sales. Hélène Giroux’s contribution to this volume considers the nature of ‘popular management’ in detail. For the purposes of this chapter on management’s gurus, however, it is sufficient to note that commentators in the UK, Europe, and the USA have looked upon the rise of popular management with a mixture of enthusiasm, envy, and disdain (see for example, Collins, 2000, 2001; Hilmer and Donaldson, 1996). For the most part these are not positive emotions. It is important to concede, therefore, that useful outcomes have emerged from this gaze. Academics, for example, have sought to locate the products, the producers, and the processes of popular management within sociological accounts. These reflections have allowed scholars (a) to chart the increasing scale and complexity of various endeavours (see Collins, 2006, 2016; Engwall et al., 2016) and (b) to explore the ways in which an elite group of commentators now routinely labelled as ‘gurus’ have propagated this arena (see Collins, 2000; Furusten, 1999; Huczynski, 1993). In this chapter, we focus our attention upon these (so-called) gurus of management although we will later return to those contributions which would essay a networked appreciation of popular management. For the moment, however, it is worth noting that

management’s gurus   217 academics have indeed struggled to come to terms with these pundits. Yet we will ­protest that, despite attempts to dismiss the gurus as charlatans (Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 1997) and snake-oil salesmen (Höpfl, 1995) who trade in fads (Brindle and Stearns, 2001; Collins, 2001, 2012a; Hilmer and Donaldson, 1996) and panaceas (see Örtenblad, 2015), it is important that we take these actors seriously because they have changed the ways in which we think about, talk about, and practise the work of ‘management’. This chapter acknowledges therefore the impact of management’s gurus. It is, however, driven by a desire to provide a useful overview of the key concepts, contests, and controversies which (should) shape our appreciation of the activities undertaken by these individuals. Accordingly, our discussion is structured as follows: the second section begins with brief reflections on the etymology of the term ‘management guru’. It notes the spiritual origins of the term ‘guru’, and the critical introspection which its importation into the field of management has precipitated. While recognizing the manner in which the attempt to appropriate an essentially spiritual term for, at best, secular purposes may strain its utility, we will insist that the guru label is usefully retained because it reminds us of the need to consider the ways in which these agents secure and promote their preferred representations of the business of management. The third section will offer an overview of Huczynski’s (1993) now classic account of the deeper structure of the ‘guru theory’. Huzcynski’s text, as we shall see, remains significant because, while many pioneering commentators were content to dismiss the work of management’s gurus as so much superficial nonsense, he chose to direct our attention to the foundational materials which bring meaning and substance to popular representations of managerial work. While applauding Huczynski’s contribution, we will nonetheless observe that his preferred rationalization of the appeal of management’s gurus remains rooted in an ‘externalist’ (Grint, 1997) form of analysis. Externalist analyses, as we will learn, suggest that the content of guru ideas reflects and shapes broader contextual conditions. While noting the virtues of this ‘externalist’ account, we will contrast it with alternative ‘internalist’ and ‘translation’ explanations, which invite us to understand ‘guru theory’ in a more local and pluralistic manner. The fourth section will consider the account of the ‘guru industry’ developed by Collins (2000). This section will examine the contours of the ‘guru industry’ and will attempt to give some flavour of the breadth and diversity of the commentaries in this arena. The final section will offer concluding comments and in so doing, will briefly consider more recent analytical developments which have attempted to shift the focus of debate from a preoccupation with what the gurus have written to the significance of what these individuals say.

The Gurus of Management The term ‘guru’ was until quite recently reserved for religious figures and spiritual teachers. Lexicographers suggest that the term ‘guru’ was first employed in a secular context in the mid-1960s. Indeed, it has been suggested that Herbert Marshall McLuhan was the

218   d. collins first secular figure to have this qualifying term attached to his name. The ‘management guru’ label, however, seems to have been a later refinement; a product of the 1980s. In interviews Tom Peters, who has variously been dubbed a guru; the guru; the Ur-guru and the Uber-guru of management (see Collins,  2007), often asserts that it was The Economist newspaper which should shoulder the responsibility for this refinement. Indeed Peters suggests that it was The Economist which first coined the term and saddled him with it. Greatbatch and Clark (2005), however, offer a dissenting opinion. They suggest that the term ‘management guru’ was developed and first utilized by The Sunday Times in 1983. To be honest, it matters little who first developed and applied the term ‘management guru’. What will become abundantly clear, however, is that while the label is now ­commonly applied to those who trade in the representations of popular management, it remains, for many, rather problematic and more than a little contentious. Stuart Crainer (1998) and Carol Kennedy (1996, 1998), however, seem untroubled by the controversies that so often surround the term. Indeed, their texts appear to accept that ‘management guru’ is a thoroughly complimentary notion and rooted within practical movements and developments which allow us to name and acclaim these actors. Discussing the ­factors which make these commentators so special, Kennedy argues that the gurus of management constitute an organizational elite. This, she argues, is quite unlike the academic and journalistic collectives which dwell within the lower strata of the management knowledge arena because the former (a) develops novel ideas and (b) promotes practices that are useful and durable. Grint (1994), however, disputes these claims. He argues that it is seldom possible to demonstrate that the ideas contained within popular management are, in fact, new. Furthermore, we should acknowledge that in complex organizations, calculations as to the practical utility of a practice tend to be both multiple and contestable. Crainer (1998) is altogether less concerned by claims to originality when it comes to weighing the value and appeal of management’s gurus. He does, however, share Kennedy’s interest in durability. Thus, Crainer’s text highlights ‘50 thinkers who made management’. Reflecting upon this select grouping, he concedes that it is somewhat arbitrary. Indeed, he acknowledges that to some extent, all guru listings could be accused of subjectivity, bias, and error. And he demonstrates this by supplying an appendix containing the names of sixty-two more ‘thinkers with strong cases for inclusion’ (1998: 265) in the main text! Hindle (2008) is similarly open about the difficulties associated with any attempt to produce a (portable) digest of guru theorizing. In fact, he tells us that his original intention had been to record the contributions of some 100 gurus, but confides that he was forced to abandon this project due to a lack of space. Commenting on the process that whittled this collective into a more manageable number he adds: The final selection of ideas and gurus included here was inevitably a personal one. There are 54 gurus in this book, but there could as easily be 154. A small band of names appears in virtually all such lists—a band that is more or less confined to what can be called the ‘Famous Five’: Peter Drucker, Douglas McGregor, Michael Porter, Alfred Sloan and Frederick Winslow Taylor.  (Hindle, 2008: 1)

management’s gurus   219 Accounting for what might be, for some, a surprising omission from this ‘Famous Five’, Hindle notes that in 2003 the Harvard Business Review (HBR) invited a number of key business thinkers to nominate their favourite guru—thus, the guru’s guru. Drucker, he tells us, came top of the list, James March was second, and Tom Peters was not ­featured at all. The exclusion of Tom Peters does merit further analysis, but it is, perhaps, not so ­surprising as Hindle would have us believe. Indeed, the omission of Peters from this ‘Famous Five’ may be readily explained in methodological terms. For example, we might venture that the omission of Peters is more a product of the population surveyed by HBR than an index of this individual’s standing in the field of management knowledge. Equally, we might suggest that the omission could be a product of ‘social reporting’ whereby respondents choose to disguise their preferences and instead report actions, choices, and orientations that reflect societal preferences and/or the perceived preferences of the researcher. In this regard, Tom Peters’ exclusion from the ‘Famous Five’ may be a product of those processes which cause dinner party guests to profess a love of the films of Stanley Kubrick whilst (and because) they secretly prefer the comic stylings of Adam Sandler. Thus, we might suggest that it is Tom Peters’ market success (see Collins, 2007) and the common prejudice which equates popularity with low-brow ­vulgarity (Collins, 2012b; see Giroux, in this volume) which have encouraged respondents to represent their preferences in a manner that denies Peters his place in the pantheon. Rigby (2011) has also acknowledged the difficulties associated with labelling but a few individuals as gurus. He deals with this issue, however, by attempting to side-step the problem. Thus Rigby draws our attention, not to gurus, but rather more vaguely to twenty-eight ‘business thinkers’ who have acted as ‘game changers’, exercising ‘a significant and lasting effect on the world of business and sometimes even the world’ (Rigby, 2011: 2). Rigby’s approach in this respect is refreshing: It produces, for example, a broad and eclectic profile of ‘thinkers’ (Tim Berners-Lee is acknowledged for the contribution which the Internet has made to markets, products, and services although his contribution to popular management and the challenges associated with the strategic management of IT is perhaps less clear).Yet Rigby is unable, entirely, to evade the perils which accompany any attempt to separate one part of the community from another. For example, his collection of twenty-eight ‘game changers’ includes Ricardo Semler. Semler, we should acknowledge, did make waves when he published Maverick! in 1993. But it is far from clear that Semler’s personal contribution has, in any meaningful sense, altered the game that is managing. It is, however, worth observing that Tom Peters can certainly voice this claim because he has, through his books and lectures, changed the ways in which people think and talk about management and act managerially (Collins, 2007). Of course, it would also be appropriate to observe that mere mention of the name Tom Peters tends to excite and polarize opinion. Nevertheless—like him or loathe him—Tom Peters entered and altered the market for management knowledge in the early 1980s (Collins, 2007). Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that to a considerable degree Tom Peters crafted the field of popular management in his own

220   d. collins image. Furthermore, we should acknowledge that he has sustained a prominent ­position within the market segment which he planted and propagated some thirty years ago. Peters has achieved and maintained this position despite vociferous critiques of his early empirical contributions (see Carroll, 1983; Guest, 1992), I suggest, because he has provided an account of managerial toil which is essentially faithful to the dynamics of managerial work and oriented to the practical problems and dilemmas that make managing so difficult. Thus, Peters has argued that managerial work is not the domain of number-crunchers and technicians. Plainly managerial work does have technical components, but Peters has been at pains to point out that managing others cannot and will not reduce to such technicalities. Instead, he insists that managerial work needs to recognized as a ‘world-building’ endeavour (Latour, 1987) because those who lead modern corporations (and other similarly complex forms of organization) must construct ‘moral universes’ (Watson, 2001) which demonstrate that what is being done is both necessary and commendable (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). Jackson and Carter, however, take an altogether more critical view which would deny the wit, wisdom, and worth of the gurus. Questioning both the conceptual clarity and the practical utility of the term ‘management guru’, they observe: The word ‘guru’ means a spiritual leader, and it derives from the Sanskrit word for venerable. ‘Venerable’ means worthy of worship, and its Latin origins are connected with Venus, the goddess of love: we should worship our gurus as fountains of love for us.  (Jackson and Carter, 1998: 153–4)

Plainly, the spiritual origin of the term ‘guru’ makes it rather difficult for some to use this label to describe those who write so approvingly about the business of management. Indeed Micklethwait and Wooldridge (1997) note that Drucker (often dubbed a guru himself, as we saw above) suggests that some use the term ‘guru’ only because they are too mannerly to call these people ‘charlatans’ in a public forum. Pattison (1997) recognizes the strength of this sentiment. He suggests, however, that the term ‘management guru’ has utility because it offers insights into the ways in which these actors secure and solidify their representations of the world. Thus, Pattison argues that the label—­ management guru—might be retained even by archly critical scholars because it highlights the manner in which those commentators who form the leading edge of popular management are able to shape how we think, feel, and act. Indeed, Pattison suggests that management’s gurus operate as evangelists; they threaten our sense of self and in so doing promise to provide—if not redemption—then at least a release from our pressing problems and dilemmas (see also Jackson, 1996, 2004). Offering a concrete example of this general process, Pattison suggests that Tom Peters’ second work, produced in concert with Nancy Austin (Peters and Austin, 1985) amounts to a secular retelling of the story of Noah and the flood and, like this biblical tale, promises salvation to those who are prepared to embrace what we might term the rapture of business excellence. Most sensible commentators, I suggest, would tend to concede the existence of an A-list of management’s gurus who have (a) enjoyed popular acclaim and volume sales because they have, through writing and public speaking (b) constructed an account of

management’s gurus   221 the business of management that both threatens and redeems managerial identities. The contents of this A-list will vary geographically (Huczynski, 1993) and, I suspect, with your date of birth, but it seems sensible to suggest that the likes of Tom Peters (Peters and Waterman, 1982), Peter Drucker (see Drucker 2007 [1955]), Richard Pascale (Pascale and Athos,  1981), Steve Jobs (see Isaacson,  2011), and Lee Iacocca (see Iacocca with Kleinfield, 1988; Iacocca and Novak, 1984) would make the list. And beyond this observation, frankly, I have no real or sustained interest in guru personification and would certainly not seek to impose a personal top 10, top 50, or top 100 upon anyone else. But it would be wrong to conclude our reflections on this note because, as we shall see, Huczysnki (1993) offers an account of ‘guru theory’ which can liberate us from the problems of listeria.

Guru Theory Huczynski (1993) observes that managers have been able to purchase laudatory books on the practice of management since at least the 1900s. Nevertheless, he suggests that the growth of a mass market in ‘popular management’ and the related rise of an elite group of commentators dubbed ‘management gurus’, are very much products of the 1980s. Unlike other analysts who have sought to personify the gurus, Huczynski warns us against any attempt to reduce the gurus to a compact or regimented collective. Indeed, he argues that when we make reference to ‘management gurus’, we are actually highlighting a diverse grouping and a complex set of ideas. Nonetheless, Huczynski does suggest that those who have been labelled as management gurus tend to belong to one of three broad classes; these being the academic guru (see Kanter, 1989; Porter, 1985), the consultant guru (see Ohmae, 1982; Pascale and Athos, 1981; Peters and Waterman, 1982), and the hero-manager (see Isaacson,  2011; Leahy,  2012; Welch with Byrne,  2001). Reflecting upon the ways in which these gurus derive their authority and appeal, Huczynski argues that the academic and consultant gurus tend to highlight their ­education and training whereas the hero-managers trade more upon their experience. Suddaby and Greenwood (2001), however, question this categorization. They suggest that it fails to capture the complexity of the CVs which these actors possess. At one level, of course, this is fair criticism. Tom Peters holds advanced degrees in civil engineering and in management. He is, consequently, at least as qualified as his academic counterparts. Likewise, the modern executives who run our corporations and who are, from time to time, celebrated as ‘hero-managers’ are often qualified to a very high standard. And yet, despite (increasing) similarities in background and educational attainment, Huczynski remains correct in his assertion that the gurus tend to speak in different registers such that consultant and academic gurus tend to play upon their training whereas ‘hero-managers’ prefer to trade upon their experience and upon their leadership capabilities. Commenting upon the marketability of these gurus, Hindle (2008) reminds us that their career prospects are far from assured. Indeed, he observes that aside from the

222   d. collins ‘Famous Five’ who have sustained prominent positions in the market for management knowledge, most of those who have been dubbed ‘management gurus’ tend to flourish briefly and then fade (sometimes ignominiously) from public life. Huczynski (1993) would tend to accept this account of the career-path of management’s gurus, but would add the caveat that while gurus may well come and go, guru theory endures. Outlining the nature and character of ‘guru theory’, Huczynski (1993: 38) concedes that: the term ‘guru theory’ is used as a convenient label to refer to [the] different contributions that have been so influential [since the 1980s]. The label encompasses a rag-bag of prescriptions which include the importance of innovation, more teamwork, more empowerment of the individual, more employee participation, fewer levels of hierarchy and less bureaucratization.

Yet despite this, Huczynski insists that there is a deeper structure of orientations and representations which draws the strings of this rag-bag together. Noting that the works of the modern gurus are but the latest in a long line of management ideas, Huczynski suggests that modern guru theory develops and retains an audience by focusing upon presentation and by cultivating an ideological focus which endorses the rights and privileges of management. Fleshing out this point Huczynski suggests that guru theory ­constitutes an ‘idea family’ which possesses three main themes and twelve inter­ dependent, complementary, and overlapping features. Thus, Huczynski suggests that ‘guru t­ heory’ articulates an understanding of the world of work which is: 1. Readily communicable through acronyms, alliteration, or slogans. For example, the 3Cs of Business Process Re-engineering (Hammer, 1990) and the McKinsey 7-S framework which underpins In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982) and The Art of Japanese Management (Pascale and Athos,  1981) spring readily to mind. 2. Focused upon the (assumed) capacity which managers and leaders have to change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of their colleagues. 3. Happy to assert that human understanding and human actions are malleable in the hands of the skilled leaders lauded at point two.

Exploring the second theme that underpins guru theorizing, Huczynski suggests that successful representations of managerial work have been designed to enhance the status of the intended purchaser. Thus, he argues that marketable representations of ­managerial work: 4. Provide legitimation and self-affirmation for those engaged in managerial work. 5. Build upon a unitary account of managerial work which suggests that there is no room for meaningful dissent with respect to organizational ends or indeed the means used to secure these goals. 6. Allow modifications which enable managers (a) to tailor the model to local problems and contingencies and (b) to claim some personal stake in the initiative. 7. Focus upon ‘leadership’ and in so doing suggest that colleagues will volunteer their support to the point of altruism.

management’s gurus   223 Examining the third theme, Huczynski focuses, unsurprisingly, on practical ­application. Thus, he argues that successful forms of guru theory: 8. Promise control over market conditions otherwise notable for their volatility. 9. Outline a limited number of steps that will deliver useful, planned, change (see Collins, 1998). 10. Suggest that the idea, tool, or initiative enjoys universal applicability. 11. Carry authorization or proof but not in the traditional academic or empirical sense. Commenting upon this, Lischinsky (2008) observes that popular management builds and depends upon persuasive ‘examples’. 12. Has ready applicability and can be utilized without special tools or knowledge.

And, perhaps more importantly, Huczynski suggests that successful representations of management do not require the user to scrap their existing knowledge base (see Grint, 1994). Kieser (1997) offers a similar, ten-point, analysis of guru rhetoric, but adds an ­important dimension not addressed by Huczynski. Thus, Kieser observes that gurus need luck! Discussing this issue, Collins (2007) offers confirmation of the roles which luck and good timing can play in the market for guru ideas. Discussing Tom Peters’ (1987) Thriving on Chaos, Collins suggests that in any half-way rational world, the book-­buying public would have rejected what is, in truth, a rather under-developed, unwieldy, and uninviting text. Collins notes, however, that Tom Peters had the very good fortune to launch this text on ‘Black Monday’, 19 October 1987; a day which, because it brought chaos to global financial markets, resonated with Peters’ core theme. Barley and Kunda (1992) provide a similarly resonant analysis of the nature of management knowledge. This analysis while not directly concerned with guru theory ­nonetheless has something to tell us about its nature and processes. In common with Huczynski, Barley and Kunda acknowledge the historical foundations of management. Yet unlike Huczynski, Barley and Kunda suggest that management fashions vary cyclically and move—broadly speaking—in relation to business conditions. Reflecting upon the changes which typify long waves of economic expansion and contraction, the analysis offered by Barley and Kunda suggests that the prescriptions for managers developed, for example, during economic boom periods will carry little real resonance as economies enter recession. Their analysis observes that when profitability is low, product markets are stagnant, and technologically driven innovation is limited, practitioners will be attracted to ideas which are inclined to view the central problems of management in terms of ‘commitment’, ‘satisfaction’, and ‘staff retention’. Huczynski’s attempt to position the content of guru ideas in relation to broader contextual factors and the review developed by Barley and Kunda, reflect what Grint (1997) has labelled an ‘externalist’ appreciation of management knowledge. Externalist r­ eadings, it would be fair to say, have tended to dominate our understanding of guru theory. It is worth noting therefore that Grint (1997) has developed a complementary account of guru theorizing which reminds us of the significance of socio-economic processes within business organizations. This alternative, ‘internalist’, account of guru theorizing

224   d. collins recognizes the broad appeal of the externalist narrative, yet insists that it would be wrong to suggest that we can simply locate management knowledge as a variable rooted in, and moving with, factors that remain external to the organization. Internalist renderings of guru theory have both positive and negative connotations for our appreciation of management practitioners. On the plus-side, the internalist account of guru theorizing locates practitioners as situated choice-making actors, and so, pushes back against those who would tend to suggest that managers are somehow cultural dopes who have been duped into using empty, faddish, ideas (Collins, 2012a). On the negative side of the equation, however, internalist accounts suggest that practitioners may be attracted to forms of guru theorizing which reflect and project their own narrow personal ambitions regardless of whether these reflect the unitary organizational goals that guru theory must construct and applaud. Thus, internalist accounts of guru theory remind us (a) that organizations are complex, political systems and (b) that managerial and other actors remain capable of exercising discretionary choice (Collins and McCartney, 2010). More recent attempts to consider both the appeal of management’s gurus and the operationalization of ‘guru theory’ have highlighted the significance of ‘translation’. Reflecting upon the catalogue of heroic assumptions required to operationalize the fad motif (Collins, 2001), a number of authors have suggested that management practitioners are altogether more thoughtful, more innovative, and, yes, more devious than the casual deployment of this labelling device might suggest (see Brindle and Stearns,  2001; Collins, 2004). Cole (1999) in his analysis of the American adoption of modern quality management, for example, suggests that ‘quality fads’ have, both, a history and a context. In combination, he avers, these factors undermine the suggestion that Japanese quality management techniques (at one time a field with its own gurus such as W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran) simply diffused amongst a population given to mindless imitation. Thus, Cole argues that organizational adoption is built around the active translation of concepts and practices. Taking this point a step further, Giroux (2006) suggests that adoption turns upon local processes of adaptation which need to be invoked in order to convert more-or-less empty, generalized, and abstract theoretical representations into practical endeavours. Collins (2004) echoes this and adds that the utilization of guru theory develops ‘paragrammatically’ because practitioners seldom enjoy access to all the resources that gurus suggest will be required. The following section will continue with our reflections on the uses and abuses of ‘guru theory’ as we consider the ‘guru industry’.

The ‘Guru Industry’ In 1974 Harry Braverman published a text which focused attention on the hitherto neglected third volume of Marx’s Das Kapital. In so doing, Braverman highlighted the manner in which the day-to-day activities of managers and workers—‘the labour

management’s gurus   225 ­ rocess’—had been shaped by what we would now term ‘guru theory’. Within academic p sociology, Braverman’s text was widely, if critically, read. A conference, for example, was quickly instituted to advance study in this area and before too long what Eldridge (1983) labelled a ‘Braverman Industry’ had formed. Collins (2000) offers the ‘guru industry’ as an analogue of Eldridge’s ‘Braverman Industry’ insofar as it draws attention to an orbit of second-level commentators whose position within this (academic-publishing) complex is dependent upon the gurus. Collins suggests that the ‘guru industry’ contains three distinct segments. Those in the thrall of the gurus, he suggests, are served by that segment of the guru industry supplying (a) homages to those (academics and journalists) who had until the 1980s acted to constitute management knowledge and (b) ‘hagiologies’ of those who had during this turbulent decade been celebrated as business visionaries. The texts prepared by Kennedy (1996, 1998), Crainer (1998), and, to a lesser extent, Rigby (2011) and Hindle (2008) are among those which would qualify as hagiologies insofar as they exist to document the lives and special gifts of these (secular) saints. The mid-range segment of the guru industry is, Collins suggests, occupied by those who would save management from its newly designated prophets. The texts which constitute this segment of the ‘guru industry’ (see Brindle and Stearns, 2001; Hilmer and Donaldson, 1996; Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 1997) have been drawn up, ostensibly, to prevent managers from taking that fork in the road which leads to the gurus. These attempts to redeem management, however, have rather more in common with the hagiologic texts than the authors might like to concede. Both groups, for example, tend to share a chauvinistic commitment to an ideology which assumes commonality of interest while asserting the property rights of management. What divides the redeemers from the hagiologists, however, is the question of ‘faith’. Thus, the redeemers insist that their truth claims are founded in empirical research whereas the gurus are said to trade more narrowly in rhetoric and anecdote. The ‘agnostics’ and ‘atheists’ who form the third segment of the ‘guru industry’, acknowledge the presence of a cadre of gurus yet complain loudly about their continuing presence on earth. The agnostics tend to share Donaldson’s focus upon ‘facts’, but would nonetheless suggest that his positivist methods are undone by a methodology which struggles to accommodate organizational plurality. The agnostics therefore would locate themselves firmly in a material world and in so doing would suggest that the claims voiced by the gurus should be subject to a form of scrutiny which recognizes and pursues managing as a complex, political process. Huczynski’s pioneering account of management’s gurus might be situated as an ‘agnostic’ text insofar as it offers a sociological account of popular management that takes these representations seriously while and because it critiques the ideologies that make guru theory persuasive and substantial. The ‘atheists’ of the guru industry are generally united in their rejection of the gurus of management and are, furthermore, unanimous in their suspicion of management ideology. Yet beyond these commonalities the ‘atheists’ are far from a united presence. Some, for example, will gladly suffer positivism while others would all but reject the

226   d. collins merits of empirical inquiry. In truth, what allows us to bring the ‘atheists’ together in one (loose) grouping may be little more than a shared and instinctive anti-managerialism (Parker, 2002). Whether this represents a meaningful analytical category is perhaps a moot point. Indeed, we might suggest that a category that would place the Critical Management Studies (CMS) community and the Labour Process Conference under one canvas should expect to find lots of people pissing in the tent! Mindful that this image may test the editors of this volume we will move (swiftly) to offer a reprise of our analysis and a brief consideration of ‘guru speak’ (Greatbatch and Clark, 2005).

Concluding Comments This chapter commenced by acknowledging the rapid and sustained growth of popular management. It has observed that academia has struggled to come to terms with the gurus of management and has suggested that at times ill-temper has clouded perception. Thus, it is worth observing that academic accounts of management’s gurus tend to revolve around attempts to ‘debunk’ the ways and means of guru theorizing. Such attempts to debunk the gurus are, at one level, well intentioned, but they are in my opinion not particularly productive. Indeed Collins (2001, 2012a, 2015) notes that decades of debunking seem to have done little, either to (re-)educate the consumers of popular representations of managing or to diminish the market for popular management texts. That said, it is also worth observing that some scholars (see for example Engwall et al., 2016) have sought to cultivate a broader, networked, appreciation of the ways and means of popular management. Commenting upon choices which remain latent, if unselected, within critical ­scholarship, Latour (2004) highlights the significance of networked forms of understanding and in so doing suggests the need for a new rapprochement between the practitioners of management and those critical scholars who would proffer enlightenment. He observes: The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of naïve believers, but the one who offers participants arenas in which to gather.  (Latour, 2004: 232)

Taking our cue from Latour, this chapter has attempted to assemble an account of ­management’s gurus which eschews simple debunking. Unlike other texts which would dismiss the gurus as charlatans who peddle fads at best, and snake-oil at worst, this chapter has taken care to explore those factors which bring form and substance to the representations of work and management which are preferred by the gurus. Noting that some will baulk at the use of a spiritual term to describe endeavours which are profoundly materialistic, we have suggested that the term ‘management guru’ has utility and may be retained even by archly-critical or ‘atheistic’ scholars because it offers

management’s gurus   227 insights into the ways in which gurus—of all descriptions—construct and propagate their preferred representations of both the here-and-now and the hereafter. Acknowledging, too, the controversies that arise whenever an attempt is made to personify the gurus of management, we have suggested that we might come to know the gurus by considering the deeper structure of their claims and representations. Thus, while noting the very real difficulties associated with attempts to ‘name and acclaim’ management’s gurus, we have suggested that these agents, however they are named and arrayed, are remarkable because their representations craft moral economies; new ways for us to be at work. In an attempt to explore the political character and broader costs of such new forms of identity our chapter has journeyed through ‘guru theory’ into the ‘guru industry’ and will now conclude with critical reflections on ‘guru speak’ (Greatbatch and Clark, 2005). Acknowledging that many texts have been developed to debate the wit and wisdom of the gurus, Greatbatch and Clark (2005) nonetheless complain that academia has produced only a limited appreciation of the ways and means of guru theorizing because it has focused upon what gurus write rather than what they say (and do) in their seminar performances. Commenting upon the significance of these settings, Greatbatch and Clark (2005: 16) argue that seminars ‘are critical to [the gurus’] popularity and success’. Indeed, they observe that the appearance fees generated by these events ‘can dwarf their book royalties’. In an attempt to explore what gurus say and do within the context of these seminar performances, Greatbatch and Clark (2005) analyse recordings of events hosted by four individuals generally acknowledged worthy of the management guru label. Thus, the authors examine seminars offered by Gary Hamel, Peter Senge, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and Tom Peters. Through their analysis of these performance events, Greatbatch and Clark make us aware of an aspect of the market for management knowledge which has hitherto not been properly acknowledged in academic debate. Indeed, it is worth observing that this text and subsequent analyses (see Groβ et al., 2015) improve our appreciation of (a) the rhetorical devices employed by the gurus, (b) the role of humour in these performance events, (c) the stage-craft necessary to achieve the co-production of moments of humorous enjoyment, and (d) the stories that the gurus use (variously) to punctuate their performances, to make their ideas memorable, and to generate an emotional bond with their audiences. In short, analyses of ‘guru speak’ usefully qualify our appreciation of the ways and means of guru theorizing while extending our understanding of the work that this elite is obliged to undertake as it attempts to secure its preferred representations of management and managing. And yet these explorations remain, I fear, conservative in outlook and (accidentally) incremental in their ambition. On the issue of incrementalism, it is perhaps worth observing that analyses of ‘guru speak’ remain rather limited in their purview because they fail to locate the guru performers within a networked understanding which would trace and acknowledge the complex linkages between, for example, agents, ghost-writers, and publishers which nurture and sustain these arrangements

228   d. collins (see Clark and Greatbatch, 2002, 2004; Collins, 2006, 2016). Given this oversight, future research on management’s gurus might, I suggest, usefully take heed of Latour’s observations and work to assemble a networked appreciation of what we might now refer to as ‘the full circuit’ of popular management. On the issue of conservatism, it is worth observing that in their characterizations of guru theorizing, academic commentaries seem prepared to accept certain aspects of the full circuit of popular management which surely merit further analytical reflection. Neither Huczynski (1993) nor Greatbatch and Clark (2005), for example, acknowledge that successful guru ideas tend to come from (the mouths of) those who are American and male. (Indeed there may be more Mormon followers of Joseph Smith Jr than Britishers among the ranks of management’s gurus, which should give us food for thought!) Given these limitations, it seems sensible to suggest that future research on guru performance might, in acknowledging the importance of comic moments and movements, consider affinities between ‘guru speak’ and other more familiar forms of performance such as ‘stand-up comedy’. Research constructed in this manner would, I suggest, recognize the importance of identity-work in performance settings and in so doing might consider why it is that guru theory—with but a few notable exceptions— remains a club for white males.

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CHAPTER 12

The Consum ers a n d Co -Producers of M a nagem en t Ideas Suleika Bort and Alfred Kieser

Introduction Whereas consumers of management ideas tend to be primarily portrayed as key actors in a market offering ‘solutions’ to management problems, they may take the same ­variety of roles as consumers of material goods as tellingly described by Gabriel and Lang (2015): that of choosers who have to make choices while being confronted with heavy marketing and seductive promises; that of communicators who refer to status symbols, fashions, and brands (reputation of providers) to explain their choices to themselves and to others; that of explorers who have to find ways to learn about the potential of ideas and of their alternatives; that of identity-seekers who ask themselves what management ideas they should associate with to demonstrate what kind of person they are; that of hedonists who are looking for ideas which allow them to live out and enjoy their talents; that of possible victims who are informed about the risks they are running when following certain management ideas; and that of rebels who confess that they are sick of taking the role of victims of management ideas, a role that is not far from that of rebels protesting against ideas whose underlying purpose is the exploitation of managers and their companies. Moreover, there is speculation about whether there is, indeed, something like ‘a market for ideas’ in which consumers can satisfy their needs. This market concept was conceived in ancient Greece (Campbell, 1985) and has continuously been referred to. For example, Coase (1974) takes up the question whether the market for ideas should be regulated since, as already Plato argued, one has to be afraid ‘that the dealer in the food of the soul (i.e. the dealer in ideas) is like the dealer in fruits who must be watched for the exaggerated claims he [sic] might make about his product’ (Campbell, 1985: 189). Other authors (e.g. Gans and Stern, 2010: 805) pursue the question whether markets for ideas

consumers and co-producers of management ideas    233 contribute to ‘allocative efficiency’, suggesting that ‘when the value of an idea can only be realized by “matching” that idea with key complementary assets, markets that facilitate matching and efficient distribution in a timely fashion will provide significant social returns’. In the Middle Ages, newer reflections on Plato’s idea of markets for ideas emerged, when monasteries became centres for the generation of innovations—‘innovation laboratories’ (Melville, 2011: 72) promoting ideas for organizing one’s life to maximize the chances for salvation, including monastic management (Kieser, 1987; Melville, 2016). Later, guilds often sanctioned innovations because they considered them a threat to the balance within and between guilds (Kieser, 1989). In the seventeenth century, ‘learned societies’ like the Royal Society of London (founded 1660) became institutions which saw the generation and distribution of new ideas improving practices of societal relevance as their main task (Bryson, 2010). Technical schools and, later, engineering universities were typically the first educational institutions that concentrated on the generation of innovative ideas for profit-oriented organizations as the main consumers (Armytage et al., 2003). In a recent analysis of the development of Northwestern Europe, McCloskey (2015: 57) pays tribute to the power of ideas when claiming that ‘[i]t was ideas and ideologies, not interests or institutions, which changed in Northwestern Europe, 1600’—ideas that finally brought about capitalism and an enormous increase in wealth that spread over Europe. A recent variant of capitalism is ‘populist capitalism’ (Khurana, 2002: 62) in which millions of private investors eagerly consume news about new management ideas and the companies which invest in these ideas—to eventually invest into the companies themselves. After a brief discussion about the nature of management ideas, including the possibility for alternative usage, we take the perspective of the different actors in ‘the market for management ideas’. We analyse why and how these actors (i.e. managers, consultants, researchers, students, and citizens) consume and co-produce management ideas, each with their own typical motivations and consuming practices.

Consuming, Co-Producing, and Translating Management Ideas The ideas dealt with in this handbook are not simply ideas that somehow have to do with management but, as outlined in the introductory chapter, are ‘more or less coherent visions, principles and/or guidelines for managers and others to adopt in organizing resources’. This broad definition includes other terms such as management fashions or concepts. Ideas of this sort, traded in discourses, are usually characterized by ambiguity (Kieser, 1997; Nicolai and Dautwiz, 2010) allowing ‘interpretative viability’ (Ortmann, 1995: 371) which, as Benders and Van Veen (2001: 37) suggest, may be intentionally designed into the concept to increase ‘the size of the potential market because different buyers

234    s. bort and a. kieser may recognize their own situation in the description’. Perhaps ­interpretive viability is not, as these authors assume, a matter of design, but an unavoidable necessity, due to the fact that management ideas are not algorithms that provide exact solutions for given problems, but rather toolboxes of principles and methods which different actors use to interpret and synthesize problems and identify ways of handling them. This characteristic of a management idea has an important implication, namely that each actor can select different elements from the box and replenish them with custommade bits and pieces. Under this condition, there is neither a ‘correct’ way of ‘consuming’ nor of interpreting a management idea. Consuming management ideas cannot be separated from co-producing them as consumers actually co-produce ideas in order to achieve a fit to the context in which the concept is moved (Ansari et al., 2010; Kelemen, 2000; Røvik, 2016; Spyridonidis et al., 2016). Indeed, Corbett-Etchevers and Mounoud (2011: 167) define management idea consumption as ‘a process that includes both adoption and implementation’. However, in general, this perspective portrays the consumer as a primarily active agent. In this sense, co-production can simply occur in the form of an individual’s associative reaction when being confronted with a management idea (Heusinkveld et al., 2011; see also Sturdy and Wright, 2011; Van Veen et al., 2011). Both the consumption and co-production of management ideas are facilitated through commodification (Engwall et al., 2016) which involves abstracting ideas from specific contexts, and their conversion into ‘something that can be stored, moved and reused’ (Suddaby and Greenwood,  2001: 938; Heusinkveld and Visscher,  2012). This can be achieved through models or figures that exemplify the essence of the idea and through routines, templates, questionnaires, or checklists. Commodification facilitates colonization, i.e. the transformation of management ideas to new fields. However, commodification of a management idea does not necessarily result in a standardization of solutions created by different actors implementing the same commodified idea (see Rasche and Seidl, in this volume). The actors can still interpret the commodified idea in different ways and thus realize diverging solutions. As O’Mahoney et al. (2013) show, in some organizations, procurement takes an active role in the commodification of ideas by modifying action plans suggested by consultancies in response to a ‘Request for Proposal’. The main intention of such a modification is ‘to generate a lower exchangevalue for the knowledge their organization is buying’ (O’Mahoney et al., 2013: 229). In the following sections we further detail the main reasons why and how different actors (managers, consultants, researchers, students, and citizens) consume management ideas.

Managers Managers are often portrayed as the key consumers of new management ideas. Other organizational members usually have to get the consent of managers from an appropriate level, when in favour of implementing an idea. Major organizational changes are usually initiated by top management—mainly because top management is supposed to

consumers and co-producers of management ideas    235 demonstrate its qualification and its vision by initiating change. Managers are expected to keep informed about the latest management ideas and to implement those they consider useful. The main sources managers draw from in their search for new ideas are the business press, practice-oriented management journals, management books (Engwall et al., 2016), and consultancies that regularly offer their services to managers (Jung and Kieser, 2012). When managers ponder which ideas qualify as candidates for implementation, the question arises whether they predominantly follow a logic of consequences (i.e. effectiveness) or a logic of appropriateness (i.e. legitimacy). At first sight, it seems obvious that managers evaluate ideas according to the logic of consequences (March, 1994). However, reference to this logic is problematic since managers’ control over the process of implementation is limited. Under this perspective the logic of appropriateness, which takes account of the social context in which managers act, appears as the more suitable explanation for the preferences managers develop when selecting management ideas. Specifically, Wilhelm and Bort (2013) identified four ‘discourse categories’ according to which a consumption of management concepts was seen as appropriate: (1) learning from others’ experiences, (2) controlling organizational change, (3) gaining external legitimacy, and (4) collective sense-making (see also Groβ et al., 2015). Other e­ xplanations stress the significance of the rhetoric used in selling management ideas and indicate how it strongly influences their attractiveness to a managerial audience (e.g. Huczynski, 1993; Jackson, 2001). Common rhetorical elements in successful presentations of management ideas include focusing on a single success factor, selling new ideas as superior to old ideas, linking ideas to widely shared values, presenting stories of extraordinary success, and selling ideas as universally applicable (Furusten, 1999; Kieser, 1997; Røvik, 2002).

Consultants If clients contact a consultancy firm asking for advice regarding a problem they are struggling with in their organization, the firm will probably produce ‘on demand’ ideas that are presented as appropriate. Yet, this perspective does not correspond with the consultancies’ basic business model according to which firms propagate a profile of their competencies in the market, mainly referring to commodified solutions they have developed, to which potential clients respond when looking for a consultancy. In order to maintain demand for their services, consultancies have to permanently develop new products, i.e. new commodified management ideas (Heusinkveld and Benders, 2005; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001). They manage this task by entangling their staff ’s ambitions to become partners with the strategic goal of strengthening their market position. Consultants can advance their career by successfully contributing to the expansion of commodified knowledge and thereby to the establishment of ‘practice areas’, i.e. sub-units consisting of bundles of related commodified management ideas (Anand et al., 2007). Practice areas are created when consultants not only generate commodified ideas that fit with the overall business of their consultancy, but are compatible with the consultancy’s

236    s. bort and a. kieser product range; can mobilize internal support and collaboration; have proven their relevance in practice; and are promising to become fashionable (Heusinkveld and Benders, 2005). They also bundle groups of commodified ideas together in a sensible way into practice areas (Anand et al., 2007). Selling a management idea encompasses all activities leading to a contract for a consulting project aiming at its implementation. As Berglund and Werr (2000: 639–40, 644) argue, in order to increase the attractiveness of an idea, consultants usually integrate two myths in their presentations. Consultants draw on a rationality myth to convince clients that they, as consultants, ‘possess a stock of scientific knowledge universally applicable to different situations’. In addition, they refer to the pragmatic/normative myth that ‘is manifested in the . . . emphasis on his/her own and others’ personal experience and merits, highlighting the fact that the knowledge needed for success is not some general, impersonal method but rather a specific, mainly tacit, ability to react to the contingencies of each situation’ (Berglund and Werr, 2000: 649). Consultancies have long been portrayed as fashion setters. In their presentations of management concepts, they ‘not only provoke fear, they raise hopes’ (Kieser, 2002a: 174) and thus seduce clients (David and Strang, 2006; Kieser, 1997). However, some recent studies suggest that firms are getting increasingly reluctant to categorize emerging management concepts as ‘fashionable’, since it is more difficult to convince clients of their potential benefits (Whittle, 2008). Perhaps the fact that outcomes from really big management fashions, like Business Process Re-engineering or Lean Production, could not be observed for many years now explains the difficulty some consultancies have in sparking enthusiasm for new management ideas.

Researchers Suddaby and Greenwood (2001: 936–7) outline three reasons why researchers in business schools consume and co-produce management ideas. First, they do it because their task encompasses ‘testing the validity and reliability of managerial concepts in use’. Second, they consume ideas because the critical evaluation of existing ideas ‘inevitably generates suggestions for improvement’. Third, management scholars are ‘educating and accrediting an ongoing stream of management students, [and thereby] they generate the foundation for consumption of managerial knowledge products’. However, generating a foundation for the wider consumption of ideas requires that one has consumed the ideas oneself in the first place. Thus, another reason why researchers consume and co-produce management ideas is that it enhances management scholars’ legitimacy. Researchers, as other social actors, need a societal authority to function and perform and this is achieved by conforming to societal expectations (Meyer and Rowan, 1977) and one societal expectation towards business schools is their relevance to wider practice (Augier and March, 2011). Some academics became popular as ‘academic management gurus’ (see also Collins, in this volume). For example, C. K. Prahalad, professor of the University of Michigan,

consumers and co-producers of management ideas    237 was ranked the most influential business thinker in the Forbes 2009 list, followed by other academic gurus such as Paul Krugman, Philip Kotler, Gary Hamel, and Michael Porter (Kneale, 2009). Thus, quite a few management researchers engage in activities of popularizing management science by publishing management ideas in a form that renders them accessible for practitioners (Kelemen and Bansal, 2002) or temporarily acting as management consultants (Werr and Greiner, 2008; Zhang et al., 2015). Others may also collaborate with practitioners with the aim of generating ideas of scientific value, but also useful for practitioners (Van de Ven and Johnson, 2006; for a critical analysis see Kieser and Leiner,  2012). Thereby, ideas originally produced by researchers for the  scientific community have been successfully ‘adapted’ to practitioner contexts (e.g. the concept of the ambidextrous organization—see Duncan, 1976; Tushman and O’Reilly, 1996, 1997). Sometimes, an idea created by a scholar can be potentially useful for practice. For example, the scientific idea of a competency trap proved helpful in finding ways how to avoid them (Denrell and March, 2001). However, in general, ideas which significantly contribute to the advancement of management science, or even to the emergence of an influential theory or a school, originate from ‘small ideas’ which develop into bundles which complement each other, thereby unfolding a ‘robust beauty’ (see, e.g., Maslach et al., 2015, on the development of the Behavioural Theory of the Firm). This reflects the perspective of ‘normal science’ which, according to Thomas Kuhn (2012), is the accumulation of knowledge without questioning the underlying paradigmatic assumptions. Thus, most researchers consume management ideas in ways that are in line with the dominant paradigm, rather than ideas that challenge the assumptions of normal science. A central topic here is that the ideas researchers are co-producing typically differ from those practitioners are dealing with in their practice. ‘Scholars talk about ideas that describe the basic mechanisms shaping managerial history—bounded rationality, diffusion of legitimate forms, loose coupling, liability of newness, competency traps, absorptive capacity, and the like’ (James G. March in Coutu, 2006: 86). In contrast, practitioners’ knowledge tends to focus ‘on a particular context at a particular time and on the events of personal experience. . . . A scholar’s knowledge cannot address a concrete, highly specific context, except crudely’ (James G. March in Coutu, 2006: 86). The difference in the uses of ideas necessitates a difference in the logics of co-producing ideas (Kieser and Leiner, 2009; Kieser et al., 2015). Viewed from a systems theory perspective (Luhmann, 1995), researchers consume and communicate management ideas based on the true/false code of scientific communication, whereas the consumption of management ideas in business is based and coded along the economic criterion of payment/ non-payment (Kieser and Leiner, 2009) as well as legitimacy. These differences result in the fact that many managers do not understand—and consequently do not read— publications in academic journals (Gopinath and Hoffman, 1995; McKenzie et al., 2002; Rynes et al., 2002). Thus, the ideas that are generated in, and for, the academic system are in most cases not perceived as relevant by practitioners. This difference in logics causes the so-called rigor–relevance gap (Kieser and Leiner, 2009; Kieser et al., 2015).

238    s. bort and a. kieser

Students Students, such as regular business major students, but also Executive MBA (EMBA) students, attend business schools and consume management ideas usually as a preparation for a career in management or for career advancement (see also Engwall and Wedlin, in this volume). MBA and in particular EMBA degrees can be important means for career progression (such as when the students hold another degree in another subject) because they signal business knowledge. At the same time, however, the concepts and frameworks that are taught in business schools are usually so simplified that they can hardly be transposed one-to-one into complex business reality—or they are embedded in a complex theory whose resistance against transposition is equally strong. Thus, perhaps students consume management ideas simply because they need to know them to obtain a degree in management, but also because they need to learn the appropriate managerial language to acquire a sense (a ‘trick’) of self-confidence (Sturdy et al., 2006). Indeed, MBA programmes provide linguistic resources for ‘sense-making’, for understanding what being a manager is ‘about’, and managers derive confidence from being able to define themselves using the official (MBA) discourse of management. However, Hay and Hodgkinson (2008) found that MBA programmes make a ‘modest but significant’ contribution to managers’ ongoing learning, through broadening and challenging their understandings of managerial practice. Following Gabriel and Lang (1995), students also consume management ideas in their search for identity (Warhurst, 2011). These processes are of particular significance because the implementation and promotion of management ideas can be a kind of identity construction (Clark and Salaman, 1998; Watson, 1994b). As Clark and Salaman (1998: 153) state: ‘gurus [i.e. the ideas they promote] not only represent and define core management skills and attitudes (and values); they also define senior managers’ roles and identities and legitimize managers’ status claims. They tell managers why they are important, why they matter, why their skills are critical.’ Given the growth in the number of management ideas that are available, students as consumers have a lot of freedom to choose ideas they regard as essential for their careers and for their organizational and occupational identities. At the same time, management ideas taught in the classroom can soon be forgotten (Heusinkveld and Visscher, 2012) and the overuse of the term ‘manager’ and some negative connotations of it can also lead students to distance themselves from identifying as managers and favour alternative descriptions such as entrepreneurs, professionals, project leaders, or strategists (Brocklehurst et al., 2010). In studying managers’ perspectives of ‘relevant’ academic ideas, Splitter (2016) develops a theoretical model according to which MBA students consume management ideas mainly by (1) matching them against their organizational contexts and previous ­knowledge, (2) extending their previous knowledge through new instruments, constructs, and scientific framing, and (3) re-matching the extended knowledge to their contexts and professional practice. In addition, opportunities for turning acquired ideas into organizational practices are seen as inappropriate or as meeting resistance from others within the organization (see McCabe et al., in this volume). This partly relates to

consumers and co-producers of management ideas    239 broader historical and geo-political contexts. Indeed, the current understanding of management ideas consumption is dominated by a Western perspective which may not apply so well to students in other countries. For example, Sturdy and Gabriel (2000) show that students from Malaysia can be ambivalent towards Western management ideas because these are linked to colonial exploitation and oppression and are seen as threating local know-how, identity, and pride. Overall then, the principal outcome of ideas acquisition for students may be an increase in ‘self-confidence’ which is reinforced through discourse. Certainly, the contribution of MBA programmes to managers’ work has been questioned, in particular with regard to the relevance of the curriculum and the possibility of transferring MBA knowledge and skills into practice (Brocklehurst et al.,  2007). Business schools are therefore criticized for confronting students with a ‘theory jungle’ (Lernak, 2004) without enabling them to connect these theories to each other or distinguish ‘bad’ management theories from ‘good’ ones (Ghoshal and Moran, 1996; Khurana, 2007).

Citizens The consumption of management ideas is not limited to business people (see also Hancock and Tyler, in this volume). ‘[T]o survive in the world we have to manage our situation; to meet our material needs, and to stay sane we struggle to exert some control. This suggests that all humans are managers in some way’ (Watson, 1994a: 12). Thus, citizens also consume management ideas. By citizens, we mean, in line with Freeman’s ­definition of stakeholder, ‘any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objectives’ (1984: 46). Citizens might be politicians and people employed by government, but also business journalists and other ordinary people. Their role is multifaceted and their impact is situation-specific. For example, scientific management as a management idea was consumed and populated not only by companies, but also by governmental and private actors (Guillén, 1994: 94; Kipping, 1998; Uhl, 2011). Ordinary people also consume management ideas that promise help in the pursuit of personal objectives. For example, Fredericks (1919) applied scientific management to standardize household work in order to make it more efficient. Examples abound of using management ideas to increase the efficiency of everyday life (Hancock and Tyler, 2009). Indeed, citizens are part of the ‘broader context outside the boundaries of the managerial field itself ’ that, according to Frenkel (2005: 154) should be taken into consideration when studying the consumption of management ideas. Such a broader, institution-based perspective has served to better understand the consumption and diffusion of various management ideas such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) (Aharonson and Bort, 2015; Brammer et al., 2012) and Total Quality Management (Westphal, 1997). Citizens also use management ideas to create an impression of rationality and provide legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan, 1977) by linking them to personal goals and justifying their views in relation to the views of others (Gabriel and Lang, 1995). In this way too,

240    s. bort and a. kieser management ideas diffused into public domains such as healthcare and government (Mohr, 1992; see also Reed, in this volume). For example, nowadays, the Balanced Scorecard is used in hospitals to make them ‘more market-oriented’ and ‘customerfocused’ (Inamdar et al., 2002). Likewise, Fineman (2001: 20) points out that high-profile public figures such as Prince Charles in the UK or former US Vice President Al Gore ‘present greening in a manner that aims to stir “legitimate” managerial concerns and responsibilities, while simultaneously offering a reassuring, irresistible, way forward’. However, Fineman (2001: 27) also notes that despite the strong awareness towards greening in society ‘industry struggles to embrace more than the lighter trappings of greening, seeing it as ill-fitting workaday routines or customary axioms of business benefit’. Thus, the awareness (i.e. consumption) of a management idea in society does not always guarantee its success in the business world. Citizens consume management ideas in different ways and contexts and through different channels, notably the wider traditional and new social media (Carroll and McCombs, 2003), both of which can serve to justify, legitimate, or sometimes undermine emergent management ideas. Indeed, the role of the popular press has gone beyond the mere diffusion of prefabricated ideas to the co-production and legitimation of management practices and theories (Mazza and Alvarez, 2000; see also Barros and Rüling, in this volume).

Consumption across Boundaries: Managers Consuming and Co-Producing Ideas with Consultants The way in which managers consume and co-produce management ideas with other actors can be illustrated through the example of consultants. Here, consumption varies depending on the model on which the consulting project is understood and carried out. According to the expert model, the consultant possesses a ‘privileged interpretive position’ and the client’s position is largely reduced to that of an information supplier (Nikolova et al., 2009: 290; Nikolova et al., 2015). But, critical observers argued that consultants often misuse such a position through impression management and duping their clients into accepting changes which are not in their interests (Alvesson, 1993; Clark and Salaman,  1998; Ernst and Kieser,  2002; Kieser,  2002a). Because of this critique, the expert model was largely replaced by the ‘social learning model’ (Nikolova et al., 2009: 290), which focuses on how consultants and clients jointly accomplish the diagnosis and problem-solving process (Lilja and Poulfelt, 2001; Schein, 1999; Schön, 1983). However, on the basis of Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic systems (Seidl, 2005), other studies conclude that neither model is appropriate. Since the project team members belong to two different social systems, the communication problems between the client organization and the consultancy significantly exceed those that usually afflict collaboration between

consumers and co-producers of management ideas    241 experts and laypersons (Czarniawska and Mazza,  2012; Kieser,  2002b; Mohe and Seidl, 2011; Sutter and Kieser, 2015). According to systems theory, communication in social systems initiated by individuals is beyond their control (Mohe and Seidl, 2011: 8). For example, a presentation by a consultant of her idea of redesigning the organization may trigger a discussion among the client managers focusing on the opportunities and drawbacks of the proposal. This discussion will refer to earlier discussions in the organization and to earlier decisions and their outcomes. If some of the consultant’s quotes are repeated they are interpreted with regard to the client’s organizational context. For the client managers, that is the only way to understand them: ‘The same words have different meanings in different systems’ (Mohe and Seidl, 2011: 8). This means that client organizations will always understand and implement (i.e. consume) the consultants’ recommendations in their own ways. Some see communication barriers between consultants and their clients as being bridged through devices such as boundary objects and prototyping which can foster translation and collaboration. According to Star and Griesemer (1989: 412–13), boundary objects (such as a description of a remodelling of an organizational process) are never unambiguous, but ‘contain at every stage the traces of multiple viewpoints, translations and incomplete battles’. Likewise, prototyping can align the components that different specialists are working on together. It is ‘an iterative trial and error process, directed by some amount of insight as to the direction in which a solution might lie’ (Thomke et  al.,  1998: 316; see also Iansiti,  1997; Pisano,  1996; Thomke,  1998; Wheelwright and Clark, 1992). A simple form of prototyping is applied when, in early project phases, the project team members present a concept for the redesign of a process to other client employees who are knowledgeable about it and are asked to assess the concept and suggest revisions. Such a presentation can, for example, be based on a drawing or a slide (a boundary object) (Schmickl and Kieser, 2008). Eventually, the presenters who receive this feedback may modify the design of their concept. Despite the potential of boundary objects and prototypes to foster collaboration, some of the systemic issues noted above remain a challenge for joint working. These also apply to other actors in the market for management ideas such as when management scholars or gurus collaborate with managers to get ideas implemented. However, these collaborations are by no means as frequent as those between managers and consultants. Here, the consultants are predominantly the propagators of ideas and the managers are both the receivers and those who translate the ideas into a context they are familiar with (Kieser and Leiner, 2012).

Conclusion Managers are typically seen as the archetypical consumers of management ideas. However, this chapter showed that other actors are also very much in the role of both consumers and co-producers of management ideas, albeit with different reasons, practices, and problems.

242    s. bort and a. kieser In addition, the role of the consumers might also change and evolve over time. The same actor might come into contact with management ideas the first time as a business student at a university, and later in the role of a manager and/or researcher where the consumption is more active and may have broader implications for others. Likewise, the production and consumption of management ideas is also a dynamic and complex process which is in many ways unpredictable. Ideas take on a life of their own as different actors use, interpret, and translate and adjust them to their specific context. Even when the implementation of a new idea may be primarily ceremonial in an initial stage, over time, real changes may occur (Haack et al., 2012). In addition, at one point in time a whole ecology of management ideas coexists and coevolves and their discourses are interwoven (Wruk et al., 2016). We tried to systematize how different actors may fit into the role of the consumer and thus to contribute to a better understanding of the production and consumption of management ideas. However, our analysis also raises a number of possible themes and questions for further research. For example, it is remarkable that for quite a long period of time now ‘big’ management fashions like organizational culture, business process re-engineering, total quality management, balanced score card, or Lean production have not developed (see also Benders et al., in this volume). For many years, management fashions were conceptualized as unavoidable consequences of the activities of c­ onsultancies which consumed new management ideas and then tried to transform them into fashions that no organization could dare to ignore, enticing other c­ onsultancies to join the bandwagon with copies which promised to outcompete the original (David and Strang, 2006; David et al., 2013; Strang et al., 2014; Strang and Macy, 2001; Strang and Meyer, 1993). However, since the new millennium no similar large-scale management fashion has appeared on the market. There were some attempts to launch new ideas as fashions such as knowledge management (Lilley and Parker, 2016; Scarbrough et al., 2005), yet they did not achieve a breakthrough. Is it that managers have become increasingly sceptical with regard to the promises of consultancies and others who market fashions? (See also Wright, in this volume.) Or is it that procurement has become more powerful in controlling expenditures for management fashions? Another research question that is connected with the fashion phenomenon relates to how companies or individual managers scan management ideas and on which basis they evaluate their potential. What information do they consult to learn about new ideas and their potential? Which publications do they look into, with what frequency, and how are these selected? Are there meetings encompassing managers of several c­ ompanies in which participants exchange experiences in scanning and evaluating management ideas? How do companies evaluate the implementation of new management ideas, whether or not they have been brought about with the support of consultancies? Are attempts made to evaluate systematically the impact of the new ideas when they are implemented (see also Wickert et al., in this volume)—an evaluation that is extremely difficult because the comparison with the situation without the implementation of the idea in question in most cases depends on subjective judgements (Phillips, 2015). In short, how rational or evidence-based is idea consumption in practice?

consumers and co-producers of management ideas    243

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pa rt i i i

PRO C E S SE S

chapter 13

Th e R e-A doption of M a nagem en t Ide as how they come, how they go, and why some come back Patrick Reinmoeller, Shaz Ansari, and Mohit Mehta

Introduction This chapter addresses the strategic issue of companies’ re-adoption of management ideas. The various ways in which the spread of ideas has affected management practice have been studied under different labels including administrative, managerial, and management innovations (Damanpour, 1987; Damanpour and Aravind, 2012; van Grinsven et al., 2016). While the adoption of management ideas requires substantial resources in large-scale change efforts, why and how some management ideas at times are re-adopted after their initial abandonment remains an important, yet unanswered question in research on management practice. This is important because repeatedly dedicating resources to similar management ideas only to withdraw them again can lead to wasteful patterns and exhibits a lack of learning capabilities. Building on what we know about the  specification, antecedents, generation, and diffusion of such management ideas (Abrahamson, 1991, 1996; Ansari et al., 2010; Birkinshaw et al., 2008; Damanpour, 1987; Damanpour and Aravind, 2012; Kennedy and Fiss, 2009; Rogers, 1995), we aim to shed further light on the re-adoption of management ideas. Management ideas have different focal areas, including how to organize, how to manage, how to innovate, or what structures and processes to use. Particularly ideas on how to improve performance—including total quality management, Lean management, outsourcing, data analytics, and holacracy—have generated much interest among ­managers and researchers who study how management knowledge is transferred (Mol et al., 2017),

252    P. Reinmoeller, S. Ansari, and M. Mehta translated (Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996, 2005; Spyridonidis et al., 2016), and adapted (Ansari et al., 2010; Røvik, 2011). Different approaches to translation research focus on structural or symbolic change through embeddedness (e.g. regulation) or actors’ agency (van Grinsven et al., 2016). All of these points about management ideas suggest the need for a better understanding of their repeated adoption, adaptation, and abandonment processes. We begin by reviewing key findings of an increasing body of work on this topic. We identify three main, partially competing, perspectives in the literature: fashion, function, and process; each highlighting particular aspects of the adoption process. While the fashion perspective emphasizes the social process of how new ideas spread regardless of their effectiveness, reflecting psychodynamic, dramaturgical, and institutional/ cultural views, the functional perspective focuses on the role of socio-economic needs and associated performance benefits in rational and political terms (Sturdy, 2004). Finally, our emphasis on the process perspective shifts attention and offers unique opportunities for understanding how and why ideas are re-adopted. We identified four factors that regulate the adoption process: external and internal conditions, technology, and employee experience as the perceptual, emotional, and cognitive (re)action to management ideas. Each can moderate the adoption of management ideas that make re-adoption more or less likely. We end by outlining opportunities for future research avenues.

The Adoption of Management Ideas: An Overview of the Field Although the adoption of technological innovations has played a prominent role in management research, the spread of management innovations has only recently received more attention (Birkinshaw and Mol, 2006). Organizations adopt ideas such as teamwork, total quality management (TQM), business process re-engineering (BPR) (cf. David and Strang, 2006), or design-thinking to help improve their performance and productivity. However, these new management ideas can be difficult to implement (Davenport, 1995), which results in an uneven distribution and competitive advantage only for those who know how to effectively implement them (e.g. Mol and Birkinshaw, 2009). Other practices, such as texting, power point presentations (cf. Ansari and Phillips, 2011; Kaplan, 2010), and other social media were rapidly adopted and tend to spread widely among individuals and organizations even though their performance benefits may be ambiguous, fleeting, or at times non-existent (Abrahamson,  1991; Benders and Van Veen, 2001; Staw and Epstein, 2000). A variety of different adoption patterns shows considerable variation in how management ideas are adopted in interaction with their given context (e.g. Ansari et al. 2010), like the concept of golden parachutes, which was used to retain key employees and align incentives (Fiss et al., 2012). Prior reviews have used different ways to organize what we know about the adoption of management ideas, including environmental and practice characteristics (O’Neill

The Re-adoption of Management Ideas    253 et al., 1998), psychodynamic and institutional views (Sturdy, 2004), and rational and social accounts (Ansari et al., 2010). Each of these reviews focuses on instances of adoption and possible reasons for adoption. Building on such work, we seek to explore why we observe re-adoption over time. (See also Benders et al., this volume.) Emphasizing the longitudinal nature of management practices and their re-adoption, we offer a novel way to categorize prior work by identifying three main perspectives to understand the re-adoption of management ideas over time: fashion, function, and process.

Fashion Several researchers have approached the spread of management ideas with an emphasis on a fashion-like pattern of diffusion and adoption (e.g. Abrahamson,  1991,  1996; Cornelissen and Lock,  2000; ten Bos and Heusinkveld,  2008). (See also Seeck and Lamberg, this volume.) Fashionable management ideas are conceptualized as fleeting phenomena marked by a rapid cycle of emergence, diffusion, and abandonment—­quality circles or BPR, which followed a bell-shaped curve (Abrahamson, 1996). Such fashion cycles have been observed across populations of companies, industries, and countries (Guillén, 1994). The ‘caffeine dose’ theory (Abrahamson and Eisenman, 2008; Cole, 1989) suggests that such ideas can be successful—independent of their effectiveness—because they initiate change efforts as a (temporarily) effective antidote to ­organizational inertia. The so-called fashion setters, including consulting firms, management pundits, and professional societies who develop and disseminate such ideas influence fashion cycles of ideas like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems (Wang and Ramiller, 2009). Some studies focused on professional, information systems, media, and consultants’ influence (e.g. David and Strang, 2006; Scarbrough et al., 2015; Sorge and Witteloostuijn, 2004) and on academic influence on fad propulsion (Barley et al., 1988), like the labelling of an opaque practice from Japan as ‘Lean’. When the ‘gurus’ introduce a faddish idea for the ‘gullible manager’, normal practice becomes unattractive and e­ uphoria and collective emotion drive wider imitation (Abrahamson and Eisenman, 2008). Anxiety, excitement, simplified and incorrect logics, and prior events are conditions for the emergence and diffusion of fads. Also, the discourse and rhetoric (e.g. Green, 2004; Zbaracki, 1998) and fashion-specific language influence the diffusion of ideas. ‘Broadcasting’ of a particular vocabulary is essential to widespread adoption (Strang and Soule, 1998) and highlights the role of supply-side organizations in the adoption process (Hirsch, 1972; Rogers, 1995) and their ‘packaged solution’ (Newell et al., 1998).

Function The functional perspective shifts attention to the effectiveness of new management ideas and sees performance increases as the primary motivation for the adoption of new ideas. (See also Wickert et al., this volume.) This perspective of ideas as solutions to problems applies also to reforms of public sector enterprises so as to adopt private

254    P. Reinmoeller, S. Ansari, and M. Mehta sector ideas to improve performance (Moynihan, 2006). Examples include TQM and performance-based compensation structures (Milakovich,  2007). Similarly, in the information systems area, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), E-commerce, and Knowledge Management were adopted as solutions to satisfy similar perceived ­organizational needs (Wang, 2010: 63). The functional perspective emphasizes that management innovations tend to emerge to meet a perceived need (Birkinshaw and Mol, 2006). Management innovations are seen as new ‘rules and routines by which work gets done inside organizations’ (Birkinshaw et al., 2008: 828). While some management ideas are ‘new to the world’ (Birkinshaw et al., 2008), many more appear ‘new to the firm’ (Mol and Birkinshaw, 2009). Although management innovations are frequently marked by much higher levels of social complexity and transfer failure (Lillrank, 1995), many o ­ rganizations adopted management ideas from other sectors to serve perceived needs (Damanpour and Aravind, 2012). Related to the functional perspective, the two-stage model of practice diffusion (e.g. Tolbert and Zucker, 1983; Westphal and Zajac, 1997) explains early adoption as driven by efficiency needs, while later in the adoption cycle the motivation shifts towards conformity to avoid looking illegitimate, which appears theoretically incomplete and of low predictive power (Kennedy and Fiss, 2009). Other institutional scholars emphasize the institutional embeddedness of technical considerations and view institutional environments as more fragmented and contested (Lounsbury, 2007).

Process A third perspective shifts attention to the process of adapting management ideas (e.g. Ansari et al., 2010; Fiss et al., 2012; Røvik, 2011), i.e. the how of adoption. Bringing in new management ideas frequently involves adapting, modifying, adjusting, and translating activities by which motivations and meanings are continuously negotiated and nudged (e.g. Callon, 1986; Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005; Latour, 1987; Spyridonidis et al., 2016). Others focus on the process of how agency and embeddedness (e.g. regulation) can structurally or symbolically change management ideas (van Grinsven et al., 2016). Regarding ‘what’ is changed, differences matter. For instance, the degree of the ‘newness’ of management ideas within the practice implementation process matters (Slappendel, 1996). At times, new practices can undergo extensive translation (Boxenbaum and Strandgaard Pedersen,  2009; Zilber,  2006) and adaptation (e.g. Ansari et al.,  2010). More radical management ideas may require a more complex process. When ideas are expected to involve a significant proportion of new arrangements, ­capabilities, or radical change, contestation and the emergent nature of the process will be exacerbated. New (to the world) management innovations, such as TQM, BPR, or design-thinking require significant changes in organizational processes to improve ­productivity. In contrast to a traditional waterfall model to develop software (Rigby et al., 2016), new agile practices involve considerable adaptation in the organizational mind-set and the practice.

The Re-adoption of Management Ideas    255 Unknown management ideas suffer more difficulties; ‘not invented here’ affects adoption of ideas within organizations (e.g. Ansari et al., 2014; Kostova and Roth, 2002). Consider how the management idea of digital transformation of the workplace has been an umbrella that covers practices that are very similar in their aims to introduce PCs, LAN, ‘always online’, and cloud computing. The process of re-adopting the management ideas is therefore more complex and long term and not well understood. How adoption occurs also matters. The adoption of new management ideas is frequently a dynamic, contested, and emergent process (Ansari et al.,  2010,  2014; Drori and Honig, 2013; Fiss and Zajac, 2004; Heusinkveld et al., 2013; Reinmoeller and Ansari, 2016; Sanders and Tuschke, 2007). However, turning the adoption of new ideas into front-line activities requires converting related action patterns into habits through repetition (Reay et al.,  2013; Zbaracki,  1998). New management ideas may meet sedimentation (Cole, 1989; Heusinkveld and Benders, 2012; Heusinkveld et al., 2013), entrenchment due to culture or education (Zeitz et al., 1999), or succumb to other patterns (Noon et al., 2000; Røvik,  1996) and remain only ‘temporally and contextually provisional’ (Orlikowski, 2000: 412).

A Case Study: The Idea of Self-Management Mostly the sources of new management innovations are problems and/or opportunities in the external environment (cf. Mol et al., 2017), and we know how discourse on management ideas and their use coevolve over time (e.g. Benders, 1999; Nijholt and Benders, 2007; Stjernberg and Philips, 1993), yet other contingencies of re-adoption have hardly been explored. Here we explore the case of self-management because of repeated attempts to use self-organizing organizations with empowered self-managing employees in different guises to improve systems, organizations, and professionals. We arrive at process characteristics of re-adoption including the moderating influence of external and internal factors, technology, and, at the micro level, importantly employee experience of identity, which can explain (re-)adoption with support or resistance against perceived pressures. Markedly different from command and control views of management in hierarchies, self-management is certainly not a new management idea. The concept of self-­organization has roots in multiple fields including engineering, physics, biology, mathematics, and ecology, spanning six decades from 1950 to 2010. Self-organization—closely associated with terms like self-management, self-managing, and self-steering—has been found in  a variety of contexts, including ‘multicellular organisms, social insects, market economies, human societies, [and] ecosystems’ (Jelasity et al., 2006: 8). Related frameworks include: emerging order (von Hayek, 1994) (e.g. Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’); autopoietic social systems (Luhmann, 1984); evolutionary processes in social systems

256    P. Reinmoeller, S. Ansari, and M. Mehta (Ulrich and Probst, 1984); and substitutes for leadership (Manz and Sims Jr, 1987; UhlBien and Graen, 1998). Self-organization has four characteristics (Wolf and Holvoet, 2004): (1) an increase in order, (2) autonomy, (3) adaptability or robustness, and (4) dynamics far from equilibrium. Illustrating ‘how collective behaviors causally result from the individual level’ (Bonabeau et al., 1997: 188), self-organizing organizations consist of independent units that operate based on local observations and some local rules, yet collectively they are capable of inexpensive, simple, and robust solutions, resilience and even self-healing. Hence, self-organizing is a concept that underpins a range of collective phenomena including empowerment and self-organization. While some pursue research rooted in the natural sciences (e.g. McKelvey,  1999), ­others enrich conventional management approaches (e.g. Ulrich and Probst, 1984) and search for ‘new organizational forms’ (Daft and Lewin, 1993), ‘the non-standard firm’ (Helper et al., 2000), ‘cellular forms’ (Miles et al., 1997), ‘hypertext organization’ (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995), or ‘spaghetti organization’ (Gould, 1994). Besides the emphasis on organization, self-management relies on self-managing ­individuals who take responsibility for decisions related to execution of tasks, monitoring and managing their own behaviours (Manz and Sims Jr,  1987; Uhl-Bien and Graen, 1998). Employees set personal standards, evaluate their own performance in light of these standards, and self-administer consequences based on self-evaluation (Manz and Sims Jr, 1987). Basic self-management skills include being able to investigate problems, set goals, rehearse and observe, evaluate, reinforce, and punish. Self-management is seen by some as critical for competitive advantage (Walton, 1985) because of its ‘emphasis on employee commitment’ (Uhl-Bien and Graen, 1998: 340).

Self-Management as Fashionable and Functional The desire to distil key insights from self-management and apply them to organizations has appealed to practitioners and researchers time and again. A graphic representation (based on Google’s NGram) included in Figure 13.1 shows a time horizon for this idea illustrating how self-organization and self-management are reflected in published books. Self-organization had peaks between 1940 and 1950, around 1960, between 1970 and 1980, and around 1990. For the closely related ‘self-management’ we see a similar pattern of several peaks; smaller ones before 1920, around 1930 and 1940, then around 1980 and between 1990 and 2000 with a rebound between 2000 and 2010. Since the 1960s organizational units at Kyocera (see also Adler and Hiromoto, 2012) were treated as if they were cells or organisms; each autonomous and responsible for its  own management. Self-management became fashionable and waned in the 1970s and 1980s (Salem and Banner, 1992). PepsiCo and Xerox or Volvo, where small teams produced cars autonomously, were among early adopters. More recently, W. L. Gore and Buurtzorg in The Netherlands (Laloux, 2014) have re-adopted self-management (e.g. Roelofsen and Yue, 2017). The idea of self-management has seen a rise in interest with

The Re-adoption of Management Ideas    257 0.00000550% 0.00000500% 0.00000450% 0.00000400%

self management (AII)

0.00000350% 0.00000300% 0.00000250%

self organization (AII)

0.00000200% 0.00000150% 0.00000100% 0.00000050% 0.00000000% 1900

1910

1920

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

Figure 13.1  Google NGram for self-organization, self-management

numerous related practices, such as agile development or design-thinking, that rely on self-management of employees and participants. Self-management has functions that address the high costs of hierarchy and ­inflexibility. Self-management builds on the autonomy and critical ability of their employees to self-manage (e.g. Adler and Hiromoto, 2012; Langfred, 2000), use discretion and freedom (Cohen and Ledford Jr, 1994; Pearce and Ravlin, 1987), and their ability to structure internally and organize for goal achievement (Hackman, 1986). Heightened flexibility in reconfiguring in response to the changes in a variety of tasks and contexts (Langfred, 2007) can confer the advantages of self-managing teams on organizations.

Re-adoption Process of Self-Management: How it Comes and Goes We turn to the case of self-management’s (re-)adoption because of its importance as it introduces tensions with respect to traditional views in management, its longevity, and, with some notable exceptions (e.g. Nijholt and Benders, 2007) has received less attention. Similar to adoption and adaptation, abandonment is a complex process (Burns and Wholey, 1993). It may involve varying levels of commitment, even only adhering to labels (Benders and Van Veen, 2001; Giroux, 2006), and running the practice as a tick-box exercise (Lapsley, 2009; McGivern and Ferlie, 2007). Some management ideas seem to re-emerge in various forms. Related work on the ­rhetorical and substantive adoption of management ideas highlights the parallel effects of transience and sedimentation (e.g. Benders, 1999), the motivational challenge of change agents to balance change with legitimacy and control with autonomy (Stjernberg and Philips, 1993), and repackaging of old ideas and faddism (Noon et al., 2000). We build on this work and explore how such multiple processes help with a more systematic account of the re-adoption of management ideas, using multiple incarnations of self-management.

258    P. Reinmoeller, S. Ansari, and M. Mehta Self-management is characteristically based on ‘disaggregating internal organization (i.e., adopting internal hybrids) rather than disaggregating the corporation itself (i.e., adopting external hybrids or engaging in arms-length contracting)’ (Foss, 2000: 3). It is reflected in several well-known management practices including TQM, communities of practice, and agile methods (Rigby et al.,  2016). Over the years, companies engaging with self-management include Semco, W. L. Gore, Morning Star, and Valve (Birkinshaw, 2014) and some are known for features of self-management like Kyocera’s amoeba management, Oticon’s ‘spaghetti organization’, and Zappos with its unique self-organizing culture, or Spotify’s squads (Mankins and Garton, 2017). A recent incarnation of self-management, holacracy, has generated considerable attention (Bernstein and Bunch, 2016; Sampere, 2015). Proponents of holacracy suggest that it is marked by (a) dynamically changing flexible job roles as opposed to static roles; (b) distributed decision-making with delegated authority; (c) rapid and iterative organic growth against large re-organizations; and (d) eliminating extraneous factors (e.g. consensus building, organizational politics) and replacing them with transparent operating rules (Anon., 2007). However, rather than becoming entrenched (Zeitz et al., 1999), holacracy has lost some momentum (Anon., 2014; Appelo, 2016) and was abandoned by early adopters, who, citing onerous processes, accountability gaps, and difficulties in making decisions and implementing the necessary mind-set, have moved on to other ideas (cf. Sorge and Witteloostuijn, 2004). By exploring the concept of self-management, we found four main factors and their combinations that justify efforts to re-adopt self-management: (1) external conditions, (2) internal conditions, (3) technology, and (4) employees’ experiences. These factors can explain why self-management and self-organization continue to capture the attention of managers.

External Conditions External conditions strongly influence adoption. Frequent changes in the external business environment create a real or perceived need for change, thereby justifying radically new ways of organizing. External complexity and dynamism, in line with Ashby’s law of requisite variety (Ashby, 1956), call for a corresponding change in internal structures able to handle them. Next, such new ways to organize are supported by new and more independent ways of working, such as hotdesking, remote workplaces, and other arrangements that afford much greater flexibility and autonomy of employees. These external conditions, including peers’ behaviours (Chen and Miller,  2007) can strongly influence re-adoption of self-management. External changes have led to the increasing need for flexibility and adaptability, which self-management promises to deliver by different means including open office designs, and agile and design-thinking. External conditions can influence re-adoption by defining the relevance of ideas and how they may be resuscitated.

The Re-adoption of Management Ideas    259

Internal Conditions Internal conditions strongly influence adoptions of management ideas. Selfmanagement’s complexity and implementation challenges do not make it an easy-to-use idea because it alters the typical contract between the employee and the organization. Although self-management introduces more employee freedom and relies on trust to independently pursue a common goal, even self-management needs guidance which raises questions about who leads self-management and with which consequences (Barker, 1993; Morgeson, 2005) including ambiguity and confusion. Indeed, the implementation of self-management frequently does not unfold as planned in terms of yielding organizational benefits. Once the idea’s dysfunctional side-effects (Langfred, 2007) like risks or higher than expected costs become known, ­organizations tend to devalue the idea and subsequently abandon it. For instance, selfmanaging teams may create barriers, which reduce autonomy and adaptability, and go against the idea’s core tenets. Similarly, training people to self-manage while being managed may create disappointment. Internal conditions exert a strong influence on re-adoption. While external conditions influence relevance and remembering, internal conditions operate through how realistic (re-)adoption is. If internal conditions do not allow for (re-)adoption, then (temporary) abandonment may be the consequence. Internal factors influence re-adoption because prior adoption frames internal factors through increasing perceived familiarity, knowledge, and the view that a specific idea is naturally part of the set of available options. Therefore, re-adoption is more likely if prior adoption has been inculcated and left traces that influence the identity and reduce reasons for resistance (Schilke, 2017). After Zappos’ open and fun culture had been hailed for years at the top of Fortune magazine’s best place to work, it was acquired by Amazon. Building on Zappos’ culture that already emphasizes autonomy and decentralized decision-making, self-management, not surprisingly, was re-adopted under the label of holacracy. It was introduced to reinforce cultural elements and prevent complacency. At Zappos, re-adoption happened in a short period of time, as different notions of self-management were adopted in quick succession (empowering individuals, holacracy, teal). Reviving self-management, Zappos experienced setbacks and strong increase in employee dissatisfaction (Petriglieri, 2015; Reingold, 2016). The experimental nature and the absence of formal management roles created uncertainty, increases in meeting times, high turnover, and a loss of trust in leadership.

Technology Technology strongly influences (re)adoption of management ideas. Falling communication costs facilitate organizations’ move away from hierarchical organization (Malone, 2004). For instance, data warehouses, knowledge management, and data

260    P. Reinmoeller, S. Ansari, and M. Mehta analytics build on the underlying management idea of exploiting IT to enhance the abilities of organizations to efficiently develop, test, and implement the best ideas. Re-adoption is influenced by technology because technological change can alter the feasibility of management ideas. Whereas self-management was in the 1970s revolutionary in its way of wresting control from central headquarters, technological change has over time allowed for applications of self-management that integrate dispersed decisionmaking and retained control at the centre. Technological change made the idea look much less radical and more useful. Yet, with the short shelf-life of technology, the management ideas are abandoned quickly in favour of the next new one, even without radical differences. Therefore, technology can drive abandonment because new and improved substitutes drive re-adoption. A number of firms such as Valve, GitHub, and Zappos received significant press and practitioner attention (Roelofsen and Yue, 2017). Especially, the idea of holacracy appeared driven by technological advances that made technology seemingly capable of supporting the dynamics and complexity of self-managing groups with distributed communication devices. Holacracy, developed by the former CEO of a software company, is explicitly supported by dedicated software designed to enable its adoption (Robertson, 2015).

Employee Experience Self-management brings its set of challenges. Mainly the difficult and often extensive adjustments to pre-existing organizational structure, culture, and practices may make some employees less enthusiastic about (re-)adoption. Although prior to adoption, employee enthusiasm may propel management ideas to be introduced, it may weaken with time and growing (negative) experience. For instance, moving from a hierarchical mind-set towards self-management may seem enticing at first, but it challenges ­managers’ accountability and creates concerns given unclear promotion patterns (Hamel, 2011) and potential incompatibility with alternative employers. Employees may  relish autonomy but can find it challenging when asked to be accountable as well (Mankins and Garton, 2017a, 2017b). Commencing with new activities such as self-administering, to personally reinforcing or sanctioning their own or their peers’ productive individual and team activities, self-management requires proactive behaviour by employees that can significantly alter jobs, demands, resources (Demerouti and Bakker, 2014), tasks, and relationships, i.e. job crafting (Tims et al., 2013; Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001). In doing so, self-management appears to do away with traditional managers and leaders, only to—as some critics note—introduce new kinds of managers and leaders of the now self-managed organization (e.g. Morgeson, 2005). Self-management often requires considerable leaps in employee capabilities or ­managerial capabilities. Employees may experience the responsibility of being held accountable as challenging because it demands heightened sensitivity and alertness to changes relevant to their increasingly ambiguous jobs and their organizations. While

The Re-adoption of Management Ideas    261 the need to be alert and sense threats and opportunities may be challenging, it also offers self-managing employees the freedom to discuss and influence the organization’s agenda. Therefore, employees’ inclinations to explore and sense will influence their receptivity towards the adoption of management ideas. Re-adoption may become more likely if in previous rounds, such perceptual capabilities had been honed and can now be leveraged and redeployed. Cognitive challenges equally influence re-adoptions. Cognitively self-managing employees need to address the difficult challenge of reconciling paradoxical demands for autonomy and accountability, abandoning the notion of being managed but m ­ anaging themselves and others through peer pressure, and simplicity (without hierarchy) through complexity (with overlapping teams and responsibilities). Where traditional management systems require employees to understand a few relationships very well (managing downward and upwards), self-management requires attention to a large number of important relationships that need to be managed. Increases in the cognitive load can be experienced as negative or as stimulating until a threshold is reached, which has been discussed as Dunbar’s number. The differentiation of layers is aligned with the cognitive information processing constraints of the human brain that are quickly challenged by many human social contacts (MacCarron et al., 2016). In a system relying on self-management employees need to make and maintain relationships with numerous peers, who through the system of peer evaluation and peer pressure have collectively decisive influence on rewards; this increases cognitive stimulation but also can lead to strain. Re-adoption of self-management is influenced by employees’ experience of how demanding the cognitive effort is likely to be. Prior adoption of the same idea may facilitate re-adoption because employees are already ­knowledgeable, making re-adoption less difficult. However, such prior and/or experiential knowledge about a previously adopted idea involves engaging cognitively and getting to know more about it. This can, through the cascading nature of dissimilarity, lead to less affinity or even contempt for the practice (Norton et al., 2007). While Helfat and Peteraf (2015) focus on social cognition as a cognitive capability, Hodgkinson and Healey (2011) point to the importance of emotional and non-conscious processes for dynamic (managerial) capabilities. Maintaining meaningful relationships with numerous colleagues requires considerable effort and emotional energy. MacCarron et al. (2016) found, for example, that different personality types, introverts and extroverts, differ in how easy or agreeable they find interacting with others and consequently how many meaningful relationships they are capable of managing. Introverts may find self-management through circles or squads with many peers emotionally more taxing than extroverts. Affective responses of employees can thus lead to the reception or rejection of management ideas. Re-adoption of self-management can be facilitated by prior adoptions as familiarity can grow alongside positive affect (cf. Rindfleisch and Inman, 1998). However, from social psychology we know that affect also influences perceived familiarity (Monin,  2003), whereby emotions can influence how facile or complex an idea is seen; likeable ideas look easy. When the likeability of an idea makes it well-known, this could further reinforce the influence of emotion on adoption and

262    P. Reinmoeller, S. Ansari, and M. Mehta re-adoption. Taken together, the perceptual, cognitive, and affective experiences of employees in relation to management ideas can greatly influence employees’ view of an idea, its adoption, and more importantly, its re-adoption. The four factors—employee experience, technology, external and internal conditions— combined with a management idea’s perceived benefits can strongly influence re-adoption (see Table 13.1). While their influence reveals a complex pattern that makes predicting re-adoptions tenuous, we suggest that they can motivate or limit re-adoption.

Conclusion Questions related to reasons for re-adoption lead us to interrogate the literature organized as three broad perspectives—fashion, function, and process—that can provide insights into the revival of an abandoned idea. Modes, vogues, and fashions are at times revitalized. Regarding the example of self-management, many different labels and concepts are closely associated with the fundamental idea, increasing the likelihood that self-management is invoked whenever one of its associated concepts is highlighted or discussed. The number of associated key concepts may distract or confuse potential adopters about what constitutes the essence of the practice, but it may also ensure better odds at resurgence and continued survival (see also Benders et al., in this volume). From a functional perspective, cyclical fluctuations can create perceptions about the usefulness of a past practice (it worked in the past) and pave the way for its revival (it might work this time). A process perspective suggests that adoption and abandonment may be processes rather than single events that allow ideas to resurface in only a slightly different form, not necessarily carrying the same label. Thus, a practice may not have been completely abandoned before we see its renaissance as in reality it never had died. In short, we have drawn on the literature and the case of self-management to identify four factors that can influence the process of adoption and re-adoption. While external and internal factors point to intuitive reasons why and how organizations may (or may not) re-adopt, technology and employee experience provide additional insights into the phenomenon. Technology appears to be driving and constraining re-adoption because every technological shortcoming provides an excuse why the idea could be adopted as well as desired. In addition, every technological advance provides new justification for the claim that ‘this time’ the technology is ready. In most studies, adoption of new management is associated with the strategic decision-making processes of key managers. Revisiting the idea of self-management and its many incarnations over time, we found that employees’ experience, as the perceptual, cognitive, and affective effects of a management idea, can moderate how such ideas are adopted and re-adopted. In doing so, we provide a first look at the dynamics of the re-adoption process. Below we sketch how and why self-management and self-organization may have risen, receded, and returned. The adoption of management ideas is by now a mature field of research, and a significant number of studies have examined topics of emergence,

The Re-adoption of Management Ideas    263

Table 13.1  Process factors driving re-adoption Fashion

Function

Process

Adoption

Abandonment

Re-adoption

• Idea-driven • Attention-driven • Chance-driven • Fashion setters (‘charismatic gurus’) and ‘gullible managers’ •  ‘Caffeine dose’ • Collective anxiety or excitement • Simple logics and wrong logics

• Inertia •  Decline of attention • Chance-driven • Collective anxiety and excitement

• Repackaging • Relabelling •  ‘Old wine in new bottles’

• Newness-driven • Promise-driven • Needs-driven •  Efficiency needs •  Legitimacy needs • Expectation-driven solutions • Anticipation-driven benefits

•  Lack of newness • Evidence-driven • Delusion-driven • Realism-driven •  Shifting priorities • Fatigue

• Adapting

• Adapting

• Modifying • Adjusting • Translating • Nudging

• Modifying • Negotiating • Contesting

• Simple logics and wrong logics

•  Return of need •  Rekindling interest

• Dysfunctional effects • Remembering and resuscitating •  Enhanced motivation •  External factors driving •  Greater ­productivity •  Lower costs • Need for flexibility and adaptability •  Internal factors • Inculcation, traces of the past • Realism-driven • Technology • Enabling and energizing new trials • Justifies ­repackaging and relabelling •  Employee experience • Enthusiasm •  Mind-set and cognition • Capabilities • Affect

264    P. Reinmoeller, S. Ansari, and M. Mehta diffusion, and abandonment. That being said, there are still some unexplored areas, such as in understanding the factors underpinning the durability and ‘stickiness’ around such practices as competitive intelligence (Reinmoeller and Ansari,  2016) or balanced scorecards (Kaplan and Norton, 1996). A significant topic of interest for future research relates to the question of a practice’s identity in change processes. Few ideas come out of the diffusion process unchanged (Ansari et al., 2010). Yet, at what point is a changed practice still the same versus when has it morphed into something so different that its identity is no longer the same? So far, the issue of an item’s identity includes its core and peripheral features (Rogers, 1995). However, while the distinction between core and periphery points to some unchanging, essential features of ideas, it leaves open how core features are defined. To establish how identity may remain unchanged even if some properties of an item change over time, it may be helpful to use the concept of social codes as formal constraints about what is expected and not expected of an entity (Pólos et al., 2002). Such a conformity approach sees social actors (such as organizations and their constituents) as imposing certain socially defined codes on entities, with circumscribed ranges within which different features of the entity may fall without violating the code. The identity of a diffusing item, then, is essentially a constraint, and observers make decisions about code violations. Such an approach seems better suited to the problem of understanding changes in diffusion than an approach that focuses on innate, core features of the diffusing item. Still, very little research has focused on how diffusing items change their identity and the response such changes generate for key actors involved in the diffusion process. A focus on the re-adaptation process also highlights the strengths and weaknesses of traditional accounts of diffusion among organizations. For example, if adaptation is the norm rather than the exception, then the technological, cultural, and political implications of a diffusing practice will often be subject to negotiation and change during the diffusion process (Ansari et al., 2010). Thus, organizations will frequently not be able to conduct rational calculations on the cost–benefit trade-offs of adoption when the meaning of the diffusing practice is still contested or in flux. Furthermore, these organizations are themselves significant ‘sense-givers’ in the complex process that shapes the meaning of a diffusing practice. This likewise points to the emergent, processual character of adoption. In addition, the ideas of ongoing negotiation and change suggest that the legitimacy of a diffusing practice is also in flux in ways that go beyond social accounts emphasizing simple mimetic processes. We hope that our ideas here will spawn further theorizing and empirical analysis to broaden the theoretical base and predictive power of studies on the adoption and evolution of management ideas.

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CHAPTER 14

The Persistence of M a nagem en t Ideas how framing keeps ‘Lean’ moving Jos Benders, Marlieke van Grinsven, and Jonas A. Ingvaldsen

Introduction The Engineering Industry is as much subject to fashion as any other human activity, and a study of its history reveals a succession of new ideas which have swept into the industrial limelight, each being received as a panacea which is going to revolutionise production, only to make way for some newer idea still. ‘Inspection’; ‘time and motion study’; ‘piece work’; ‘job rating’; ‘stock control’; each has had its day, made some contribution to management thought, and then receded from the limelight. Every idea has added one more layer to the multi decker sandwich which is management today. (Burbidge, 1957: 175)

Whilst this quote shows that swings in the popularity of management ideas were noted (at least) as early as 1957 (see also the introduction to this volume), academic attention to this phenomenon started a few decades later. Abrahamson (1991, 1996) is credited for conceptualizing such ‘management fads and fashions’ as a research theme in its own right. Ideas such as business process re-engineering (BPR), and total quality management (TQM), which were promoted in the 1980s and 1990s seem, by and large, to have faded away and are now, at best, hidden in footnotes of contemporary textbooks for management students. However, some management ideas keep being discussed and applied (see also Reinmoeller et al., in this volume). This holds in particular for Lean Management—often referred to simply as ‘Lean’. Having been coined by Krafcik (1988) and popularized by the bestseller The Machine That Changed the World (Womack et al., 1990), it was popular and controversial in the first half of the 1990s (Benders and

272    j. benders, m. van grinsven, and j. a. ingvaldsen Van Bijsterveld, 2000). It appears to have gone underground for some time only to come back as a ‘second wave’ (Sederblad, 2013). How was that possible? And what does that mean for the durability of other management ideas? In this chapter we attempt to answer these questions.

Management Ideas In 1887, the British government launched the Merchandise Marks Act. It was meant as a warning for British citizens against inferior products from foreign and particularly German origin. ‘Made in Germany’ was initially seen as a warning to the British consumer. Yet, as the public began to experience German products as superior to British ones, German producers started using it as a mark of quality, a practice which survives to the present day. Although ‘Made in Germany’ is not a management idea, it does exemplify how ideas may evolve. They are launched with particular intentions, but often received and used in other ways than intended by their originators. Whilst a variety of terms can be used to describe the phenomenon here called ‘management ideas’ (see also the introduction to this volume), there seems to be some agreement on their characteristics. Two of these are particularly relevant for our discussion: the concept of interpretive space and the promise of performance improvement.

Interpretive Space The first characteristic is related to what Ortmann called ‘interpretative viability’ (1995: 370): in order to be viable, ideas must lend themselves to various interpretations. Ideas may be interpreted very differently from what their originators intended, as was the case with ‘Made in Germany’. Originators may claim that these interpretations and, more importantly, manifestations in practice do not do justice to their ideas. Some uses may be purely rhetorical, i.e. the idea’s label is used symbolically without any substantial changes taking place. Especially when an idea is in vogue, it may be important or attractive for organizations to signal that they are in step with contemporary developments, without necessarily implementing ideas into practice. If organizational changes are aligned with the banner of the idea, these may range from closely following the idea as originally launched to highly selective cherry picking. Seen from the perspectives of idea consumers and producers, the interpretive space associated with management ideas offers a number of opportunities. Consumers of management ideas, generally managers, can eclectically pick out elements they find suitable for their own situations and/or purposes. For instance, BPR has been used to create new work process flows, but also to discharge staff. In a similar vein, a management idea’s advocates can frame particular interpretations at the expense of others. This makes the notion of ‘fidelity’ to an idea (Ansari et al., 2010) problematic as it assumes that a management idea can be defined exactly.

the persistence of management ideas    273 A management idea’s interpretive viability can be affected if it ‘wears out through use’ (Benders and Van Veen, 2001): once a particular interpretation is chosen and put into practice in a particular organization, to members in that organization this particular interpretation becomes the idea’s reality over other interpretations (Gondo and Amis, 2013; Scarbrough et al., 2015). Even if the adopting organization’s interpretation appears awkward to outsiders, to insiders it comes to be the meaning of the management idea. Such uses of the interpretive space narrow it down: one particular interpretation becomes the idea, rather than a set of possible interpretations.

The Promise of Performance Improvement Abrahamson (1996) stressed that the adoption of management ideas is driven by beliefs about ‘rational progress’, i.e. using ideas to improve organizational performance (see also Wickert et al., in this volume). Shortly after an idea is first propagated, (early) adopters may be persuaded solely by claims about the idea’s effects or they may simply try the idea in an attempt to stay ahead of their competitors. Over time, however, questions arise about how well the idea works in practice. Interested followers may look for evidence. Of course, intended benefits may or may not fully materialize. Whereas managers are always interested in ‘proven ideas’, delivering that proof in a way that is convincing to sceptics is very difficult. Indeed, this relevance to practitioners sits uncomfortably with the academic rigour needed to deliver such a message. Ideas are always implemented in continuously changing organizational settings, which makes it virtually impossible to prove that an effect is caused by the idea itself, rather than by other changes taking place in the same setting (Kieser and Nicolai, 2005; March and Sutton, 1997). Such ‘proof ’ may only be delivered in experimental research, which is practically impossible to conduct in real-life organizations. At the operational level, in single projects or stand-alone applications and pilots, one gets closest to ideal circumstances, but these applications are often criticized for being too narrow. To complicate matters further, the performance effects of a management idea are critically dependent on how the idea is put into practice—not only in terms of the interpretations made, but also in terms of associated contextual factors. Whilst this is generally ignored in quantitative studies, as it is virtually impossible to map the enormous variety of possible applications, these different types of use are undoubtedly an important explanation for contradictory research results. For instance, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) advocates the use of their ISO 9001 system to improve quality. Key to this system is documenting production processes. However, this does not include a judgement of how well these processes perform. Consequently, a malfunctioning process may be ISO-certified as long as it is well documented. Given that the ‘evidence’ for performance improvement of a management idea, if available at all, can always be contested, beliefs about an idea’s effects, rather than its actual effects, tend to drive the actions of both advocates and opponents (see also Wickert et al., in this volume).

274    j. benders, m. van grinsven, and j. a. ingvaldsen

Framing Moves Faced with inherent ambiguity in the content of a management idea and practically insurmountable difficulties in establishing performance effects, there is considerable manoeuvring room for framing moves (Heusinkveld and Visscher, 2012). For example, consultancies promise business benefits from management ideas, and they easily jump on board the bandwagon once a particular idea appears to be gaining popularity; they also abandon the idea as soon as demand fades (Benders et al., 1998; David and Strang, 2006). We see that a deliberate attempt to portray an idea in a particular way involves the idea’s content, its intended effects, and the extent to which these effects are realized. A decline in popularity may be caused by signals that the idea ‘is not delivering’, i.e. reports that the claimed benefits are only partially realized, or that ‘collateral damage’ has been incurred. In other words, field experiences impact the idea’s reputation and thus its viability (Benders and Van Bijsterveld, 2000). In the case of negative experiences, discussions are likely to emerge as to whether or not the idea has been properly implemented. The debate centres around the issue of whether the idea itself works or not, or whether an in essence sound idea was used ‘correctly’. If the latter view gets to prevail, an idea’s reputation as improving performance is likely to remain intact and more implementations are likely to follow. Beliefs about a management idea and its effects are transitory and continuously fed by reports of experiences in practice (David and Strang, 2006; Scarbrough et al., 2015).

Framing and Reframing Management Ideas Figure 14.1 contains a model of how management ideas evolve by being coupled with particular contents which generate outcomes which in turn have consequences for the label’s reputation. These processes are subject to framing and reframing. In this evolution, beliefs in an idea are reinforced or undermined, leading over time to the idea’s persistence or demise. Management ideas are initially created and framed by business school academics or consultants, who distil recipes for success and attach those to particular labels. The labels and the associated ideas then enter ‘adopting’ organizations. In putting the ideas to use, these ‘adopters’ narrow down the interpretive space by opting for a particular interpretation (and not other possible ones), and by conducting organizational changes in line with that interpretation. In other words, the label is framed to be about particular contents and to reach particular improvements. Organizational change then leads to intended and possibly also unintended economic and social outcomes. These outcomes are framed in causal terms, i.e. debates arise to what extent these outcomes can be attributed to the contents of implemented ideas. Subsequently, these debates have consequences for the label’s reputation: the idea may either be supported or discredited.

the persistence of management ideas    275 Idea creation

Label

Framing Outcomes

Contents

Figure 14.1  Model of how management ideas evolve

Framing and Reframing Lean In the case of Lean, it is useful to distinguish between a global level and field levels. ‘Lean’ was developed and disseminated at the global level. It was framed, and reframed, as a broadly applicable way to realize (arguably urgently needed) performance improvements. Building on that global level, more than a decade later the two field-level developments started, as we describe below. At both levels, Lean’s contents and reputation were, and still are, continuously being framed and reframed. The field levels tend to be more focused, as the interpretive space is narrowed down to a more specific content which its propagators see as particularly apt for the context at hand. In addition, in both cases a supporting infrastructure was created to support the idea’s dissemination. The latter includes facilitating, and influencing, debates about the idea’s effects. Both levels interact in many ways: the global level made the field levels possible in the first place, and experiences at field level may be incorporated at the global level.

Global Level When Krafcik (1988) coined the term ‘Lean production’, he meant to convey the idea that this way of manufacturing passenger cars produced superior results. Before 1988, there were many publications on the topic, yet using labels (mainly adjectives) referring to the country where the concept had been developed: Japan. These labels had the disadvantage that manufacturers outside of Japan easily attributed Lean production’s success to idiosyncratic Japanese circumstances which they could not copy. The first framing move was the choice of the term ‘Lean’, a term with positive connotations appealing to the ideals of health and/or beauty, yet not referring to a geographical base, to get that message across. ‘Lean production’ only became famous after the launch of the book The Machine That Changed the World (Womack et al., 1990). Before discussing this and how

276    j. benders, m. van grinsven, and j. a. ingvaldsen Lean production developed into Lean, we provide background information on the Toyota Production System (TPS), the model for ‘Lean’.

Toyota and ‘Japanese Manufacturing’ Several decades before the birth of the term ‘Lean’, a new way of producing cars was developed within Toyota Motors, a model which came to be known as the ‘Toyota Production System’ (Fujimoto, 1999). Toyota perfected the convergent, repetitive manufacturing of discrete products (Young, 1992). Organizing this was a serious logistical and organizational challenge, as a considerable number of elements must be tightly coordinated in order to fulfil customer orders in the most efficient way. For any specific car model, customers can choose from a menu of specifications, i.e. they can vary on a theme. This allows combining the repetition needed to benefit from economies of scale with a certain degree of customization. The development of what was to become the TPS took off after the end of the Second World War. The engineer Taiichi Ohno (1988) is generally seen as the genius behind it. Early in his career, Ohno developed three insights that proved to be essential for the later development of the TPS: 1. organize along product flows rather than by functions; 2. make small rather than large batches; 3. prevent rather than repair. The importance of creating flows in production was not a new idea. However, it was novel to claim that production should only start after a customer placed an order, so the manufacturer does not produce to build up stock, but instead is sure that the product will actually be sold (‘pull instead of push’). Putting that into practice took decades, as it involved developing a completely new logistical system that included suppliers. Internally and externally, parts must arrive ‘just in time’ (JIT), i.e. not earlier or later than needed. By making small batches, work-in-process is minimized which not only saves on inventory costs but, more importantly, also means that defective parts can immediately be identified. Once an error is detected, the process should stop immediately to avoid making more defective products. Mechanisms were further developed to remedy processes causing defects, eliminating the root cause once and for all. Making small batches means that it must be possible to set up machines very quickly, in order to minimize idle time (‘Single Minute Exchange of Die’). Another important element is standardization, for instance in the form of ‘standard operating procedures’. These SOPs are seen as the temporarily best way to perform an operation. ‘Temporarily’ is an important descriptor, because any given procedure is seen as provisional: striving for perfection means that all employees are to think continuously about how existing procedures can be improved. Being experts in conducting their own work, employees are expected to come up with improvement suggestions on a continuous basis (‘kaizen’).

the persistence of management ideas    277 After Japanese manufacturers started outcompeting many of their ‘Western’ counterparts, the latter began quests to find the secret(s) of Japanese success. Many explanations were proposed, and the notion that ‘the Japanese’ had developed superior production and operations management systems only slowly took root. In addition, particular elements of Japanese systems came to be stressed for certain periods. Publications appeared on ‘Japanese Manufacturing Techniques’ (Schonberger, 1982), but the adjective ‘Japanese’ had the connotation that their applicability was confined to Japan. The establishment of Japanese companies, particularly in the USA and the UK in the late 1970s, helped to transform that belief. Particularly in Western automotive companies, changes towards ‘Japanese’ production were gradually taking place.

The Machine That Changed the World Based on a large-scale research programme and many detailed reports, Womack and colleagues published the book The Machine That Changed the World (1990). The book was aimed at practitioners, and explicitly designed to reach a large managerial audience. A professional writing agency was hired to communicate the message: ‘quantitative data prove that Lean production is superior’. For the first time, macro-level performance data became available to the managerial public, and its accessible presentation certainly helped in getting the message across. Furthermore, the focus was much broader than earlier works on Japanese manufacturing and Toyota. Whereas the latter focused on the fairly technical topic of production and operations management, ‘The Machine’ dealt with the wider management system as well. Data on Japanese companies outside of Japan were presented to support arguments that ‘Lean production’ was possible everywhere. In addition, the term was connected to positive connotations about being fit and healthy. The well-thought-out approach of composing and marketing the book may, however, not have been successful, had not a severe economic crisis set in shortly after the book’s launch (Holweg, 2007: 430). The book became a bestseller, and Lean production began to inspire many organizational changes. However, during the economic crisis of the early 1990s these changes were not necessarily in line with the TPS, i.e. the model for ‘Lean production’. One antonym for Lean is ‘fat’, and in attempts to become ‘Lean’, many organizations started downsizing and delayering. This, together with critiques from researchers about the working conditions under Lean production, was epitomized by the expression ‘Lean is mean’. This affected Lean production’s reputation and in particular circles, it fell into ­disrepute. This was certainly the case among the workforce affected by downsizing measures under the banner of ‘Lean’, and/or in companies that had taken such measures (Benders and Slomp, 2009).

278    j. benders, m. van grinsven, and j. a. ingvaldsen

Lean Thinking Meanwhile, Womack and Jones were working on their next book which was published in 1996: Lean Thinking. Whereas the authors stated that their first book had shown that Lean production worked well, this book’s aim was to focus on how those results were achieved. Observing that many practitioners were struggling with implementing specific methods, they concluded that there was a need for a publication about the larger system within which these methods fitted. They called this system ‘Lean Thinking’ which was summarized in five principles:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

specify customer value by specific product; identify the value stream for every product; create an uninterrupted value stream per product; let the customer pull value; pursue perfection (by improving constantly).

The high level of abstraction made it possible to apply Lean principles beyond the repetitive manufacturing industries which so far had been the focus of Lean-inspired changes. In the final chapter, Womack and Jones ‘dreamed’ about how, in the future, several sectors may be transformed by Lean principles: long-distance travel, food production and distribution, construction, and medical care. Actually, Lean-inspired changes were to be initiated, and still are, far beyond the sectors about which the authors had dreamed, including service industries and the public sector. Whereas manufacturing industries were the main focus in the first ‘Lean production’ wave, Lean’s scope was now broadened to, in principle, all other sectors. Where the abstract principles opened up many new areas of application, the ‘prehistory’ meant that many different methods, tools, and practices were available and could be drawn upon to make concrete changes. As Womack and Jones had observed earlier, this again led to many changes that were seen as being at odds with ‘the original’. In 2000 or 2001, the American professor Bob Emiliani even coined the term ‘fake Lean’ to describe the tool-based focus on continuous improvement that had become ubiquitous. In addition he argued that ‘real Lean’ was not ‘mean’, i.e. adverse effects for employees are not according to its spirit (). Given our focus on an idea’s effects and therefore its reputation, separate attention needs to be given to the long-standing discussion on Lean’s impact on employees. As early as 1977, Sugimori et al. called ‘respect-for-humans’ a key element of Toyota’s approach to manufacturing and continuous improvement (CI) in particular. This became hotly debated, for instance between Adler and Cole (1993) on the one hand and Berggren (1994) on the other. The former stressed employees’ influence on designing their own operating procedures and work; the latter found this form of participation very limited. As Ortmann (1995: 340–1) pointed out, much depends on the frame of reference: whilst CI may represent an advance in worker autonomy compared to working

the persistence of management ideas    279 in conventional ‘mass production’ in most European and US car factories in the 1980s, the level of autonomy was still far removed from the situations discussed by Berggren (1994). The debate on Lean’s impact on employees continues (Hasle,  2014), which is unsurprising given that Lean is enacted in many different ways and thus generates a large variety of employee outcomes.

Field Levels In this section, we present two examples of how Lean has been advocated and framed in order to make and keep it viable. These were chosen because of our familiarity and even personal involvement with these movements, allowing us to benefit from some inside knowledge. The first illustrates a sectoral development; the second is at the national level. Our examples are illustrations, and future comparative research might establish how characteristic they are of the evolution of management ideas more widely.

Lean in Dutch Healthcare Leaving aside a single exception, the first Dutch healthcare institutions started experimenting with ‘Lean’ at the beginning of this century. Probably the first adopter was an institute for radiotherapy, Maastro. At the time, long patient waiting lists were a national issue and Lean’s emphasis on smooth operational flows could be used to shorten diagnostic and treatment processes. A few years later, a project started to improve patient safety while at the same time reducing the number of radiation technologists. This was realized thanks to an emphasis on redesigning and standardizing operational processes. As of 2010, incorporating ‘Lean’ in the organization culture and processes was declared a strategic priority (Simons et al., 2017). Around 2005, several healthcare institutes were gaining experience with ‘Lean’ yet, apart from Maastro, few of these initial developments seemed to survive in this period when the statement ‘a patient is not a car’ was commonly heard. In retrospect, the appointment in 2006 of Marc Rouppe van der Voort as innovation manager in the Tilburg-based St.-Elisabeth Hospital was a key event. Whilst ‘Lean’ had already been used in this hospital in at least three change projects, these had had little wider impact. That changed when Rouppe van der Voort got a position in which ‘Lean’ came to be advocated centrally with top management support. In 2007, he came into contact with the first author of this chapter which resulted in the publication of the book Lean denken en doen in de zorg (‘Lean thinking and doing in healthcare’) (Benders et al., 2010). The body of this edited volume consisted of a number of examples of Lean projects in various Dutch healthcare institutions. The chapters were authored by practitioners involved in those projects, who were instructed to write easily readable and short chapters, paying attention to drawbacks as well. The basic idea was that stories from other practitioners are far more convincing to other practitioners than abstract accounts or prescriptions

280    j. benders, m. van grinsven, and j. a. ingvaldsen from outsiders. The book sold beyond expectation, and drew the attention of the country’s largest health insurer Achmea. Achmea had used Lean to reorganize internally, and decided that the idea could benefit their contract partners in healthcare as well. They approached Rouppe van der Voort with the aim to establish a network to promote Lean in healthcare. In 2011, this network was established as a ‘learning community’ for healthcare institutes to continuously improve their processes. As of 2014, about 40 per cent of all Dutch hospitals are members, a percentage which has been stable ever since. At the beginning of the movement, so as not to repeat the experience of the 1990s, warnings were issued that ‘Lean’ should not be used to cut budgets and/or downsize. Instead, the declared aim was to improve the quality of care. To do so, the network ‘Lean in de zorg’ started to promote an approach that was ‘theoretically wrong, yet pragmatically right’. Theoretically, the five principles of ‘Lean thinking’ should be applied in the sequence outlined above. However, establishing ‘customer value’ in healthcare is an arduous task and has been the subject of debate for decades. Rather than trying to resolve this, care providers implicitly or explicitly enacted it in a particular way, for instance by shortening process times by value stream mapping (VSM). However, VSM and standardization are only practicable and economically feasible for repetitive processes. In healthcare, such repetitive processes are found in labs and pharmacies and for frequently occurring pathologies, although in the latter case, there is generally still considerable variety between patients. Furthermore, unlike repetitive manufacturers, most hospitals have a large number of different processes. Whilst the repetitive ones may be turned into flows, for many other processes this is not possible. The last principle, however, a focus on continuous improvement, can be applied locally at any organizational unit and any member of staff, i.e. including the nurses who probably constitute the main group initiating improvement efforts. Consequently, the authors of Lean in de zorg decided to focus on the last principle, rather than following the sequence prescribed by Womack and Jones (1996). Although over the course of years, thousands of projects must have been conducted by members affiliated to the network, it proved surprisingly hard to document operational and/or financial benefits (Rouppe van der Voort and Benders, 2014). Projects often start enthusiastically, without having the necessary hard data available on prior performance. Furthermore, collecting data is costly and results are often reported in an approximate way. Finally, attributing effects to ‘Lean’ efforts rather than other changes is often contested. Especially in a sector where ‘evidence-based medicine’ is held as a golden standard, the virtual absence of solid empirical proof makes Lean’s legitimacy vulnerable (Simons et al., 2017). A similar observation may be made for the effects on nurses, about which even fewer publications appear, even though these employees are the main ones c­ arrying out continuous improvement efforts.

‘Lean på norsk’ (‘Lean—the Norwegian Way’) With 43 per cent of large Norwegian companies reportedly having ‘adopted’ Lean (Madsen et al., 2016), the idea has become widely considered as being ‘best practice’ for

the persistence of management ideas    281 industrial operations and beyond. In the mid-1980s Norwegian automotive suppliers started to work with process controls, quality improvement, and just-in-time logistics, and in the 1990s, the process industries followed. In the mid-2000s, a second wave of Lean hit Scandinavia and also sectors like finance, telecom, healthcare, and public services started to embrace the idea (Holmemo, 2017). Applications of Lean have triggered little controversy, which appears at odds with some British and American assessments (e.g. Carter et al., 2011; Jones et al., 2012). Labour unions remain predominantly positive (Rolfsen and Ingvaldsen, 2013) and public criticism is restricted to a handful of antiLean articles. To understand Lean’s apparent viability in this context, we look at how national labour institutions and a well-organized national infrastructure shape and promote the belief in Lean. Early adoptions of Lean bear the imprint of the Scandinavian working life model (Gustavsen, 2007) reflecting strong traditions of worker participation and cooperative industrial relations. Inspired by Volvo, local interpretations among Norwegian automotive suppliers reflected a human-centred work design (Sandberg, 1995), which emphasized teamwork and the transfer of indirect tasks to operators. This created a sense of continuity between Lean and prior experiments with autonomous teams in the context of ‘industrial democracy’ (Emery and Thorsrud,  1976). From the onset then, Lean was enacted in a worker-friendly fashion and framed as an instance of how management and unions could cooperatively develop productive and humanly rewarding organizations. Blue-collar unions were actively involved in shaping the content and process of change. In some instances, union representatives would even take on roles as field ‘Lean champions’. Contrary to the German experience (Benders and Van Bijsterveld, 2000), downsizing following economic difficulties was not associated with Lean, but rather perceived by workers and unions as something that stalled or impeded the development efforts. As the awareness of Lean grew during the second wave of popularity in Scandinavia, a number of national partners formed a coalition to discuss Lean, share experiences, showcase best practices, and develop the notion of ‘Lean på norsk’ (‘Lean—the Norwegian way’). The platform, formally established in 2009, was called ‘Lean Forum Norway’ (LFN). Among its founding partners were the labour union confederation (LO), branches of the employer confederation (NHO), consultancies, major industrial companies, research institutes, and public funding bodies for research and development. The platform was instrumental in establishing a series of publicly financed research projects on Lean-related topics, by bringing together the different stakeholders in applied research and serving as an arena for dissemination of research results. With the more recent addition of public employers and governmental agencies overseeing public modernization (Holmemo, 2017), LFN brings together the major employer and employee organizations in a national infrastructure around a set of core ideas. By 2017, it had ten regional branches, which regularly arranged workshops and company visits. Simultaneously with the formation of LFN, LO published a document explaining their official stand on Lean. It explicitly framed Lean as a continuation of the industrial democracy programme and as an instrument to fulfil workers’ psychosocial job demands (Emery and Thorsrud,  1976). It also introduced the idea ‘Lean på norsk’, which was defined very broadly as ‘systematic [organization] development’ based on ‘participation’

282    j. benders, m. van grinsven, and j. a. ingvaldsen and ‘co-determination’. ‘Lean på norsk’ is supposedly different from ‘US Lean’ and ‘Japanese Lean’, and is directly contrasted with ‘cost-cutting’, ‘managerial control’, being ‘expert driven’, and the ‘uncritical application of tools and techniques’. The document can be read as a prescriptive generalization of previous experiences in manufacturing. Applications elsewhere, particularly within healthcare and public services, are expected and welcomed as long as they accommodate the ‘Norwegian’ interpretation. The main event of LFN is an annual conference, which attracts around 500 individual participants. Every year one organization is awarded the prize ‘Norwegian Lean enterprise of the year’ in a prestigious ceremony. The programme includes company presentations that highlight best practices and provides inspirational key notes and guru performances on the need for ‘change’ and ‘modernization’ that reinforce the belief in Lean and frame the experiences within the community. Although it is not prescribed, the company presentations typically follow a common format; an ‘adapted’ version of Lean is explained, some strategic or organizational challenges are sketched, and improved performance is reported. For presenters, it is an opportunity to demonstrate understanding and commitment to the idea and the Lean community. Furthermore, LFN’s discourse makes sense of negative and mixed results, while protecting the idealized concept from criticism. Well-known examples of troublesome or failed Lean implementations are denounced as ‘un-Norwegian’, ‘uncritical application of tools’, or not Lean at all. For instance, excessive use of the stopwatch means that the ‘Lean ideas are misunderstood’. As such, the forum acts as judge to distinguish ‘real’ and ‘fake’ implementation. Another notion deployed in presentations is that Lean implementation is difficult, so immediate results cannot be expected. Enthusiasts are called on to be patient, and continue to work on getting managerial support (cf. Holmemo and Ingvaldsen, 2016). Putting emphasis on the ‘implementation challenge’ also has the effect of shifting the blame for failure from the idea itself to its implementation.

Conclusion: Routes of Survival? The term ‘Lean’ was introduced in 1988 (Krafcik,  1988); gained enormous attention roughly in the first half of the 1990s; appears to have gone underground in the second half of that decade; only to come back as a ‘second wave’ (Sederblad, 2013) in the new millennium. This longevity stands at odds with the idea of ‘management fashions and fads’, for which a temporary popularity is characteristic. What made the longevity of Lean possible and what does that mean for management ideas? Based on global and field-level accounts, we described several framing moves which we argue were critical in making, and later keeping, Lean attractive. These include (1) the choice of an attractive label, (2) the change from Lean production to Lean thinking, and (3) field-specific versions of the idea, tailored to be attractive to that field. Throughout its lifecycle, this idea’s contents and outcomes have been subject to contestation, certainly as far as the impacts on employees were concerned. In addition,

the persistence of management ideas    283 particularly if the idea was argued not to lead to the intended outcomes, debates arose whether this was caused by the idea or by its improper implementation. These debates in turn had consequences for the label’s reputation affecting its wider support. Framing was key (and still is) to maintaining the idea’s credibility as enhancing organizational performance. This holds at the global level, but also within the field, and perhaps even most importantly, intra-organizationally. To what extent then is what happened in the Lean case typical for management ideas? Certainly, for all ideas, framing whether or not the idea leads to the desired outcomes is typical (cf. Easton and Jarrell, 1998). Beliefs about performance improvement are the key driver for ideas’ uses, and (being successful in) maintaining those beliefs is critical for the idea to remain in the spotlight of managerial attention. What may be idiosyncratic for Lean is the succession of various framing moves regarding its content, both at the global level and within fields. Somewhat similar is the case of resource planning systems. Scarbrough et al. (2015) discussed how substantial framing helped this idea to survive. However, different from Lean is that resource planning systems are materialized in the form of software. Yet another mechanism enhancing an idea’s survival may be coercion by other organizations, as appears to be the case for ISO. Whilst there are, thus, alternatives routes than framing a management idea to suit a particular field for it to persist, we have argued that this was successful in our case. Of course, for as long as it lasts . . . 

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chapter 15

Evolv i ng M a nagem en t Ideas Hannele Seeck and Juha-Antti Lamberg

Introduction Recent studies of management history (e.g. Djelic, 2016) have increasingly criticized ‘the’ history of management as offering a limited, mono-cultural, and linear view of how management emerges and evolves. The same genre of research has called for a broader and more engaged understanding of management history to foster innovative thinking in our field. As Cummings and Bridgman recently observed: Management’s origins are almost always outlined in ‘chapter 2’ after an introductory chapter. This forms a basis upon which management’s more recent ideas are presented in the chapters that follow. They are presented as the foundations upon which the subject has been built and responded to.  (2016: 252)

Developing a better understanding of how to view ‘the’ evolution of management ideas and their possibilities and limitations is important for various reasons. First, management ideas easily work as powerful frames for how we interpret not only the evolution of management thinking, but also management itself as a profession and a practice. Second, ‘the’ evolution of management, as both a historical and a discursive ­phenomenon, has attracted a very high number of research studies over the decades, and accounts can generally be found in all textbooks on management and organization. To date we lack, however, a comprehensive overview of different approaches to the evolution of management ideas. In the light of these motivations, we review three main approaches to the evolution of management ideas, their typical characteristics, as well as their possibilities and limitations. We first discuss a number of influential mainstream approaches such as the pendulum, performance gap, and fashion perspectives, which primarily focus on the

Evolving Management Ideas    287 ‘winners’ in terms of management models and fashions, thereby seeing these ideas as more or less universal models of management. Then we move on to review some approaches which draw on a more embedded perspective to understanding management idea evolution. Finally, we identify some less researched avenues to evolving management ideas, such as the critical alternatives approach(es) which focuses mainly on forgotten and marginalized discourses. These latter two enable us to reveal some underlying epistemological and ontological assumptions of the dominant approaches (see also O’Mahoney, in this volume). Table 15.1 summarizes the three approaches that are the focus of our chapter. Historical accounts that focused on the pre-industrial era consider management as a practice that has been very similar throughout different time periods (Wren,  2005). Indeed, the quest for efficiency (e.g. Rost et al., 2010; Ruef, 2012), the handling of social tensions (Leeson, 2007), and a patriarchal approach to leadership (Bylund, 2010; Ruef and Harness, 2009) seem to be universal themes in the theory and practice of management. We explicate limitations and research opportunities emerging from the three main approaches, and raise the question of whether the study of management idea evolution should follow the historical turn in organization studies (e.g. Clark and Rowlinson, 2004; Rowlinson et al.,  2014) which would entail an increased emphasis on the historically embedded nature of the practice of management (Vaara and Lamberg, 2016).

The Mainstream Approach: A Classic ‘Chapter Two’ Approach to the Evolution of Management The mainstream approach generally includes more conventional perspectives on the evolution of management as both a historical and a discursive phenomenon, and has attracted a very high number of research studies over the last decades. These perspectives are characterized by a research focus on the emergence and prevalence of management ideas across time and geographical locations, and generally draw on realistic ontoepistemology and assumptions about universal ideals of management (see also O’Mahoney, in this volume). Whilst there are differing established categorizations of how management ideas have evolved in the capitalistic era, these all share an underlying assumption of management as a powerful mode of thought in the modern world, which is associated with economic growth and a dominant American influence (Shenhav, 2002 [1999]). There is also a consensus that the roots of most Western twentieth-century management ideas lie in the USA (Barley and Kunda, 1992; Wren, 2005). In a classical reading, ‘the’ evolution of management ideas of the twentieth century is often described in the following way: scientific management emerged in the USA between 1900 and 1923, human relations between 1923 and 1955, systems rationalism between 1955 and 1980, and

Table 15.1  Three approaches to the evolution of research on management ideas Typical characteristics

Research focus

Mainstream

Research on the Diffusion of management ­emergence and ideas and paradigms across ­prevalence of time and g­ eographical ­management ideas. locations.

Embedded

Diffusion and travel of management ideas and paradigms across time and in different ­geographical locations.

Critical Other and forgotten alternatives ­management ideas across time and ­geographical locations.

Adoption and translation of management ideas into specific cultural and organizational contexts.

Underlying assumptions

Possibilities/limitations

Realistic ­onto-­epistemology and assumptions about universal ideals of management. Often realistic onto-epistemology with sensitivity to cultural and ­ organizational differences.

Barley and Kunda, 1992; A powerful approach for Abrahamson, 1997; studying the conceptual Kunda and histories of management Ailon-Souday, 2005. ideas, but ignores historical and cultural deviations. Guillén, 1994a, 1994b; Especially suitable approach Warner, 1994; Seeck and for understanding and Kuokkanen, 2010. analysis of organizational and institutional adaptations Czarniawska and and translations of ­ Sevón, 1996; Morris and management ideas. Lancaster, 2006; Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008. Kipping, 1997; Highlights both limitations Leeson, 2009; and strengths of current Mantel, 2010; Ruef and conceptualizations of Harness, 2009. management ideas by identifying practices and ideas that could not be predicted by current ­ mainstream frameworks. May appear to be a futile search for anomalies and anecdotes.

Tracing of historical Different anomalies and reasons ­onto-epistemological for their ­marginalization. approaches, from realist to social constructionist and post-modernist.

Research examples

Evolving Management Ideas    289 organizational culture from 1980 onwards (Abrahamson, 1997; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Guillén, 1994a; Kunda and Ailon-Souday, 2005; Wren, 2005). The narrative follows, to varying degrees, the adoption and translation of each of these models of management in different Western countries in successive decades. As suggested, the mainstream approach to the study of management ideas evolution is not a monolithic approach but comprises different perspectives such as (1) the pendulum perspective, (2) the performance-gap thesis, (3) the ‘old wine in new bottles’ view, and (4) the fashion perspective. First, in their well-known study, Barley and Kunda (1992) draw on a pendulum perspective, thereby seeing the evolution of management ideas as an alternation between the ideologies of normative and of rational control. In particular, they suggest that the management ideas related to industrial betterment, human relations, and organizational culture have been based on normative forms of control, whereas scientific management and systems rationalism have their premises in rational forms of control. Whereas the locus of normative control is in shared values and moral engagement, the principles of rational control suggest that productivity is a result of carefully defined methods and procedures (Barley and Kunda, 1992: 384). According to Barley and Kunda’s pendulum thesis, these alternating surges of rational and normative control relate to economic long waves—rational surges during long-wave expansions and normative surges during long-wave contractions. However, whereas the pendulum perspective explains the emergence of management rhetorics, Barley and Kunda’s (1992) classic work does not explain the post-emergence prevalence of rational and normative rhetorics (Abrahamson, 1997) or how and why one rational or normative rhetoric may differ from another (Bodrožić and Adler, 2018). Second, Abrahamson (1997) complements this perspective by establishing that, while long waves do explain the emergence of rational and normative waves, their postemergence prevalence is explained by the performance-gap thesis: the popularity of a management rhetoric depends on how well it can respond to the management problems typical of a time, i.e. how they are considered to narrow the gap between goals and actual performance (Abrahamson, 1997: 491–3). Relatedly, Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999: 714–15) also conducted a theory-development case study on the quality circle management idea and found evidence that during the upsurge of an idea management thinking can be depicted as ‘superstitious learning’ (Abrahamson and Fairchild,  1999: 735–6). This enables ‘the dissemination of the belief that specific management techniques are rational and progressive’ (Nijholt and Benders, 2007: 648). Bodrožić and Adler (2018) propose that changes in the content of models of management can be explained by linking the emergence of new models to specific technological revolutions. Each management model, they argue, emerges through a primary cycle that generates a new model and renders the old one obsolete, followed by a secondary cycle that generates another model mitigating the dysfunctions of the one generated by the primary cycle (Bodrožić and Adler, 2018: 85). Drawing on this view, David and Strang (2006) show how fashionable management ideas can actually return to their technical roots once the hype they generate is over, thereby reversing the ‘classic’ logic of management evolution according to which hype is followed by the decline or abandonment of a management idea.

290    H. Seeck and J.-A. Lamberg Third, authors such as Jacques (1996; see also Guillén, 1994a; Kieser, 1997; Spell, 2001) argue that there is little difference between the contents of successively adopted management ideas. From this perspective, ‘new’ management ideas are, so to speak, old wine in new bottles. This allows putting the previous two views into perspective given that one may find rather little difference between the consecutive ideas themselves. Fourth, the fashion perspective has generated a wealth of writing and studies over past decades. Management fashions are often defined as ‘providing efficient means to important ends and new as well as improved relative to older management techniques’ (Abrahamson, 1996: 255). Fashions need to be perceived as rational and functional, yet innovative (Carson et al., 2000; Huczynski, 1993; Letscher, 1994). Management fashions are generally described as cyclical, i.e. they progress through a set of distinct stages. Abrahamson (1996: 264; see also Clark, 2004: 300; Gill and Whittle, 1993: 281) identifies a fashion-setting process consisting of creation, dissemination, acceptance, disenchantment, and decline or abandonment of an idea. Clark (2004) finds multiple shortcomings in the cycles approach, such as the extensive use of citation analysis and a focus on the dissemination stage of the fashion cycle to the relative neglect of the creation, selection, and processing stages (see also Heusinkveld et al., 2013). In relation to the fashion perspective, some theorists assume that new ideas do not build on previous ones and consider this as an important driver for transience in management thinking (e.g. Gill and Whittle,  1993). Other studies have examined how recurrent management ideas cumulatively build on one another (Clark,  2004: 298; Spell, 1999, 2001), and thus that there is ‘a gradual and directional, rather than a punctuated and random, accretion in business knowledge’ (Clark,  2004: 298; see also Abrahamson and Eisenman, 2008). Heusinkveld and Benders (2012: 121) point out that there is no uniform pattern to the long-term impact of fashionable ideas on organizations. More recently, researchers have increasingly examined how management discourse and organizational practices relate to management ideas and how fashions may coevolve (Abrahamson and Fairchild,  1999; David and Strang,  2006; Heusinkveld and Benders, 2012; Nijholt and Benders, 2007; Strang et al., 2014). The classic ‘chapter two’ reading of how management ideas have evolved is not without its complexities, which are generally recognized as hampering our understanding of this evolution. For example, there is ambiguity in the conceptualization and functioning of management ideas. Indeed, some theorists argue that management ideas function as ‘rationalized myths’ (Meyer and Rowan,  1977) with a predominantly ceremonial or ­rhetorical function (Kieser,  1997). Others have argued that difficulties in our understanding of management idea evolution stem from an idea’s ‘linguistic ambiguity’ (Nicolai and Dautwiz, 2010), ‘interpretative viability’ (Benders and Van Veen, 2001), or the extent to which they are ‘ambiguous and vague’ (Clark,  2004; Giroux,  2006; Kieser, 1997). Finally, the evolution of management ideas has not ended. Kunda and Ailon-Souday (2005) posit that since the beginning of the 1990s a new management idea, market rationalism, has emerged in the USA, based on the idea that markets have become the central location in which a firm’s performance is assessed.

Evolving Management Ideas    291 The mainstream approach to the evolution of research on management ideas currently dominates studies on the conceptual histories of these ideas. However, it pays little attention to ‘deviations’ stemming from different historical and cultural contexts in which these ideas become embedded. Moreover, the major management ideas, especially (scientific management, human relations, etc.), are so ubiquitous that they easily come to work as powerful frames for how we interpret not only the evolution of management thinking, but also management itself, a given which hampers discussions of the limits of these established frames. At the end of this chapter, in discussing the critical alternatives approach, we present some cases which may be seen as historical alternatives to the dominant historiographical accounts of management thinking, but which simultaneously demonstrate the powerful nature of existing paradigms.

The Embedded Approach: Management Ideas Embedded in Contexts The embedded approach is about understanding and analysing the evolving organizational and institutional adaptations and translations of management ideas within and between specific cultural and organizational contexts. Indeed, a major factor rendering the mainstream approach complex and problematic is the fact that the unique elements of different societies and how they relate to each other may induce considerable v­ ariation in the evolution of management ideas (Frenkel,  2008; Merkle,  1980). Research has tracked these developments in, for instance, the UK, France, Germany (Kipping, 1997; Merkle, 1980), Japan (Warner, 1994), Israel (Frenkel, 2005), Finland (Seeck, 2008; Seeck and Laakso, 2010a, 2010b), and Turkey (Üsdiken and Wasti, 2009). Findings show that there is no set template for patterns in the evolution of management ideas; rather, local conditions generate ‘tailor-made’ solutions (Guillén, 1994a; Phillips and Oswick, 2012; Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008), which become widely shared and eventually taken for granted in their own locality (Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996). Theorists stress that even the best-known management ideas may follow different patterns of evolution (e.g. Guillén, 1994a) given that they are embedded in contexts. Management ideas manifest in different ways, in the form of different ideological and technical ‘solutions’ (Guillén, 1994a, 7; see also Bodrožić and Adler, 2018). Drawing on substantial comparative data from the USA, the UK, Spain, and Germany, Guillén (1994a) shows that an idea’s evolution in a society is related to the joint effect of (1) organizational problems and (2) institutional factors. In his study, Guillén (1994a) found different types of macro-level organizational problems associated with the introduction of management ideas. These include changes in the structure of the economy such as the bureaucratization of businesses, the separation of management and ownership, or companies growing and becoming increasingly complex. Another type of problem

292    H. Seeck and J.-A. Lamberg relates to international forces such as economic competition, and war or threat of war. The third type encompasses worker actions that somehow challenge the authority of management, such as strikes or sabotage (Guillén, 1994a). Guillén’s (1994a) study showed that not all these problem types were present in all the countries (USA, Germany, Spain, and UK), and that different combinations existed in different countries. In addition, a host of institutional factors have influenced how the adoption of specific organizational solutions has evolved in different countries, for example the mentality of the business elite, the role of the state in the dissemination of management ideas, the positions of professional groups and experts supporting an idea, as well as the response of employees to the implementation of the idea, the regulatory activities of the state, the position of the state in the supranational system, and the status of labour unions in a society (Guillén, 1994a). However, the focus here is on adoption versus rejection of a management idea in a particular context, and to a lesser extent on the detailed changes of meaning these models undergo when moving from one social context to another (Frenkel, 2005). One may argue that the embedded approach often draws on different theoretical perspectives and concepts within neo-institutional theory, such as (1) Scandinavian institutionalism (Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996, 2005), or (2) institutional work (Perkmann and Spicer, 2008). The translation perspective, drawing on Scandinavian institutionalism, posits that the adoption and evolution of management ideas and practices is shaped by processes of translation and interpretation into a local context (Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996, 2005). Since the new location and institutional environment are unlike those within which the idea originated, ideas are reinterpreted as they are adopted and put into practice in the new setting (Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996, 2005; Morris and Lancaster, 2006), resulting in the occurrence of local versions and variations of the idea in question (Sahlin and Wedlin,  2008). This process is also known as glocalization (Czarniawska, 2008: 93). The glocalization perspective emphasizes how management ideas, and the wider meanings or perceptions of the problems conceived within these ideas, are not adopted as such, or do not evolve in a linear manner. Some ideas may be considerably modified along the way, or even rejected, while those that are adopted may receive social, cultural, and political meanings and attributes that were not attached to them in their country of origin (Frenkel, 2005). Management ideas thus also change as they evolve. Another theory drawn upon in studying the institutionalization of management ideas is that of institutional work, which is defined as ‘the purposive action of indi­ viduals and organizations aimed at creating, maintaining and disrupting institu­tions’ (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006: 215). Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) describe the ­cultural, political, and technical forms of institutional work at play in this. In line with this, Perkmann and Spicer (2008) examined the conditions under which transitory management fashions become more permanently diffused and institutionalized, and found that it is the political, technical, and cultural work of various actors that constitutes the institutionalization of a management fashion.

Evolving Management Ideas    293 Perkmann and Spicer (2008) argue that institutionalization is stronger if (1) any one type of institutional activity builds on the results of the previous activity, and if (2) multiple actors are involved (see also Guillén, 1994a). This is not necessarily a systematic process, but rather a result of consultants, gurus, business media, business schools, and others independently carrying out different types of institutional work that ultimately reinforce each other (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999; Perkmann and Spicer, 2008). One example of how management ideas become embedded is the role of religion, which is considered a significant institutional variable in shaping the evolution of management ideas. For example, the religious mentality of the business elite has impacted the adoption and rejection of models of management in many countries (Guillén, 1994a, 1994b), and ultimately shaped the evolution of management ideas. Guillén (1994b: 79) sees Confucianism and Buddhism as fostering a view of the firm as a community, while Christianity values individual efforts. Protestantism favours instrumental approaches, whereas Catholicism prefers communality and self-actualization (Guillén, 1994a, 1994b). In Germany, for instance, Protestant management intellectuals have been in favour of scientific management, while Catholics have preferred the human relations school. In Spain, Catholic theoreticians have played a decisive role in spreading the ideas of the human relations school (Gorski, 2003; Guillén, 1994b). There is also evidence on a more general level that, in Europe, ascetic Protestantism, particularly Calvinism, has led to the emergence of more rationally governed societies than in predominantly Catholic countries (Gorski, 2003; Guillén, 1994a, 1994b; Seeck and Kuokkanen, 2010). In considering Christianity as an ideological and philosophical underpinning of management thinking across historical periods, it is also important to recognize that not all countries and cultures share the same value base when it comes to management evolution. Asian countries and management ideas (Chen, 2002), for example, build on collectivism and a longer-term view of how to manage organizations (Michailova and Hutchings, 2006), making some aspects of management thinking considerably different from that of the USA and Western Europe (Chen, 2004). While the production of management ideas is increasingly global (Meyer et al., 1997) and Asian countries have successfully adopted ideas from scientific management and other management models (e.g. Tsutsui, 2001), these models may also be challenged by these alternative ways of thinking (see also Parker, in this volume). The embedded approach examines the travel of management ideas across time and into different geographical locations and emphasizes the value of sensitivity to cultural and organizational differences. However, the embedded approach also concentrates mainly on examining the evolution and adoption of mainstream management ideas, thereby ignoring forgotten management ideas. There is a need to consider the historical epistemology of management history (cf. Suddaby et al., 2014), which calls for explicit consideration of the role played by the particularistic and local nature of management, the complex causalities in the evolution of management ideas, and the motivations both of their past creators and of the present framing of these processes of creation. The historical epistemology of management history may help us to reconsider the nature and structure

294    H. Seeck and J.-A. Lamberg of present ideas on management and to understand the historically embedded nature of both management ideas and the practice of management across time and place.

The Critical Alternatives Approach to the Evolution of Management Ideas The critical approach entails consideration of forgotten management ideas across time and geographical location. Overall, this approach contributes to a better understanding of both limitations and strengths of current conceptualizations of management idea evolution by identifying practices and ideas that could not be predicted by current mainstream frameworks. As the preceding pages indicate, the dominant discourse in research on management ideas focuses primarily on how, since the Second World War, management doctrines have been imported from the USA, which is generally ­considered a ‘reference country’ for many others (Üsdiken, 2004). As a result, ‘chapter two’ texts on ‘the’ evolution of management have predominantly focused on ideas and  practices in the USA, often without problematizing this focus (cf. Üsdiken and Çetin, 2001). There has been discussion of Americanization in the context of management ideas (Alvarez, 1998; Djelic and Amdam, 2007; Frenkel, 2008), and of business schools (Amdam, 1996; Juusola et al., 2015; Tiratsoo, 2004). For example, Frenkel and Shenhav (2006) offer a postcolonial reading of management and organization studies, showing how colonial practices were the forerunners of processes now associated with Americanization, and followed a similar logic (Frenkel and Shenhav,  2003). Frenkel (2008), in turn, shows the importance of translation and of theorizing as ways in which geo-political domination is reproduced (see also Salles-Djelic, in this volume). Although many, in particular American, management models can be very pervasive in the way they are diffused into different countries in a rather similar manner and order, the individual characteristics and institutional circumstances of each country still affect the manner and timing of idea acceptance (Djelic and Amdam, 2007). Much less discussed is the idiographic, historically specific nature of American-based management models. Some scholars have theorized how and why all models are to some extent hybrids (Frenkel and Shenhav, 2006; Guillén, 1994b), combining elements and influences from several sources and cultural orientations. Such hybrids are especially prevalent at the firm level, where organizational actors seldom use management models in a ‘pure’ form (Sahlin and Wedlin, 2008). Rather, models and fashions are often co-produced and co-consumed (Heusinkveld et al., 2011; Heusinkveld and Benders, 2012), that is, firms use models and ideas for their own purposes, driven by organizational goals, politics, and traditions (Levinthal and March, 1993; Sturdy, 2004). It is possible to recognize these firm-specific practices post hoc as belonging to specific paradigms, but the use of pure forms of management model is more the exception than the rule simply because organizational needs are firm- and context-specific.

Evolving Management Ideas    295 For example, Rose (1999) has written about the evolution of different management ideas in the twentieth century, and how these have sought to shape the subjectivity of employees. This work shows how the psychologization of working life, and the ideas of the human relations school in particular, have made work an experiential phenomenon that shapes the subject. Shenhav (1995, 2002 [1999]) meanwhile shows how management experts turned rationality into an ideology by during the twentieth century, and how managers used this ideology to establish their power and legitimacy. Shenhav (2002 [1999]) suggests that ideological parameters arising from efforts to consolidate and legitimize management are implicit in much of management theory. Thus, evolving management ideas need also to be viewed as an evolution of the legitimization and justification of different management styles and management functions per se. Bendix argues that ‘all ideologies of management have in common an effort to provide a favourable exercise of authority interpretation’ (Bendix, 1956: 11; see also Bendix, 1959). He stresses the need to view managerial ideology as an attempt to rationalize and legitimate relations of obedience and command in companies and the current structure of authority in organizations. Thus, management ideas as managerial ideologies are regarded as emerging primarily in order to justify and maintain the authority of managers, not merely in order to justify a specific set of ‘neutral’ techniques (Frenkel,  2005; Shenhav, 1995, 2002 [1999]). The legitimization of managerial authority can take place through the use of techniques that allow managers to effectively and efficiently fulfil organizational goals. American-based management models are also specific and historically embedded. The USA has been the leading economic force since the Second World War. This is reflected in the dominance of its business schools, management models, and consulting companies (see Salles-Djelic, in this volume). However, seventy-odd years is a relatively short period in global history, especially as this US dominance continues not to affect all parts of the world. But what if US business schools and thinkers had never made any significant innovations in management? Such questions lead us to consider alternative dominant management models, perhaps fundamentally or partially different from the present one (see also Parker and Salles-Djelic, both in this volume). In essence, even small adjustments to the prevailing capitalist economic order may fundamentally shift the nature of management ideas (cf. Kipping et al., 2008; Üsdiken and Wasti,  2009). The assumption that a firm should be ‘socially responsible’, for ­example, implicitly underpins most management models and doctrines, while in some cases social responsibility is the core of a management idea (Banerjee, 2008). For ­example, stakeholder management starts from an assumption that ethical behaviour is not only a question of values, but also enhances a firm’s potential for capturing value. The ethical norms linked to US-based management models, however, are very specific. World history has seen (and probably will continue to see) ethical stances of various kinds, from Italian fascism to Juche in North Korea. Nazi Germany, in particular, was an alternative to Anglo-American ethical standards and important for management history due to its strong temporary influence on management ideas and education in Europe (see, e.g. Hayes, 2001; and Parker, in this volume).

296    H. Seeck and J.-A. Lamberg In the early stages of industrialization, Germany already represented a different t­ radition in management. Its political and military leaders, such as Moltke the Elder, had created far-reaching managerial models based on the integration of hierarchical organizational forms and the flexible delegation of power (Echevarria, 1996). Also, the industrial sector produced its own management thinkers. Buenstorf and Murmann (2005), for example, describe how Ernst Abbe, the manager of the Carl Zeiss Foundation, created his own management principles, which deviated considerably from those of Taylor and closely resemble much more modern ideas of the dynamic capabilities approach to strategic management (cf. Teece,  2007). So, when Hitler rose to power in 1933, Germany already had an independent tradition of management ideas and education with considerable impact in many parts of Europe. Hitler, however, changed the whole institution, ­generating and distributing management ideas and knowledge. In  less than ten years most business professors, for example, had either adopted Hitler’s ideas on management and the economy or been replaced by loyal members of the Nazi Party (Mantel, 2010). Because of Germany’s defeat in the Second World War, we do not have a full picture regarding Nazi management ideas. However, the knowledge we do have of the ethical principles of the party suggests many similarities to scientific management, but with a bizarre angle resulting in repressed factory workers (Schoenbaum, 1997), the use of slaves in mass production (Homze, 2015), and an overall emphasis on economic efficiency and state control (Temin, 1991). The key message of and reason for raising such counterfactual questions is that the German system and management principles were not entirely different from Anglo-American management ideas. In fact they were very similar in most respects (Kipping, 1997), and only the presence of a few factors in the surrounding societal context was required to produce different kinds of management ideas originating from a common source (Taylorism and scientific management). Overall, what we mean by critical and alternative in the context of management ideas is having an approach that challenges the prevalent assumptions of the Anglo-American business school canon. Seeing ‘the’ evolution of management ideas as a series of ahistorical processes—or assuming that similar processes will characterize all time periods—is naïve and has resulted in introverted and cyclical discussion of the paradigm changes and fine-grained differences between fashions and ideas.

Continuing Historical Questions and Avenues for Future Research In this chapter, we have reviewed the current conceptualization of ‘the’ historical development of management ideas by focusing on three broad research approaches to the evolution of management ideas: the Mainstream, Embedded, and Critical Alternatives approach. Each of these has its possibilities and limitations for our understanding of management idea evolution. The mainstream approach is a powerful approach for

Evolving Management Ideas    297 s­ tudying the conceptual histories of management ideas. However, it is inclined to ignore historical and cultural deviations. The embedded approach is especially suitable for better understanding and analysing organizational and institutional adaptations and translations of management ideas. However, it often does not pay attention to local historical anomalies and the reasons for their marginalization. The critical alternatives approach highlights both the limitations and the strengths of current conceptualizations of  management ideas by identifying practices and ideas that could not be predicted by current mainstream frameworks, but it risks becoming just a marginal search for anomalies and anecdotes in the context of business schools because it may undermine their legitimacy (see also Parker, in this volume). Our review of the three main approaches highlights some especially important ­avenues for the next generation of research on management ideas. The first concerns the meaningfulness of management ideas. Critical voices have already long argued that management ideas lack palpable material outcomes (Benders and Van Veen,  2001; Heusinkveld et al., 2011). The mainstream perspective would benefit from more longitudinal empirical research into management ideas: are these merely ‘hypes’ that have little bearing on the longer-term empirical reality of organizations? Do they evolve in and across organizations and across time? More research is needed in analysing links between organizational dynamics and the adoption of management ideas. For instance, Sturdy and Fleming (2003) argue that there is a distinction between ideas and practices, but that this is overdrawn, and that ‘talk can be a technique of implementation in its own right’ (Sturdy and Fleming, 2003: 753). Sturdy (2004: 155) argues that existing frameworks tend either to idealize or to marginalize managerial rationality, which leads in practice to its neglect. Røvik (2011) succinctly asks why those studying management fashions should be looking at all for substantive or wide-ranging effects of popular management ideas whose transience and superficiality they have tended to stress. He suggests that the rather scarce conceptualization of how ideas affect organizations reflects the limitations of management ideas. One potentially interesting way to approach this problem of the relevance of management ideas, of benefit to the embedded perspective in particular, would be to engage in empirical work by examining the causal strength of management ideas as catalysts for strategic and industrial change. That is, if management ideas have an impact and are ‘real’ (i.e. not just documentations of already existing managerial practices) their absence should change the organizations involved. This relates to debates about coevolution (see Abrahamson and Fairchild,  1999; David and Strang,  2006; Nijholt and Benders, 2007). However, such thinking is still rare in the study of management ideas and therefore we encourage scholars to evaluate the meaning of these ideas from critical and even realist perspectives. Likewise, the ‘strategy as practice’ turn (Jarzabkowski and Spee, 2009) offers models and inspiration for studying the meaning of management ideas in situ—embedded and potentially used in organizations for different purposes. The practice turn also suggests that we need to be sensitive to actor-level perceptions and behavioural processes when facing, for example, the use of another wave of new management ideas in executive education and strategy talk (Mantere and Vaara, 2008).

298    H. Seeck and J.-A. Lamberg We have already emphasized that it is important to find and follow less researched avenues in the evolution of management ideas, such as the critical alternatives approach drawing on forgotten and marginalized discourses. Current research on fashions may be too much concentrated on the ‘winners’, and more emphasis on the ‘losers’ can generate far more insight into how ideas evolve (Clark, 2004). The critical alternatives approach, for example, enables us to illustrate some underlying epistemological and ontological assumptions of the dominant perspectives (as depicted in Table 15.1) and to look for new research directions in the study of management ideas. We would suggest that historically embedded practices, and how ideas are seen by entrepreneurs and employees in different historical times and cultural contexts, should be studied through a multilevel analysis of micro, macro, and meso levels. The critical approach offers opportunities for studying, for example, contexts and management thinkers, which are not predicted by existing approaches and canons. Simultaneously, however, this carries a risk of anomalism and anachronism if done without historical sensitivity and, especially, without a motivation to engage in the development of theory on the evolution of management ideas.

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chapter 16

Popu l a r M a nagem en t Ideas Hélène Giroux

Introduction Management ideas emerged as a distinct label and research field in the 1990s, ­coinciding with scholarly interest in management fads and fashions. Many studies of management ideas focus on popular management ideas. The introductory chapter of this book noted the ambiguity of the expression management ideas and discussed the explicit manifestations of these ideas, such as specific principles, guidelines, methods, and ­practices. But what does popular mean? In the last thirty years, several articles and books on management fads and fashions have endeavoured to measure and explain popularity, yet the words popular and popularity are almost never defined. This is unfor­ tunate because like management ideas, popularity is an ambiguous concept with ­multiple meanings. This lack of precision is not specific to our field. In a discussion of popularity among children and adolescents, Bukowski observes: ‘Not knowing what we are studying when we say we are studying popularity is not likely to be the royal route to theoretical or empirical clarity’ (2011: 9). Several research streams address the concept of popularity in forms such as popular music, popularity among peers, and popularity of online or media content. Measures of popularity have been developed by mathematicians, psych­ ologists, and information science specialists; they too try to understand and explain why some objects or people—and not others—are deemed popular. Similarly, historians, anthropologists, and English scholars have examined popular culture in depth; their work may be applicable to popular management ideas. The purpose of this chapter is to explore what it means to be popular and to illustrate how multiple streams of research can clarify the ways that popular management ideas have been investigated and conceptualized (which may inspire future research and methodology development).

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What is Popularity? If we follow Bukowski and probe the etymology of the word popular, it becomes clear that its polysemy has deep roots. The term comes from the Latin popularis, meaning ‘of or belonging to the people’ or ‘designed for the people’ but also ‘acceptable to the people, agreeable to the multitude’ and ‘instituted by the people’, to mention a few uses of the word in texts from the first century bc (Lewis and Short, 1890). The word transitioned to French (populaire) and later to English and several other languages (Bukowski, 2011). Nowadays, the Oxford English Dictionary (2016) and Merriam-Webster (2016) propose more than a dozen definitions of the adjectival form. The most important (abridged) are: 1. ‘Of a belief, attitude, etc. prevalent among the general public; generally accepted, commonly known.’ ‘Accepted, followed, used, or done by many people.’ 2. ‘Relating to, deriving from, ordinary people or the people as a whole; generated by the general public.’ 3. ‘Of low birth; not noble. Vulgar, coarse.’ 4. ‘Of cultural activities or products: Intended for or suited to the understanding or taste of ordinary people, esp. as opposed to specialists in a field.’ 5. ‘Liked or admired by many people.’ 6. ‘ . . . forms of culture with general appeal; intended primarily to entertain, please, or amuse.’ 7. ‘Frequently encountered.’ When authors talk about popular management ideas, do they refer to their origins (from the people), their destination (for the people), their prevalence (in the media or in organizations), their particular status or notoriety, their accessibility, their acceptability, or their lack of refinement? An overview of the literature on popular management ideas suggests that all these definitions are in use and often conflated. Scholars studying man­ agement fashions examine ideas that are frequently encountered and become prevalent, generally accepted, and used by many people (Abrahamson, 1991, 1996). Popular man­ agement ideas may come from the people (i.e. managers who use them in their practice), as opposed to academia (Huczynski,  1993). Furusten (1999) stresses the populist ­tendencies of management gurus. Several authors identify an entire industry built on the dissemination of popular management ideas, conceived as cultural products that are carefully crafted to fit the needs and tastes of ordinary managers (Kieser, 1997). Researchers have analysed the rhetoric of popular management ideas and have shown how they are made to be so appealing (Greatbatch and Clark, 2005; Jackson, 2001). Popular manage­ ment ideas are often scorned as cheap quick-fixes (McGill, 1988). The polysemy of the word popular is well reflected in the variety and fertility of our research field. The definitions listed above fall into three groups. In the first group (definitions 1, 5, and 7), a person or an object—or a management idea—becomes popular owing to a ­collective movement of choice. In this sense, popularity emerges, it is not an essence.

popular management ideas    305 Conversely, in the second group (definitions 4 and 6), popularity is an intrinsic ­characteristic of an object, person, or idea. Popularity in this sense is a genre with ­specific characteristics. For example, a song or a tune can be branded as popular music even though nobody listens to it. The third group (definitions 2 and 3) encompasses denota­ tions that descend from the Latin and French definitions of popularity as coming from or belonging to the people. Here, popularity is ownership. The following sections delve further into these three meanings of popularity.

Popularity as Collective Choice Stating that popularity emerges from collective choice indicates that it has a processual nature comprised of several steps, which can be outlined as follows:

Step 1. Appearance In theory, the first step should be the appearance of the new management idea that becomes popular—or not, but the last fifteen years of research on management fashions have shown that management ideas are constantly transformed and negotiated during their rise in popularity (Heusinkveld et al.,  2013). However, Örtenblad (2010) aptly observes that management ideas are usually bundled and popularized under a specific label. As a result, studying the popularity (as collective choice) of management ideas largely consists of following the appearance and use of a particular label.

Step 2. Visibility The second step is for the new label to become visible: it cannot be collectively selected if no one knows about it. It has to become part of the public discourse. This is one reason why the popularity of management ideas is often measured using print media indicators (PMI), namely by counting the number (or ratio) of journal or magazine articles con­ taining the new label. PMI have often been criticized for measuring ‘the amount of “noise” generated in the print media’ (Clark, 2004: 300) instead of quantifying adoption and implementation by organizations (Benders et al., 2007; Madsen and Stenheim, 2013). Although media presence should not be equated with practice, it is a valid measure of popularity defined as frequently encountered. Surprisingly, although traditional print media are increasingly replaced by web pages and supplemented with blogs and social media, little research on popular management ideas has used web media indicators. Early explorations of management fashions built on Rogers’ studies of the diffusion of innovations. Abrahamson (1991, 1996; Abrahamson and Rosenkopf, 1993) distinguishes swings in popularity from management fashions, which involve ‘management fashion

306   h. giroux setters—organizations and individuals who dedicate themselves to producing and ­disseminating management knowledge’ (Abrahamson, 1996: 256). The central role of a management fashion industry in publicizing new ideas is also emphasized by Rüling (2005). Until now, it would have been difficult to imagine that a new management idea could disseminate and become popular without fashion setters’ involvement. The explo­ sion of social networks may have changed that (Madsen and Ståtten, 2015). It would be worth exploring the possibility that social media help management ideas become ‘viral’.

Step 3. Raising Interest The third step of the process is raising interest. Managers become aware of the new con­ cept (Van Rossem and Van Veen, 2011) and actively seek information about it; they read articles, buy books, attend seminars, etc. Herein lies another shortcoming of PMI: they measure the number of articles published, but not how many people access or read them. They focus on the supply side, and do not measure the curiosity manifested by the readership. The digitization of information and the Internet now allows us to compute how many times search terms are used, or articles are accessed or downloaded, how often videos are streamlined and whether they were watched in their entirety or not, reviewed, recommended, etc. Interest in the blogosphere and other online forums (for instance, references to articles, websites, or management methods by LinkedIn members) could also be measured. Shared awareness of new ideas or labels is where the role of the collective begins: the decision to seek information may initially be individual, but it is soon influenced by the opinions of others, or simply by the fact that many people seem to know or talk about a particular topic. As noted by Sinha and Pan (2006: 438), ‘the emergence of a popular product is a result of the self-organized coordination of choices made by heterogeneous entities’. These authors also provide a method to detect this self-organized coordination. They empirically studied the cumulative distribution functions of social objects likely to become hits in their respective domains (scientific papers, movies, books, websites and blogs, elections, etc.), and found that they all present the same characteristic shape of non-independent choices. Sinha and Pan’s method might be used to identify early on which new management ideas are developing into a fad or fashion, instead of relying on lifecycle analyses that can only be performed ex post. Obviously, Sinha and Pan were not the first to observe the coordination of choice. The non-additivity of demand and the fact that social agents influence one another have long been studied by economists. Leibenstein (1950) describes bandwagons, which are one form of ‘non-functional demand’, as opposed to functional demand: By functional demand is meant that part of the demand for a commodity which is due to the qualities inherent in the commodity itself. By nonfunctional demand is meant that portion of the demand for a consumers’ good which is due to factors other than the qualities inherent in the commodity.  (Leibenstein, 1950: 188–9)

popular management ideas    307 Leibenstein identifies three motivations underlining non-functional demand: irrationality, speculation, and the existence of external effects on utility, which is the most important of the three. The bandwagon is one kind of external effect. Since Leibenstein’s seminal article, bandwagon effects have been found in a variety of contexts, both commercial and non-commercial.

Step 4. Differentiation The fourth step is the differentiation of the new label from all others and its realization as a popular idea. To date, the argument has been one of numbers: the idea is frequently encountered and inquired about by a growing number of people. What is the tipping point for an idea to be deemed popular? The literature on popularity among peers can shed light on this question. Popularity among peers had been generally believed to be synonymous with acceptance or likeability. A person who was well accepted or liked by a large number of peers was said to be popular. However, recent research indicates that popularity among peers is an attribution: in a group of teenagers, for instance, the popular ones are not those who are the most likeable or appreciated, but those who are said to be popular by their peers. Popularity is a ‘reputational judgment’ (Cillessen and Marks, 2011), a social con­ struct associated with status (that of being popular) and dom­inance (Bukowski, 2011). The first consequence of this new perspective is methodological: popularity among peers is now measured by asking peers to identify who is popular and who is not. This could be adapted to management ideas by using surveys. The second consequence is theoretical: before the new idea is adopted or even accepted, it has to be differentiated from all others and to acquire a new status. This could be the missing link between the first three steps of the process and the next one, approval.

Step 5. Approval Approval relates to the first definition of popularity: ‘Of a belief, attitude, etc. prevalent among the general public; generally accepted, commonly known.’ The management fashions literature largely argues that the new management idea is believed to be the best solution to organizations’ current problems (Abrahamson, 1991; David and Strang, 2006). However, cognitive economists (e.g. Orléan, 2004) specify several recursive levels of group belief. The first level lies in the new management idea, when most individuals in a group believe that the idea is the best solution. Yet people also hold beliefs about the beliefs of others. There is thus a second-level group belief when individuals believe that the group believes that the new idea is the best solution. The third level is when individ­ uals believe that the group believes that the group believes that the new idea is the best solution. The belief is no longer about the appropriateness of the new management idea, but about what the group believes the group believes. Two new social constructs have

308   h. giroux emerged together: the group (as an entity with independent thought) and its belief about what the group believes (the popularity of the new management idea).

Step 6. Adoption The sixth and final step is adoption. Many articles have explored why managers adopt new management ideas en masse. Proponents of new ideas claim that it is because they recognize their validity and usefulness. Conversely, critics maintain that most new man­ agement ideas are, at best, either ‘old wine in new bottles’ (Spell, 2001) or, at worst, a new type of snake-oil peddled by witch doctors. Their adoption thus indicates that managers are naïve and have succumbed to false promises. They are less rational than they are ­presumed to be. In the 1990s, several authors argued that managers were not that gullible, and that there were other reasons for the adoption of fashionable ideas (for a review, see Sturdy, 2004). These reasons include institutional pressures and the quest for legitimacy. Embracing new methods that are widely believed to be good and true is essential to  appear progressive. This holds between organizations and their stakeholders (Abrahamson and Rosenkopf,  1993) and managers and their superiors (Gill and Whittle, 1992; Watson, 1994). The role of institutional pressures and the institutionaliza­ tion of popular management ideas was also developed by Westphal et al. (1997) and Perkmann and Spicer (2008), among others. Another reason for the adoption of fashionable ideas is mimetic pressures. In ­conformity-rewarding organizations, jumping on the bandwagon maximizes utility (Hung and Plott, 2001). In the last thirty years, research on bandwagon effects, informa­ tional cascades, and herd effects has proliferated, notably in the economic and gametheory literature. During a decision-making process, previous choices may be a reasonable source of information about utility if no other information is available or if information is costly. Herd behaviour occurs when everyone is ‘doing what everyone else is doing, even when their private information suggests doing something quite dif­ ferent’ (Banerjee, 1992: 798). Thus, individual adoption of a popular management idea may not require approval or even knowledge of the idea itself. Rather, adoption is driven by knowledge that an idea enjoys popular status, the belief that the group believes that it is the best solution (and thus has high utility as a source of legitimacy), and a conformityrewarding environment. The term herd behaviour evokes a flock of sheep blindly following each other, yet it can also have positive effects. For instance, if early decision-makers have made a good decision, everyone will benefit from the cascade. As Strang and Macy (2001) contend, managers focused on the bottom line will try to emulate other companies’ success s­tories. Likewise, consulting firms frequently engage in social mimicry (Strang et al.,  2014). Information cascades can also integrate more private information than any individual decision-maker possesses (Hung and Plott, 2001), particularly if early adopters share

popular management ideas    309 private information. On the negative side, herd behaviour can lead to entrapment, with decision-makers feeling forced to follow the group despite potential negative effects (Heal and Kunreuther, 2010). Understanding the reasons for a collective adoption is one thing, but the main ­problem is how to determine whether the new idea has truly been implemented, and to what extent. The rift between theory and practice following the implementation of new management ideas has been demonstrated several times, for instance concerning ISO 9000 (Heras-Saizarbitoria and Boiral, 2015), agile development (Cram and Newell, 2016), and sustainable management and other forms of corporate social responsibility (Roulet and Touboul, 2015). In the latter case, it even spawned the expression ‘greenwashing,’ which is defined as ‘a strategy that companies adopt to engage in symbolic communica­ tions of environmental issues without substantially addressing them in actions’ (Walker and Wan, 2012). This might directly result from the bandwagon effect in that organiza­ tions tend to engage in symbolic adoption when their main motivation is to gain legitimacy (Cram and Newell, 2016). Even when adoption is substantive, what exactly has been implemented may be unclear. Nelson et al. (2014) highlight the difficulty of measuring the degree of adoption of intangible innovations such as ideas and practices. Their label may be traceable, but fashionable labels often act as umbrellas that encompass diverse ideas, methods, and philosophies. Ansari et al. (2014) contend that these labels are ‘engineered’ that way, and that this characteristic is directly linked to their popularity; this idea will be developed in the next section. However, Nicolai and Dautwiz suggest that ‘contextual ambiguity’ directly results from implementation and ‘does not originate from the linguistic ambiguity of the management fashion but from the plurality of local contexts in which the concept is interpreted’ (2010: 874). Many argue that new management ideas must be adapted to local contingencies ­during their implementation, either to fit with each organization’s practices and con­ ventions (Ansari et al., 2014) or to accommodate conflicting demands from various stakeholders (Bohn et al., 2015). This is often accomplished jointly with consultants, who view the translation process as a justification for their services. New ideas are also modified by employees who try to make sense of them and adjust them to their needs (Radaelli and Sitton-Kent, 2016). Regardless of whether or not this adaptation leads to overly diluted and ultimately useless concepts (McCann et al., 2015) or represents a normal process of ‘social reconstruction’ (Lozeau et al., 2002), measuring the adoption of a particular management idea is very difficult. This section has focused on popularity that emerges from a collective movement of choice. Popular management ideas are frequently encountered, and eventually become prevalent, believed, and used. Various literatures were mobilized to elucidate the mech­ anisms of this emergence, together with the ensuing methodological challenges for those who want to ascertain and measure popularity. The next section analyses a differ­ ent yet not unrelated view of popularity, wherein popular management ideas possess specific, inherent characteristics.

310   h. giroux

Popularity as a Genre A genre is ‘a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a ­particular style, form, or content’ (Merriam-Webster, 2017). The concept of genre can also be used to analyse non-literary texts. Gerlach (1996) cites famous bestsellers from the 1980s and 1990s as exemplars of the ‘business restructuring genre’. More recently, Cornut et al. (2012) showed that strategic plans are a distinct sub-genre of management texts, as indicated by structural and lexical features. Genres are distinguished by formal and thematic features, but are also linked to a  ­specific position of address, a rhetorical purpose, and background knowledge (Frow, 2006). A strategic plan possesses particular features because it aims to accom­ plish certain things and to impact certain people who have certain expectations about it. Genres are sets of practices and rules that are essential for both making sense of texts and producing them. The concept of genre cannot be applied to a single idea, but since management ideas are usually developed and articulated in written texts and other artefacts, it can be used to analyse these productions. Drawing on the notion of genre is particularly appealing because much has been written about other artefacts characterized as popular, or pop. For example, pop music has been analysed and described in thousands of research articles and books; so has the popular press. Pop music pieces are short, with a simple melody and a hook, and a rhythm that encourages dancing. They mostly include lyrics organized as repeated structures of chorus and verses, usually pertaining to love or dancing (New World Encyclopedia, 2012). The popular press often adopts tabloid format, with bold headlines and eye-catching photographs. Articles are concise, with short ­sentences and paragraphs; they mostly cover local news, or news with high emotional content or human interest (Bingham and Conboy, 2015). In both cases, the characteristics of the genre were developed to appeal to a large pub­ lic, in line with two definitions of popular stated above (numbers 4 and 6). Consequently, they are often broadly disseminated and consumed. The diffusion of pop music and the popular press is also associated with powerful industries, which often purportedly exploit the needs of naïve or unrefined consumers. However, the classification as pop or popular refers to generic characteristics, not to the collective process of the adoption of works in the genre. A piece of music can belong to the pop genre and not be widely dif­ fused or listened to. Not all songs become hits, and some tabloids never gain a large enough readership and eventually disappear. The label popular is also determined by a rhetoric of opposition: pop music is not significant, such as classical music or jazz, and the popular press lacks the value of serious newspapers or magazines. Both genres have often been criticized for being overly simple and superficial, lowering the bar to reach the masses, as opposed to the elite. This assessment was also one of the earliest to be made about management fash­ ions (Gill and Whittle, 1992; McGill, 1988). Popular management ideas arguably lack

popular management ideas    311 s­ ubstance and are quick fixes, reducing managerial work to formulas and w ­ atered-down theories (Furnham, 2004). Since the 1990s, several scholars of management fashions have analysed popular management texts and performances (such as speeches and videos) and identified their characteristics (for instance, Clark and Greatbatch,  2004; Furusten,  1999; Gill and Whittle, 1992; Grint, 1994; Huczynski, 1993; Jackson, 2001; Kieser, 1997; Paes de Paula and Wood, 2009; Whittle, 2015). These analyses are synthesized as follows: • Narratives of success: The central element of the genre is the telling of one or more success stories. Other managers and firms (usually, famous executives and Fortune 500 companies) have faced the current difficulties and found a solution—the new idea that will be presented. The author was either directly involved in the story or witnessed it first-hand; he does not tell his readers what to do, he shows them what others have done. The narrative structure is borrowed from a well-known literary genre, that of the quest: a manager or organization faces a new and threatening situation, and has lost a valuable object (economic dominance, profitability, market share, etc.); the hero seeks redemption and solutions, but is hindered by outside and inside forces; he makes an important discovery, sometimes with the help of a guide or allies; after much effort, he finally succeeds beyond all expectations; he is acclaimed by all. The lesson is that if the readers follow the same path, and if they sufficiently believe in it to invest the necessary time and effort, they too will ­succeed. In addition to being engaging and hopeful fairy tales for overwhelmed managers, these stories provide legitimacy to those who embark on the same quest. • Resonances: The text should resonate with current concerns, interpretations, ideologies, and values. Popular ideas also echo and reinforce dogmas about the importance of progress, growth, and fierce competition. They align with current views of leadership that create meaning and inspire people. Most management fashions since the 1980s have advocated empowerment, teamwork, coaching, cus­ tomer orientation, and value-added work. As a genre, popular management texts are part of the meta-discourse of the best practice (Thomas, 2015), which incites managers to seek ready-to-use solutions and predisposes them to accept them as true when proffered. • Ostensible novelty: Paradoxically, even if they are strongly anchored in the con­ temporary discourse about management, popular management ideas are presented as innovations. They are viewed as new knowledge and thus need to be justified by specifying the limitations of previous practices. However, old ideas must be set aside respectfully: they were good at some point (otherwise, managers who adopted them would look like fools), but are now outdated. The environment constantly changes, and organizations must adapt, hence the need for a radically new vision. Again, this rhetoric is secured in the deep-seated cultural value of innovation. Nevertheless, new ideas are sometimes portrayed as a return to common sense or to the good old American way of doing things, even as a ‘radical return to tradition’

312   h. giroux (Grint, 1994: 197). This tension between the new and the old is a well-known phenomenon in the popular arts, and has been studied from perspectives such as political economy, philosophy of aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and information the­ ory (Middleton, 1983). Popular artists excite their audience with a new creation, while reassuring them and facilitating their experience by restating the old and accepted, and activating stock emotions (Browne, 2006 [1972]). • Universalism: Fashionable management ideas are often depicted as panaceas (Bort, 2015; Lillrank, 2015). Many popular management texts claim that the new ideas have wide-ranging qualities: they can be applied in most organizations; they involve everyone, bring together all functional units, and foster a unity of purpose; they can solve a variety of problems (technical, human, financial, etc.); and they resolve all conflicts of interests between the organization’s stakeholders. • Practicality: The road to success illustrated by the narrative must be clearly ­delineated. Aspiring hero managers gain a method composed of multiple steps that seem logical and easy to follow. However, there will be roadblocks—only those who persevere and really believe in the new idea will succeed. • Readability: Academic jargon must be avoided. Sentences are short and to the point, and written in colloquial, terse language. The argumentative structure is usually weak, and generalities and truisms abound. The benefits and rewards experienced by the hero organization are aggregated into a few impressive ­numbers. The methodology used is unspecified. • Engaging style: The general tone is optimistic and confident. To share their beliefs and passion, the authors adopt a personal stance by using strong modalities and minimal hedges. They also try to construct proximity through the inclusive we and by addressing readers directly (you). Conferences and interventions are based on storytelling and humour (Greatbatch and Clark, 2005). In addition to the characteristics of popular management texts that identify them as a genre, the labels of popular ideas share another trait: their meaning is ambiguous. This feature has been highlighted repeatedly by management fashion observers, and has been confirmed by empirical research for diverse ideas such as Lean (Green and May,  2005), Achieving Competitive Excellence (ACE) (Ansari et al.,  2014), Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) (Benders et al.,  1998), and Knowledge Management (Scarbrough and Swan, 2001). Although the ambiguity of fashionable ideas is linked to their adoption, the direction of the relationship is debatable. Ambiguity purportedly results from the diffusion and implementation process, as consultants and organiza­ tions adapt ideas to fit their needs. Others argue that ambiguity is built into new ideas. This is why they are so readily adopted by organizations; people ‘can eclectically select those elements that appeal to them, or that they interpret as the fashions’ core idea’ (Benders and Van Veen, 2001: 37). Giroux (2006) sees the relationship as a snowball effect: pragmatic ambiguity is both the source and the result of adoption. Ideas become more general, ambiguous, and vague as various stakeholders attempt to translate and

popular management ideas    313 align their interests, but this process is possible only if the label allows ‘interpretative viability’ (Benders and Van Veen, 2001). Regarding Total Quality Management (TQM), Giroux demonstrates that these affordances may have largely been the unintended ­consequences of the rhetorical construction of the texts presenting the new approach. Notably, the desire to write in easy-to-read English often results in the elimination of prepositions that are essential for sense-making. Does Total Quality Management mean the total management of quality or the management of total quality? Witty wordplay, metaphors, and other rhetorical and stylistic choices intended to make texts and per­ formances more appealing also engender, sometimes intentionally, multiple interpret­ ations of the same concept. Ambiguity is thus directly linked to popularity as a genre. This section has construed popularity not as a collective emergence but as a charac­ teristic of textual or oral productions presenting management ideas. Popular manage­ ment ideas are thus cultural objects with common formal features, many of which are similar to those of pop music and the popular press: they are ostensibly novel but com­ fortably familiar; they are emotional, personal, and relatable; they can be consumed ­easily and have entertainment value. Like other popular genres, they are ridiculed by purists for not being serious enough. The management fashions industry has also been accused of acting in a populist manner because it caters to managers’ emotional needs instead of trying to teach them ‘healthy organization theories’ (Sorge and van Witteloostuijn, 2004). In the popular genre, ideas and productions are oriented towards ordinary people. In the next section, popularity implies that these ideas and productions are created by them.

Popularity as Ownership The definition of popularity as belonging to the people or coming from the people has deep roots in society and politics. In cultural studies, artefacts created and transmitted by ordinary people, for non-commercial purposes, are part of folk culture or popular ­culture, as opposed to elite culture (Browne 2006 [1972]). Considering popularity as ownership raises several questions. First, who are the ­ordinary people in the management ideas sphere? It should be managers and employees (including professionals) who reflect on how best to manage and to work. Management ideas and productions presented by hero managers, namely practising corporate lead­ ers, arguably come from the people because they were developed in the course of their work, to solve their own problems. Hero managers belong to an elite, albeit a social or financial elite rather than the intellectual elite associated with universities. The status of consultants is ambiguous and varies depending on their rhetorical purpose. They argue that they have years of hands-on experience, informed by observations of clients. Concomitantly, they claim to be experts in the new management approaches developed by experts. Further research on popularity as ownership could investigate these issues.

314   h. giroux Second, when does knowledge coming from the people become elite knowledge? Craftsmen did not wait for Kaizen and TQM to perceive value in continuously improv­ ing their products and their methods. Long before Albert Humphrey invented SWOT analysis in 1960, capable army generals have gauged the strengths and weaknesses of their troops, and the opportunities and threats they faced. This knowledge was certainly formalized enough to be transmitted to new soldiers, orally or otherwise. The esoteric labels may have been affixed by gurus, but the ideas often come from the people. Further, ideas are adapted during implementation, and the original label is some­ times redefined beyond recognition. Such co-creation could mean that management ideas come, at least partly, from the managers and employees who reinterpret them for their own purposes. Here again, new technologies could prove useful and should be added to our methodological repertoire. It is now easier than ever to analyse large text corpuses and to follow changes in time and space. As experiences and ideas are increas­ ingly shared on social media by managers, workers, customers, consulting firms, and professional associations, much more can be known about active consumption, co-­ creation and sense-making. In addition, online blogs, wikis, chats, commons, and crowdsourcing have spawned a new culture: people now enjoy and excel at creating content. Sharing ideas used to be expensive: gatekeepers controlled what could be said and by whom (Madsen and Ståtten, 2015; Nijholt et al., 2014). Social media have reduced the power of gatekeeping considerably. Some say it has gone to the other extreme: anyone can say anything with­ out the burden of proof. Nevertheless, social media are here to stay; they will undoubt­ edly expand and evolve. Concomitantly, the growing place of citizen science is slowly closing the divide between ordinary citizens and the scientific community, and more importantly, making people aware of their ability to create knowledge, and their confi­ dence in the value of this knowledge. As the ivory tower of academia erodes, so may the power of gurus and management recipes. This is certainly an exciting possibility and a new research avenue to explore.

Conclusion When discussing complex phenomena, we often use everyday words without attempt­ ing to define them, assuming that everyone will understand what we mean. This chapter has explored various definitions of the word popular and illustrated how they have shaped the study of popular management ideas. Three groups of definitions were outlined: popularity as emergence, popularity as a genre, and popularity as ownership. Each group can be linked to observations made about management fashions, so this classification can elucidate past and current debates about what constitutes a fashion. For example, Abrahamson (1996) contends that the presence of a fashion-setting industry is the essential trait of a fashion. However, Strang et al. (2014) assert that the crucial point is that adopters mimic decisions taken by

popular management ideas    315 s­ uccessful organizations. Both implicitly posit that popularity emerges from a collective movement of choice, but they focus on different steps of the process and different causes. The three groups delineated above are interrelated but different. Popularity as a genre aims to increase, but not necessarily result in belief and adoption, and can exist on its own. Popularity as emergence can result from popularity as a genre and popularity as ownership, yet it too may happen singly, and does not necessarily herald a fashion. Part of the demand may be non-functional and connected to external effects on utility, but many new ideas and practices are adopted because people genuinely find inherent qual­ ities and value in them. E-commerce and social media were not massively and rapidly adopted because they came from the people, were well wrapped in rhetoric, or were driven by a powerful industry. The main reason for their popularity (as an emergent ­collective choice) is that people and organizations find them useful. Ultimately, the explosion of social media may increase popularity as ownership and generate ideas that are collectively chosen without having been subjected to gatekeepers’ constraints or the format of a specific genre. Collectively, the three groups indicate that management fashions are a subgroup of popular management ideas. Research on these ideas should thus transcend the man­ agement fashions phenomenon. Concentrating on the popularity side of ‘popular ­management ideas’ instead of the management ideas side allows exploration of how other fields of research can enrich collective studies. For instance, can Sinha and Pan’s (2006) method for detecting self-organized coordination be used to identify burgeon­ ing management fashions? Can we consider the popularity of ideas as an attribution? Who would need (or be allowed) to make this attribution? What impact will social media have on management ideas, notably concerning the way they are disseminated and collectively chosen? Will the formal features of these new media influence the gen­ eric characteristics of popular management ideas? (See also Barros and Rüling, in this volume.) As more and more ‘ordinary’ people express and disseminate their findings and thoughts, will there be a shift in the ownership of management ideas? How will this affect the management ideas industry? The new media also present opportunities for methodological development (see also Strang and Wittrock, in this volume). We can now measure both the supply and demand sides of diffusion. Readers’ or watchers’ degree of engagement with web-transmitted productions can be assessed, and more sophisticated methods will certainly be devel­ oped. Whether these new paths of research become popular or not is another story.

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popular management ideas    319 Strang, D. and Macy, M.  W. (2001). ‘In Search of Excellence: Fads, Success Stories, and Adaptive Emulation’, American Journal of Sociology, 107: 147–82. Sturdy, A. (2004). ‘The Adoption of Management Ideas and Practices’, Management Learning, 35: 155–79. Thomas, P. (2015). ‘Putting Panaceas into Practice . . . or Not: Translating Discourse into Social Practice in Complex and Contested Terrains’, in A. Örtenblad (ed.), Handbook of Research on Management Ideas and Panaceas. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 57–73. Van Rossem, A. and Van Veen, K. (2011). ‘Managers’ Awareness of Fashionable Management Concepts: An Empirical Study’, European Management Journal, 29: 206–16. Walker, K. and Wan, F. (2012). ‘The Harm of Symbolic Actions and Green-Washing: Corporate Actions and Communications on Environmental Performance and Their Financial Implications’, Journal of Business Ethics 109: 227–42. Watson, T. J. (1994). ‘Management “Flavours of the Month”: Their Role in Management Life’, International Journal of Human Resource Management, 5: 893–909. Westphal, J.  D., Gulati, R., and Shortell, S.  M. (1997). ‘Customization or Conformity? An Institutional and Network Perspective on the Content and Consequences of TQM Adoption’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 42: 366–94. Whittle, S. R. (2015). ‘Changing the Story: Management Panaceas as Narrative Interventions’, in A.  Örtenblad (ed.), Handbook of Research on Management Ideas and Panaceas. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 173–89.

chapter 17

profe ssiona l struct u r e s   a n d pr actice ch a nge institutionalization processes in accounting and strategy Richard Whittington and Deborah A. Anderson

Introduction This chapter examines how management ideas become institutionalized as widespread practices within different kinds of professional or occupational fields. In this respect, we take seriously the growing recognition of the differences between professions (Malhotra and Morris, 2009) and hence the need for more explicitly comparative studies amongst them (Muzio et al., 2013). In particular, we suggest that institutionalization processes and outcomes are liable to vary starkly according to field structures. A great deal of research has focused on institutionalization within professions whose structures support high degrees of social closure, accomplished through professional or state regulation and strict qualification processes for example (Parkin, 1979). Law, medicine, and accounting are prime cases of such structurally closed professions. We contrast institutionalization processes and outcomes in professions with less structural closure, without significant regulation and demanding qualification requirements for instance. Such relatively open professional fields include journalism, executive search, project management, advertising, and strategy (Hall, 2011; Lewis, 2012; Muzio et al., 2013; Saks, 2012; Whittington et al., 2011). Drawing particularly on comparative analyses of accounting as representative of a more closed profession, and strategy as a highly open profession, we argue that how management ideas are adopted as practices varies systematically

professional structures and practice change    321 across these fields—both in terms of institutionalization processes (Lawrence et al., 2013) and in the isomorphism of outcomes (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). In focusing on the processes by which ideas become institutionalized practices, we  follow Birkinshaw et al.’s (2008) distinction between ideas as abstract and even ­ideological, and practices as the operationalized techniques and routines by which work actually gets done. The adoption of management ideas and practices has been analysed through a wide range of lenses (Damanpour,  2014; Sturdy,  2004), but our focus on ­operational practices in professional fields points us particularly to perspectives from institutional theory: professionals are quintessentially involved in the kinds of uncertain work where legitimate solutions are valued (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). Specifically, we consider three perspectives from within institutional theory: (1) institutional entrepreneurship (Garud et al., 2007), particularly relevant to relatively closed professions; (2) the theory of management fashion (Abrahamson, 1996), appropriate for the more market-driven context of open professions; and (3) the institutional work perspective (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006), which emphasizes the kinds of continuous processes of institutional maintenance that apply especially to open professions and which tend to be neglected in the two other theoretical approaches. Our central argument therefore is that the relevance of these three institutional perspectives on practice change varies according to the extent to which professional fields are open or closed. Our analysis of the contrasting cases of strategy and accounting will suggest that institutionalization can differ across different professional contexts in at least five ways: the key mechanisms in institutionalization processes; change agent relationships, collaborative or competitive; the rhythm of innovation, episodic or continuous; types of activity over time; and finally the outcome variable of propensity towards isomorphism or pluralism. Although the contrasts are systematic, they are a matter of degree. Even in closed professions unregulated practice innovation is certainly possible (Smets et al., 2012). However, we argue that contrasting relatively closed and open professions corrects a bias in the literature towards traditional and prestigious professions, to the neglect of the very different processes that are particularly relevant to some of the fastest-growing professions today.

Institutionalization and Professional Structure Our focus is on practice change at the level of professional or occupational fields (Baron et al., 1988; Greenwood et al., 2002). In this, we differ from those concerned with the adoption of new practices at the level of particular organizations (e.g. Ansari et al., 2014; Damanpour and Aravind, 2012). At the level of the professional field, attention focuses on cross-organizational mechanisms for institutionalization, rather than on specific organizational characteristics, for instance those favouring early adoption. Moreover,

322    r. whittington and d. a. anderson the concern is for field-level outcomes rather than for the competitive or survival advantages of particular organizations. In other words, by comparison with organizationlevel studies of practice change, field-level institutionalization involves different mechanisms and may have wider repercussions. We concentrate on occupational fields that are professional in Evetts’ (2003) pragmatic sense of being based on knowledge, both technical and tacit. In these occupations, professionals apply expert knowledge to problems involving uncertainty and discretion. Professions in this sense vary widely. As Evetts (2003) observes, some professions are established, exclusive, and elitist, for example accounting, law, and medicine. These t­raditional professions have long claimed the attention of sociologists. There are, though, a host of other groups with claims to professional status, including pharmacists, social workers, care assistants, librarians, computing experts, the police, and the armed forces. While typically less privileged than many traditional professions, these groups also apply specialized knowledge to uncertain problems. However, it is not clear that institutionalization processes can be safely generalized across these widely varying professional groups. Professions vary particularly according to their structural ability to control membership and thereby practices. In the Weberian tradition, this ability is referred to by the degree of social closure (Parkin, 1979). Traditional professions have been depicted as relatively closed in the sense that individuals must meet strict qualification requirements in terms of credentials, apprenticeships, or licensing (Kleiner,  2000). Qualification serves both to control entry into the profession and to ensure proficiency in standard professional practices: the approved ways of practising law, medicine, or accounting for example. These requirements are enforced by state or professional regulatory bodies, which not only exclude the unqualified but expel those who deviate from professional standards. Such professions are thereby able to achieve considerable homogeneity in practices. Practice change, moreover, must rely on approval by regulatory bodies. Influencing state regulators and professional associations is therefore often central to achieving practice change (Suddaby and Viale, 2011). However, many occupational groups lack the state or professional structures capable of enforcing either conformity or change. Indeed, as rapid social and technological change generates many new professional groups (life coaches, games designers, and so on), it can be expected that strong structures of these kinds will be the exception rather than the rule, at least in the infancy of these groups. Professions lacking such structures become ‘permeable’ (Malhotra and Morris, 2009), without the mechanisms for effective social closure. Permeability—or openness—is a matter of degree. In most advanced economies, engineering is relatively open by comparison with accounting and law (Malhotra and Morris, 2009), but journalism, executive search, advertising, and strategy are even more so (Lewis, 2012; Muzio et al., 2013; Saks, 2012; Whittington et al., 2011). Entry into such professions typically does not require qualifications as proof of competence in a particular set of practices, and there are weak to non-existent state or professional sanctions for those who ignore accepted practices. Professionals and their practices face pre-eminently market tests. Insofar as the market will bear them, it is possible therefore

professional structures and practice change    323 for a mix of practices to coexist. Practice change is achieved more through the mechanisms of market selection than through the state or professional associations. These two contrasting structural contexts suggest different institutionalization processes. Abrahamson et al. (2015) distinguish mainstream institutional theory accounts from those taking a management fashion perspective. The former theory tends to assume practice institutionalization over the long term, while fashion accounts emphasize the fleeting nature of practices. In mainstream institutional theory, notions of institutional entrepreneurship prevail, with change agents framing, theorizing, organizing, and networking in support of their favoured new practices (Garud et al.,  2007; Hung and Whittington, 2011). The emphasis is political: mobilizing interest groups and lobbying regulators. Such entrepreneurial action may be aimed at the state, as often in cases of environmental protection, where campaigners seek state regulation to enhance and protect the environment (Child et al., 2007; Hoffman, 1999). Institutional entrepreneurship might also focus on professional associations, as for example the Canadian Institute of  Chartered Accountants was targeted in endorsing accounting firms’ shift towards multiservice organizations in the 1990s (Greenwood et al., 2002), or the Professional Association of Money Managers was won over in the creation of the active money management industry during the 1950s and the 1960s (Lounsbury and Crumley, 2007). Whether originating with states or associations, regulations assist professions to achieve isomorphism in practices (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). In short, professional work is governed by common standards. For open professional groups, however, neither states nor professional associations are available as mechanisms and enforcers of practice change. Here, management fashion theory is potentially more relevant (Abrahamson, 1996; David and Strang, 2006). In this perspective, change is predominantly market-driven, with fashion-setters such as consultants, management gurus, and business schools cast as suppliers of management ideas and techniques and organizations representing the demand-side. Management ideas and techniques are constantly rising and falling in popular appeal. On the demand-side, organizations are committed to notions of progress that imply continuous experimentation with new and potentially improved practices. On the supply-side, fashion-setters have clear market incentives to innovate, both to steal a march on competitors and to avoid price-competition as older ideas become commodified (Abrahamson, 1996). Strategy in particular is subject to the ebbs and flows of management fashion (Clark, 2004). Indeed, the strategy market is especially vulnerable to failures because of the difficulty consuming organizations have in evaluating the value of concepts and ideas that make claims to long-term and holistic performance benefits (Ghemawat, 2002, 2016). A central argument to this chapter is that the two theories of institutional entrepreneurship and management fashion align well with the different structural characteristics of various professions: the first is particularly relevant to closed professions with strong roles for the state or professional bodies; the second fits more open contexts, where market forces dominate with little regulatory intervention or guidance. Moreover, as against older forms of institutional theory that tended to emphasize conservatism (Scott, 2000), both make good sense of practice change. However, while allowing for

324    r. whittington and d. a. anderson innovation, the two theories may in their different ways underestimate the challenges of sustaining new practices over time. In accounts of institutional entrepreneurship, the focus is on the initial effort of achieving regulatory change: once institutionalized, the survival of new practices is just a matter of following the rules. In accounts of management fashion, on the other hand, endeavours to sustain practices beyond their fashionable peak are seen as likely in vain: practices are inherently transient and the commitment to an ideal of progress renders maintaining practices mere reactionary foolishness. In contrast to fashion theory and institutional entrepreneurship, the notion of institutional work retains the emphasis on agency while also honouring the effort involved in sustaining new practices over time (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006; Zietsma and Lawrence,  2010). Institutional work involves disrupting old practices, creating new practices, and maintaining existing practices. This work can take two broad forms: first, framing work, i.e. advocacy, defining, theorizing, and both valorizing and demonizing; second, organizing work, i.e. what Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) describe as ‘vesting’ (e.g. the creation of new sets of property rights), the construction of normative networks, policing and deterrence. Such institutional work can encompass either the kinds of political activity emphasized in institutional entrepreneurship, or the market-based activities of management fashion. However, it distinguishes itself from the other two theories in its longer temporal range, extending beyond initial episodes of either entrepreneurship or fashion-setting. Institutional work appreciates the ongoing activity of maintaining as well as making institutions. These activities are required not only for disrupting old ideas and practices and creating new ones, but also for adapting and defending institutionalized practices over time. Practices rise, persist, and fall through people’s continuous efforts on the ground. Maintenance is not to be taken for granted, as in institutional entrepreneurship, nor is it in vain, as in the theory of management fashion. Practice maintenance is as important and delicate a form of work as initial institutionalization. For new ideas and practices to turn into lasting change, they need long-term help in bedding down.

Practice Change in Accounting and Strategy The previous section introduced the distinction between closed and more open professions, and signalled possible differences in institutionalization processes, particularly in the light of the three theories of institutional entrepreneurship, management fashion, and institutional work. This section explores the institutionalization processes involved in practice change in more detail, illustrating key issues by examples from two contrasting professions: accounting, typically a profession with substantial social closure enforced by both state and professional regulation (Greenwood et al., 2002); and strategy, a newer profession with limited state and professional regulation (Noordegraaf et al.,  2014; Whittington et al., 2003).

professional structures and practice change    325 Accounting’s professional status is well established and protected in most developed economies by strong professional bodies: in the USA, for instance, by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA); in the UK, by the Consultative Committee of Accountancy Bodies (CCAB) and Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). Strategy lacks comparable professional bodies: the main claimant in the USA, the Strategic Leadership Forum, went bankrupt in 1998 (Association for Strategic Planning, n.d.) (Whittington, 2019). However, strategy remains professional in Evetts’ (2003) sense, involving the application of expertise to risky and uncertain problems. In other words, strategy qualifies as professional by the nature of its work, rather than the existence of professional bodies. Moreover, strategy is not dissimilar from accounting in having core sets of practitioners who might work either in independent professional firms (strategy consulting firms on the one hand, audit firms on the other) or as organizational specialists in their particular disciplines (as Chief Strategy Officers or Chief Financial Officers, for instance). Even without professional bodies, strategy’s practitioners form a professional field in the terms of institutional theory: like accounting, there are networks of strategy specialists (e.g. strategy consulting firms, Chief Strategy Officers, and, to an extent, strategy academics), all interacting in what is acknowledged as a more or less common purpose (Scott, 2000). Our illustrations draw in part from the secondary literature. However, while accountancy as an established and high status profession has attracted reasonably extensive prior analysis, strategy is less well-studied as a professional group. Accordingly, illustrations of changing ideas and practices in strategy will draw also from Whittington (2019), based on extensive interviews with strategy practitioners from both consulting and the corporate world working from the 1960s to today. Table 17.1 provides a schematic summary of differences to be expected in the institutionalization of practice change in closed versus open professions. The first four rows refer to institutionalization processes: the characteristic mechanisms of change; the relationships amongst promoters of new practices; the rhythm of innovation; and the types of activity over time. The final line describes outcomes in terms of the comprehensiveness of practice change, whether typically complete and isomorphic or more pluralistic. Change mechanisms. As noted earlier, in a closed profession there are clear ­mechanisms to target in order to achieve practice change: either the state, or the professional association, or the standard setter. Such powerful mechanisms allow for a mixture of coercive or normative change (Scott, 2000). The characteristic change mechanisms of accounting, therefore, are coercive and normative, although there is scope for mimetic change where regulations and professional bodies fail to prescribe solutions, something that may vary over time and between professional specialisms. Thus, prior to becoming a regulated profession, changes in accounting practices were normatively driven, relying on well-known manuals and texts (Previts and Flesher, 2015: 40). Although the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) was slow to create authoritative audit standards, it did increase normative pressures by introducing onerous examinations and lengthy vocational training to promote the concept of the ‘credentialled

326    r. whittington and d. a. anderson

Table 17.1  Practice institutionalization in closed and open professional fields

Change ­mechanisms

Change agent relationships Innovation rhythm Key activities Outcomes

Closed Professions

Open Professions

Coercive and normative, through state regulation or professional bodies Collaboration amongst leading organizations Stability punctuated by episodic breaks in practices Activity focused on practice creation and disruption Isomorphism through standards and regulations

Mimetic, through the emulation of prestigious firms Competitive between rival organizations Continuous practice iteration and change Activity concerned also for practice ­maintenance Pluralism through competitive variation

chartered accountant’ (Anderson et al., 2005). However, by the late 1800s, judicial rulings in the UK were also placing coercive pressures on professional accountants to improve the standards of audits and shape audit practice (Chandler, 1997). Beyond the professional associations, other regulatory bodies are important. In accounting, standard ­setters such as the American Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) have long been the  primary mechanism for change in financial reporting (Young,  1994). It is here that accounting and financial professionals work together with the regulator to craft issues ‘as accounting problems within a regulatory space, and the subsequent construction of these problems as appropriate for standard-setting action’ (Young, 1994: 83). Thus, regulators are not just the focal point of change efforts, but also shape how change efforts are enacted. Oversight bodies, such as the SEC are able to exert coercive penalties on firms that violate Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (Files, 2012). In the gaps left by coercive regulations and professional norms, however, there does remain room for mimetic processes, as for instance in the commonplace copying of processes, policies, and procedures for complex audit estimates that can be identified from Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspection reports (Griffith et al., 2015: 858). More open fields such as strategy have traditionally had no equivalent state or professional regulators as mechanisms for coercive or normative change. Given that strategy practices (e.g. strategic planning) are typically associated with very small or ambiguous economic advantages (Pearce et al.,  1987), mimetic processes to gain legitimacy are likely to be highly influential in these conditions. New ideas and practices are promoted through the marketplace, led by the kinds of consulting and business school fashionsetters emphasized by Abrahamson (1996). Thus Michael Porter’s industry structure analysis benefited from its origins in the prestigious Harvard Business School and its promotion in such influential vehicles as the Harvard Business Review (Porter, 1979).

professional structures and practice change    327 Nonetheless, its diffusion in the business world was substantially assisted by Porter’s ­formation with some of his students of the Monitor consulting firm in 1983. The largest and oldest telecommunications company AT&T became an important and prestigious Monitor client (Whittington, 2019). Client prestige is often important to mimetic processes in strategy. For example, McKinsey’s approach to portfolio management was assisted by its adoption by General Electric in 1971, and its endorsement by the company’s President as central to its strategy: the new approach became known as the GE/McKinsey Screen. By the late 1970s, nearly half of large American firms were using portfolio management techniques in one form or other (Haspeslagh, 1982). Even the state itself can be an influential client; McKinsey’s introduction of the multidivisional structure to the Bank of England helped promote the ‘McKinsey-ization’ of British business during the 1970s (McKenna, 2006), quite likely following legitimacy-seeking mimetic processes as well as strict economic criteria (Fligstein and Dauber, 1989). The state gave the Boston Consulting Group’s experience curve technique a fillip in 1973, when it commissioned the ten-year-old company to deliver a controversial and widely publicized report on the ailing motor-cycle industry. Only recently has the state taken a more direct role in promoting strategy techniques, with the British Financial Reporting Council requiring listed companies to include descriptions of their business models in formal ‘strategic reports’ from 2013 (Financial Reporting Council, 2014). Change agent relationships.  The contrasting roles of states and associations in closed and open professions also have implications for relationships between agents of change, particularly the extent of collaboration as opposed to competition. In a closed profession focused on influencing regulators, practice change is likely to be brought about ­collaboratively, often under the joint leadership of powerful actors. The process of accounting standard setting is formally public and open. In practice, however, the views of some groups are privileged—particularly members of the largest accounting firms and other multinational entities (Botzem, 2012; Büthe and Mattli, 2011; Ramanna, 2015). The highly structured and centralized focus at the domestic and international level tends to favour ‘timely involvement and speaking with a single voice—firms operating in a hierarchical and coordinated domestic system are likely to be in a more favorable position when seeking to influence rule-making’ (Büthe and Mattli, 2011: 194). FASB members are drawn mostly from the largest firms, academe, and the private sector— smaller accountancy firms hold relatively little sway over the process. Scholars have explored the convergence of the largest firms’ lobbying preferences with respect to the reliability of standards set by the FASB (Allen et al., 2015) as well as the potential for large firm blocks and undue influence within the board (Zeff, 2016). Increasing regulation since the FASB’s creation in 1973 also correlates with increasing concentration in the audit industry, with the group of largest firms (Big N) shrinking from eight members to four (Allen et al., 2015). Greenwood et al. (2002) show how in the late twentieth century the largest firms’ shift from accounting services into consulting was funnelled through, not initiated by, the professional associations. Associations ‘were responding to the ­jurisdictional and organizational movements of the profession’s largest firms . . . these

328    r. whittington and d. a. anderson firms were less captured by prevailing routines . . . [and] were attuned to the emerging opportunities involved in serving global clients . . . [They] had the political resources to resist traditional practices . . . enabl[ing] the large firms to act as institutional entrepreneurs’ (Greenwood et al., 2002: 73). In the more open professional context of strategy, competition plays a greater role. Just as in accounts of management fashion (Abrahamson, 1996), new ideas and practices are often introduced to give a competitive edge. Thus McKinsey developed the notion of strategic management in the late 1970s as a riposte to the competitive challenge presented by the highly analytical upstart BCG (Gluck et al., 1980). While the accounting industry sees few new major players, with the field long dominated by well-established firms (the largest, Deloitte, was founded in 1845), practice innovations in strategy are often the product of entirely new firms. Classically, the very concept of ‘strategy’ was introduced by the new BCG in the mid-1960s because Bruce Henderson, the firm’s founder, saw this as the only vacant space in an already crowded management consulting market (Kiechel, 2010). Only ten years after BCG’s foundation, Bill Bain was able to spin-out what rapidly became one of the top three strategy firms on the back of new ideas about strategy implementation. Monitor entered in the 1980s with new practices based on industrial economics, enabling it quickly to become the fourth-ranked strategy firm. When Gary Hamel launched his strategic innovation practices, he broke his relationship with Gemini Consulting and founded his own new firm, Strategos, in 1995 (Whittington, 2019). This competitive aspect of practice change is thus liable to be disruptive with regard to rivals, by contrast with accounting, where practice change is more often jointly-designed by powerful incumbents. Innovation rhythm.  A third major implication of structural closure or permeability is for the rhythm of innovation. In a closed profession, institutional entrepreneurship is episodic: the successful introduction of new practices is typically followed by a period of stability. Thus in accounting, publicly traded companies have long been required to conduct annual audits, produce financial reports, and file tax returns. Such legal mandates create a reliable market for professional services—work is in large part repetitive and demand is stable (Aharoni, 1999: 36). As noted by Miller and Power, despite its technical underpinnings, accounting—in an institutional sense—‘exhibit[s] styles and patterns of thinking about organizations and management that may be quite stable, and that are supported by habituated routines and work practices which realize and reinforce those styles’ (Miller and Power, 2013: 561). From a technical perspective, while standards are frequently evaluated and modified, substantive changes occur rarely. Noting as much, Young (1994: 83) argues that the majority of changes in accounting practice are ­comparatively innocuous. Importantly, Aharoni notes that accounting firms ‘do not have to develop a proposal each time they deliver a service. This is in sharp contrast to engineering design firms where jobs are awarded only after a complex bidding procedure’ (Aharoni, 1999: 36). Auditors have often had long-standing and continuous relationships with clients: e.g. Caterpillar has been with PwC for 90 years and General Electric with KPMG for 106 years (Marriage, 2015).

professional structures and practice change    329 In open professions, continuous innovation—or at least its appearance—is a necessary part of success in a competitive market. One cannot rest on a settled, universal standard. In line with the institutional work perspective’s sensitivity to the effortful nature of practice maintenance (Lawrence et al., 2011), ideas and techniques are subject to ongoing processes of development, either by their originators in the pursuit of greater effectiveness or rivals engaged in competitive leap-frogging. For example, BCG’s theory of a product portfolio went through several iterations. It was advanced initially in the Harvard Business Review in 1966; developed further on a 1967 assignment with Weyerhauser; took shape as a four-cell matrix on an assignment with Mead Corporation later that year; incorporated the market share and market growth axes on a Union Carbide job in 1969; included colourful names (such as ‘cash cow’ and so on) in 1970; and then endowed with bubbles representing the relative size of the businesses in 1973 (Whittington, 2019). At the same time, rivals were producing their own versions. While BCG’s portfolio was based on a four-cell matrix, competitors such as Arthur D Little offered a twelve-cell matrix and McKinsey promoted nine cells (Kiechel, 2010). The last exemplifies how, within an open profession, practice adaptations can easily disrupt established client relationships: BCG originally had its matrix adopted as the standard practice within General Electric in 1970, but McKinsey’s newer nine-cell matrix displaced it within a year. Key activities.  A corollary of these different patterns of innovation across professions is contrasting sets of activity. With respect to the categories of institutional work (Lawrence et al., 2011), activity in a closed profession is liable to be front-loaded on the initial disruption of old practices and the creation of replacement practices. The process begins with a period of intense activity, going beyond the technical work of innovation to include the political work of lobbying regulators and the framing work required to undermine old understandings and establish new ideas (Perkmann and Spicer, 2008). Once a new practice has been successfully introduced, activity switches to relatively low-energy routinization via professional training and regulatory policing. Greenwood et al (2002: 62) report that ‘professional associations can play an important role in monitoring compliance with normatively and coercively sanctioned expectations . . . but once established, these beliefs and the practices associated with them become takenfor-granted and reproduced through processes such as training and education’. Practices are commoditized as routine and portable templates (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001). Training can then ensure reliable reproduction of practices, as enshrined in ­professional qualifications. For smaller firms, training is often delegated to courses run externally by professional associations: there is little effort of their own involved at all. Larger firms tend to conduct their own training, but here training regimes are focused on consolidating standards to ensure that ‘(i) clients will receive a similar standard of ­service world-wide; and (ii) . . . services provided to international clients are seamlessly delivered despite national boundaries’ (Greenwood et al., 1999: 275; see also Anderson-Gough et al., 1998). Regulation reinforces routinization. For example, with the passing of Sarbanes-Oxley in the USA in the early 2000s, audit firms’ practices became subject to review by an external oversight body, the PCAOB which conducts periodic inspections of audit work papers to ensure conformity with audit

330    r. whittington and d. a. anderson standards. Griffith et al. (2015: 857–8) observe that the PCAOB focuses its inspection reports on improving the administration of existing approved audit methods, rather than suggesting ‘alternative, superior methods’. For strategy, as a more open and competitive profession, activity is more relentlessly intense across all three of practice disruption, creation, and maintenance. This is consistent with the institutional work perspective’s insistence that institutionalization is not a oneoff event, but something requiring active maintenance (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006). Ideas and practices do not rise and fall as completely as implied in management fashion theory, nor do they follow after each other in clear succession, as implied in more heroic, all-conquering accounts of institutional entrepreneurship. Rather, even criticized ideas and practices are apt to survive over long periods of time. The result in strategy is that many practices coexist in continuous rivalry, their advocates and their critics alike constantly locked in battle. Thus strategic planning, a product of the 1960s, was still ranked in 2014 as the fourth most used management tool worldwide by Bain & Co (Rigby and Bilodeau,  2015). Two decades after the publication of Mintzberg’s (1994) widely-read book on The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, critics such as Roger Martin (2014) continue to denounce strategic planning in prominent forums such as the Harvard Business Review. On the other hand, consultants such as Monitor’s founder Joseph Fuller (1998) and Accenture (2010) simultaneously insist on strategic planning’s enduring validity, at least as done their way. In other words, consultants are still engaging actively in maintenance work with regard to strategic planning long after original attempts to disrupt it. Without state or professional regulation, the ‘de-institutionalization’ of old practices (Lawrence et al., 2011) is stubbornly slow, with advocates and critics unable ever to relax. There is no regulatory body capable of declaring final victory either way. Outcomes.  The coexistence of rival practices in strategy points to the final contrast between closed and open professions. Closed professions have clear coercive and normative mechanisms to promote comprehensive and isomorphic change. New practices are imposed as standards across whole fields. In accounting, isomorphism is aided by at least three levels of audit work review—oversight bodies, peer-to-peer review, and reviews by the national offices of the largest firms. This layering of review incrementally grew over time, with external oversight bodies the most nascent of the three practices. Following an outpouring of accounting scandals in the early 2000s, including Enron and Worldcom, the well-established practice of peer-to-peer audit review was ­scrutinized by the public and state, resulting in the creation of independent oversight bodies such as the PCAOB (USA) and POB (UK) (Khalifa et al., 2007: 837). The main function of these oversight agencies is to impose general compliance with professional audit standards through periodic investigations of the audit work of firms—ensuring compliance and completion. Admittedly, the reviews are relatively high level—internal reviews by the national offices of the Big N are perceived as more stringent and detailed (Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006: 39). Provided that these external reviews are perceived

professional structures and practice change    331 to be fairly broad, rather than a true indicator of quality, unfavourable opinions can have substantial negative implications for the firms—including loss of clients (Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006: 39; Hilary and Lennox, 2005; Löhlein, 2016: 33–4). Open professional fields, on the other hand, have little state or professional regulation to rely on, and therefore practice change tends to be less comprehensive. Pluralism is a common outcome. Thus in strategy, there are fourteen tools used by at least 10 per cent of practitioners but only two (SWOT and Key Success Factors) that are used by more than half (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013). While advocates of new practices might, as Roger Martin (2014) did, inveigh relentlessly against previous generation tools, the pragmatic response of many practitioners is to integrate the new with the old, as hybrids. For ­example, the star consulting firm of the early 1990s Gemini organized itself around a two-stage model of ‘Analysis and Design’, based on old strategic planning practices, and ‘Results Delivery’, based on new notions of business transformation (Whittington, 2019). Similarly, during the 1980s, Shell’s strategists redesigned their old top-down scenario planning method, associated with strategic planning, in order to allow more decentralized participation consistent with the new emphasis on the idea of ‘strategic management’. The result of these pragmatic incorporations is that new practices tend not to achieve sweeping change, but are gradually accumulated in a process of growing practice pluralism.

Conclusions This chapter analysed the institutionalization of management ideas as operationalized practices in two structurally contrasting contexts: traditional closed professions, exemplified by accounting, and relatively open professions, exemplified by strategy. While closed professions have historically been more often studied, open professions appear to be growing rapidly as states and professional associations struggle to keep up with the new areas of expert knowledge thrown up by rapid social and technological change. However, as articulated in the preceding sections, the institutionalization processes that apply to the traditional closed professions seem unlikely to fit so well with the increasingly important category of open professions. In examining these institutionalization processes, we reviewed three bodies of institutional theory: institutional entrepreneurship, management fashion, and institutional work. Institutional entrepreneurship theory appears particularly relevant to more closed professions, where the regulatory structures that facilitate closure can also promote practice change. In more open professions, lacking the coercive power of regulations, the market-based model of management fashion is likely to describe institutionalization more accurately. To this extent, the two theories align neatly with the contrasting professional contexts. However, we have drawn attention to the neglect in both institutional

332    r. whittington and d. a. anderson entrepreneurship and management fashion theories of the potential need for continuous effort in maintaining new practices beyond the point of initial institutionalization. Institutional entrepreneurship trusts too much in regulation; management fashion ­theory is too blithe in assuming transience. In its emphasis on practice maintenance, the institutional work perspective draws attention to the open-ended nature of institutionalization processes over time. Particularly in open professions, new practices need constant development and defending. Even closed professions require investments in training and policing. On this basis, we have proposed some systematic differences in the likely processes of  the institutionalization of ideas as operationalized practices in closed and open professions. In closed professions, practice change comes through harnessing the regulatory powers of the state or professional associations, while it is market success, particularly with prestigious clients, that works in more open professions. The market imposes competitive relationships upon change agents in open professions, as against more ­collaborative, political, and lobbying efforts in closed professions. For closed professions, activity is more front-loaded on disruption and creation, while for open professions practice maintenance remains a relentlessly demanding requirement. Innovation too is continuous in the latter, more episodic in the former. The extent to which new practices are finally institutionalized varies as well, with closed professions likely to see more comprehensive change, while open professions are characterized by enduring pluralism. As suggested at the outset, these different institutionalization processes and outcomes are schematic. Even closed professions are liable to undergo the kinds of informal and market-driven practice evolutions associated with the notion of Practice-Driven Institutionalism (Smets et al., 2012, 2017). Here regulators are not so much mechanisms of change as endorsers of what has already worked on the ground. This balance between different institutionalization processes even within the same profession is an apt topic for further research. But we also follow Muzio et al. (2013) in calling for more systematic comparative research of contrasting professions. As the differences between the closed profession of accounting and the more open profession of strategy suggest, it is ­important not to generalize institutionalization processes across very different contexts. We propose that institutional entrepreneurship applies better to closed professions like accounting, while management fashion theory applies better to open professions like strategy. Especially as contemporary social and technological change is generating domains of professional work very different to the traditional professions, there is a pressing need for research that tests the relevance of old models of institutionalization in new contexts. Researchers might also explore different national patterns of institutionalization, for example testing the implications of different degrees of local closure for the same profession. Lastly, while we provided a comparison of a relatively open (strategy) and relatively closed (accounting) profession to underpin the arguments within the chapter, the historical examination and comparison of professions which have transitioned from open to closed structures (or from closed to open professions) may reveal intermediary mechanisms, activities and relationships beyond those articulated here.

professional structures and practice change    333

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chapter 18

M a nagem en t Ideas as Sta n da r ds Andreas Rasche and David Seidl

Introduction The idea of ‘stakeholder engagement’ became popularized in the 1980s and 1990s, both through academic (Freeman,  1984) and non-academic (Drucker,  1999) publications. Although stakeholder engagement proved to be a powerful management idea, there was considerable confusion about what exactly counted as engagement and whom organizations should view as relevant stakeholders. This confusion spurred the codification of this idea into a formal standard: in 1999, the Institute for Social and Ethical Accountability launched the AA1000 standard framework for achieving corporate accountability to stakeholders. In 2005, this standard was refined as the AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard (AA1000SES). The AA1000SES translated some of the principles underlying the idea of stakeholder engagement, such as the need for inclusivity, into a codified standard with precise definitions and guidelines. The example of stakeholder engagement highlights the importance of studying how the process of standardization works in order to understand the evolution and impact of management ideas, where management ideas can be defined as ‘fairly stable bodies of knowledge about what management ought to do . . . a system of assumptions, accepted principles and rules of procedure’ (Kramer, 1975: 47). Studying the link between management ideas and standards is a useful undertaking for a number of reasons, among which we highlight the following two: first, standards can act as durable carriers of the knowledge attached to management ideas and thus influence their diffusion. Second, standards act as a source of authority and thus enhance the legitimacy of ideas. One criticism of management ideas in general is that they tend to reflect ‘rhetoric’ rather than substantive practices (Kieser, 1997) and are overly vague and ambiguous. By contrast, standards are usually considered to reflect more precise rules that are typically developed by experts (Jacobsson,  2000). This makes it possible to create mechanisms of assurance and monitoring that are based on specific management ideas.

338    a. rasche and d. seidl This chapter is structured around four central questions on the relation between management ideas and standards. We start by elaborating on how the concepts of management ideas and standards relate to each other—distinguishing between codified and non-codified standards. Next, we explore why some management ideas are translated into codified standards and discuss the process and how it affects the management ideas in turn. Finally, we discuss the consequences of the process of ‘translation’. We conclude by highlighting the insights that can be gained from adopting a standards perspective on management ideas.

Management Ideas and Standardization Defining Standards in the Context of Management Ideas Standards are ‘rules for common and voluntary use’ that are ‘decided’ and defined by ‘one or several’ actors or organizations (Brunsson et al., 2012: 616). This definition is helpful for several reasons. First, it highlights that standards are voluntary. Unlike laws, whose regulatory power derives from legal authority, the decision whether or not to comply with a standard is ultimately in the hand of adopters. Standardizers rely on their perceived legitimacy, the relevance of the underlying rules, and, in some cases, pressure by third parties to convince potential adopters. Second, standards are deliberately developed or decided rules. Unlike norms, which define acceptable group conduct that is internalized by people and accepted as ‘given’ (Lapinski and Rimal, 2005), standards are deliberately developed rules. For instance, industry consortia often decide on technical standards, alliances between NGOs and businesses formulate standards to define ­sustainable business behaviour, and expert committees define standards through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Finally, standards reflect rules for common use; i.e. standard-setters aim to form rules that are relevant to a large body of potential adopters. Standards do not just exist to regulate the behaviour of single ­individuals or organizations; they are intended for broader use and thus reach many adopters, often across geographical borders and different industry sectors. The definition we provided at the beginning of this section partly determines the structure of this chapter. Because standards are defined as voluntary, we do not consider here management ideas that have been translated into legally binding regulations. For instance, if we understand corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a management idea, we can distinguish between those aspects of CSR that have been become embodied in voluntary standards, such as ISO 26000, and those aspects that have been codified more formally into laws—for example, many countries legally require larger firms to report on their CSR activities (Rasche et al., 2017).

management ideas as standards    339

Degrees of Codification of Management Ideas as Standards If standards can be conceptualized as rules that have been explicitly developed for ­common and voluntary use, all management ideas, as defined earlier, can be understood as standards. However, standards are codified to different degrees. While there is an abundance of management ideas by, for example, management gurus, consultants, or academics in articles and books, only a few of these have been codified into standards. According to the International Organization for Standardization (2001: 9) a codified standard is a formal ‘document, established by consensus, and approved by a recognised body’, which provides voluntary rules for common use. Often the degree of codification changes over time. In the following we will compare codified and non-codified management standards. Non-codified management standards.  Some management ideas remain rather broad recommendations that are embedded in written communication, such as popular books or articles in practitioner journals. Compared to codified standards, such recommendations are commonly highly ambiguous and can be interpreted in fairly flexible ways (Benders and Van Veen, 2001). ‘Generic strategies’, a widely cited term introduced by Porter (1985), are a good example of a non-codified standard. Generic strategies reflect rules about how to achieve competitive advantage. According to Porter (1985: 12), corporations cannot be ‘all things to all people’ so they have to make choices between the right strategic target (which may be either paying attention to an entire industry or being focused on a particular segment) and the most appropriate source of strategic advantage (either uniqueness or low cost). On that basis, Porter outlines different generic strategies, pointing out that firms that fail to make a choice become ‘stuck in the middle’, a strategic position that is ‘usually a recipe for below-average performance’ (Porter, 1985: 16). While Porter’s ideas have not been formalized into any codified standard, they nevertheless reflect generalizable rules of action that prescribe what those who adopt these rules should and should not do (Rasche, 2008). Generic strategies are considered to reflect universally applicable recommendations and as such fit with our general definition of standards. Management ideas in the form of non-codified standards are typically expressed as broad (but universally applicable) recommendations. Such non-codified standards are often perceived as attractive by potential adopters because they are ambiguous and leave room for interpretation. Benders and Bijsterveld (2000), for instance, showed that the concept of ‘Lean management’ has been used in different companies to justify very different practices. While this flexibility makes non-codified standards attractive on the one hand, on the other hand, the lack of formalization makes monitoring and sanctions more difficult. Furthermore, without clear definitions of key terms and processes, there is no common point of reference for assessing the degree of compliance.

340    a. rasche and d. seidl The adoption of non-codified standards is usually a largely informal process that requires neither a formal declaration nor verification that a company has adopted such a standard. As a consequence, the boundaries of the group of adopters typically remain vague. Similarly, it is not clear who has adopted that particular management idea or the extent to which that idea has been adopted. On the one hand, this makes it more difficult for companies to use the adoption of a management idea as a means of differentiating themselves from competitors. For example, the fact that a firm claims to have adopted ‘Lean management’ or the ‘Balanced Scorecard’ hardly makes it stand out among others; any firm can make such claims. On the other hand, the informality of non-codified standards makes it much easier to reverse the decision to adopt a standard, while codified standards with an explicit membership base and certification procedures usually contain exit barriers. Codified management standards.  Some management ideas are explicitly translated into codified standards. In these cases, the written recommendations of, for example, management gurus and consultants that are part of the discourse on the idea in question are codified into more narrowly defined rules that are compiled into a document; this forms the codified standard. Codification can be understood as a form of objectification (McKinley,  2011). It involves the construction of definitions, processes, measures, or indicators that are subsequently used to judge compliance. Codification is different from other ways of framing social reality, such as oral communication or (written) textualization (Hasselbladh and Kallinikos,  2000). The differences between oral, written, and codified language point to a trade-off between semantic richness and precision. While oral communication is semantically richer than codified language, it is far less precise. Codified standards typically represent only a few select, previously non-codified management ideas. Often, they also combine elements of different, previously noncodified standards. For instance, the ISO 9000 standard series on quality management incorporates a number of ideas from ‘popular management culture’ (Furusten, 2000: 81). Some aspects of this standard are based on ideas that were developed around Total Quality Management (TQM), including Deming’s (1993) reflections on how to identify problems and the principles of quality, service, experimentation, and innovation, which Peters and Waterman (1982) famously highlighted in their book In Search of Excellence. Similarly, the Social Accountability (SA) 8000 standard for workplace conditions has defined management systems that are based on the widespread Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) model, which was first introduced by Deming (1986) in the context of TQM. The popularity of some non-codified management ideas has occasionally acted as a trigger for developing codified standards. The creation of ISO 26000 is a case in point: the wide dissemination and global success of CSR inspired the development of this standard on social responsibility. The codifier, ISO, saw the creation of a standard on CSR as a significant market opportunity, as the concept was becoming increasingly accepted (Tamm Hallström, 2008). In all of these examples, the management ideas in question were not merely put into words—for instance, in a popular book—but codified; that is, translated into rules

management ideas as standards    341 with higher degrees of precision. Codification reflects a ‘compression of knowledge and experience into a structure’ (Whitaker et al., 2011: 19); it is about constructing procedures, indicators, guidelines, and specifications, which facilitates the communication and dissemination of knowledge (Schulz, 2001). Codified management ideas leave less room for different interpretations (Terlaak,  2007), which facilitates monitoring the adopters and imposing sanctions as appropriate. Standards such as ISO 9001 and SA 8000, for instance, serve as a common point of reference for judging whether adopters comply or not. If the management ideas that these two standards embody had not been codified, there would be no such point of reference. This is what is missing from non-codified ideas. As Kieser (1997: 59) pointed out with regard to management fashions, the ‘concepts sold in potential bestsellers are . . . both simple and clear but also ambiguous, vague, contradictory and puzzling’. This is not to say that codified standards leave no room at all for diverging interpretations. Every rule, regardless of its level of codification, is characterized by a certain level of ambiguity (Rasche, 2008). The point here is that codified standards limit the scope for flexible interpretations, leaving room only for similar interpretations in different geographic contexts, at different times, and by different actors (Avadikyan et al., 2001). The membership base of formal standards is usually more concrete than that of ­non-codified ones: firms either adopt a codified standard or not. As many codified standards are used as market signals (e.g. by suppliers, to convince buyers that their products meet certain specifications), there need to be strict rules about who counts as an adopter. This is why the membership base of codified standards is often regulated through monitoring and certification mechanisms.

Reasons for Turning Management Ideas into Codified Standards There are many reasons for translating management ideas into codified standards. One of the most important reasons for doing so is that codified standards can lend legitimacy to ideas that are often perceived as exercises in rhetoric (Kieser, 1997). Management ideas are conceptualized in an arena where consultants, professors, publishers, managers, and journal editors interact. Rhetoric reflects the main input into this arena. For instance, a management idea may be said to address a ‘gravely neglected’ topic (Kieser, 1997: 57) or the principles that it expresses may be presented as indispensable for achieving success in business. Such rhetoric, however, makes management ideas appear less scientific and undercuts their perceived legitimacy. Translating rather ‘fluffy’ management principles into codified standards can enhance the legitimacy of the idea that embodies them. The development of CSR is a case in point. Corporate social responsibility started to  gain prominence as a management idea throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Moon et al., 2017; see also Sharma and Sharma, in this volume). Back then, many practitioners viewed it as soft, imprecise, and inspired mostly by moral principles. Moreover, the

342    a. rasche and d. seidl range of firms’ activities under the umbrella of CSR differed significantly and was not comparable. As a result, key actors, such as investors and accountants, saw no value in CSR. Things changed when key aspects of CSR were standardized through the guidelines issued by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The GRI offered the first global framework that enabled firms to disclose non-financial information (Gilbert et al., 2011). The launch of the GRI enhanced the legitimacy of CSR in the eyes of many actors, especially as it had been designed as a multi-stakeholder standard. Accountants and investors were finally offered a way to benchmark companies by using GRI indicators and thus to link a company’s CSR engagement to the creation of financial value. Management ideas are often translated into codified standards, because such standards facilitate the formation of markets, i.e. marketization. Marketization refers to the ‘expansion of market coordination into non-market coordinated social domains’ (Ebner, 2015: 369). Market formation in areas that relate to certain ideas is of commercial interest to numerous actors (e.g. accountants, auditors, consultants) and is thus usually viewed as desirable. Again, the standardization of aspects of CSR serves as a good example. The launch of the GRI and IR standards enabled the creation of market mechanisms that related directly or indirectly to responsible business behaviour. These standards turned vague ideas about the responsibilities of companies into measurable indicators. This, in turn, enabled the monetization of social interactions that related to CSR. For example, accountants started to sell assurance to companies, investors began to buy risk-related information, and consultants marketed their solutions for higher CSR performance. This process was reinforced by the launch of new management ideas, such as Creating Shared Value (Porter and Kramer,  2011), which informed the debate on integrated reporting and the IR standard. Previous research has shown that early on different actors cooperate to create the required market space (e.g. through the formation of standards) but later on start to compete for clients (Navis and Glynn, 2010). Translating ideas into codified standards also provides a means for organizing the use of management ideas. Once an idea has been transformed into a codified rule, other elements of organization such as monitoring, sanctions, membership, and hierarchy can be added to the standard (Rasche and Seidl, forthcoming). For example, Haack et al. (2012) described how a consortium of several financial institutions got together to turn ideas about social and environmental responsibility in project finance into a codified standard, known as the Equator Principles, in order to organize more effectively the adoption of and compliance with the standard. This consortium established an association, the Equator Principles Association, which has a clearly defined governance structure and formal membership of adopters, and introduced mechanisms of monitoring compliance with the standard. By adding these elements of organization, the developers of the standard were able to increase the regulatory impact of the management ideas on which the Equator Principles standard is based. Another reason for turning management ideas into codified standards relates to the durability of standards. Management ideas are sometimes referred to as ‘fashions’. In management, fashion-setting can be understood as ‘the process by which management fashion setters continuously redefine both their and fashion followers’ collective beliefs about which management techniques lead rational management progress’

management ideas as standards    343 (Abrahamson, 1996: 257). This definition emphasizes that many ideas are unstable and that their popularity can change rapidly. Standards are usually perceived as more durable, because they often add a ‘scientific base’ (Jacobsson, 2000: 43) to otherwise ambiguous ideas. Standardization involves experts from different societal domains (e.g. academics). The element of expert knowledge forms the basis for developing precise definitions, measures, and indicators, which specify the principles underlying management ideas. The process of specification takes away some of the semantic richness and strategic ambiguity of such ideas but at the same time increases the stability of their meaning (Timmermans and Epstein, 2010). However, stabilizing the meaning of such ideas is a two-edged sword from the perspective of those who supply and demand them. On the one hand, those who produce the necessary rhetoric are likely to prefer that such ideas do not become too stable, because it becomes hard to launch further ideas if an existing idea’s lifecycle becomes too long. On the other hand, some actors may be in favour of ideas that are stabilized into standards. For instance, the translation of aspects of TQM into ISO 9001 and of environmental management into ISO 14001 opened long-term (and thus stable) business opportunities for consultants and auditors (HerasSaizarbitoria and Boiral, 2013). The very process of turning management ideas into codified standards can help the diffusion of ideas. Inviting potential adopters to participate in drafting the codified standards can help ‘define the standard’s content in a way that is acceptable to all’ (Brunsson et al., 2012: 623). This is made possible through, for example, discussions in the course of which the participants can explore the characteristics of different groups of potential adopters that need to be taken into account in the formulation of the standard. These characteristics may reflect, for example, differences in size or in regulatory context. Such discussions also make it possible to explore the willingness of the participants to adopt particular aspects of a standard. Dropping potentially controversial aspects often helps in the subsequent diffusion of the standard. Involvement in the process through which standards are set also creates commitment amongst the participants. As Brunsson et al. (2012: 623) write: ‘participation often involves commitment to adopt the standard’. This suggests that the more parties are involved in standard-setting, the greater the number of committed adopters.

Production and Diffusion of Codified Management Standards Development of Codified Management Standards (Phase 1) We can distinguish two main types of standard-setters. Many standards are developed by so-called ‘industry consortia’. These comprise organizations in a particular industry that jointly develop standards for the members of the consortium. For example, a ­consortium of companies from the financial industry developed the Equator Principles

344    a. rasche and d. seidl mentioned earlier. Apart from consortia, there are also standard-setting organizations, which specialize in developing codified standards. The most prominent example is the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which develops a range of standards, also outside the management domain. The members of ISO are national standard-setting bodies. In addition to ISO, there are also a range of other, more specialized standard-setting organizations such as Fairtrade International (Casula Vifell and Thedvall, 2012), which sets management standards related to fair trade, the Forest Stewardship Council (Boström,  2006), which sets management standards related to sustainable forestry, and the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC), which sets standards in accounting. All standard-setting bodies have formal members; however, the set of participants involved in the development of standards is usually much wider. Often, external experts and organizations that are potentially affected by a standard are invited to provide their input (Brunsson et al., 2012). There are two main, partly competing criteria for selecting the participants in the formal standard-setting process (Seidl, 2007). The first criterion is expertise (Jacobsson, 2000). Participants—e.g. scientists, consultants, or potential adopters—should possess sufficient expertise in the field to which the planned standard relates. For example, the ISO usually sets up different technical committees to develop standards (Tamm Hallström, 2008). The participants’ expertise helps ensure the quality of the standard and reinforce its legitimacy amongst potential adopters (Seidl, 2007). However, some experts are often included only symbolically and, while they are formally consulted, they may have little influence on the actual design of the codified standard. The second criterion for participation is inclusiveness. Standard-setting bodies often aim to have all parties that are potentially affected by a particular standard represented in its development. This criterion reflects the fact that the development of codified management standards is not a neutral undertaking but driven by different interests. In view of the potential impact a standard can have on them, stakeholder groups try to shape that standard according to their interests (Gilbert and Rasche, 2007). Formally, all participants usually have equal voice in the development of a standard; however, some studies have shown that differences in material resources (e.g. travel budgets for attending meetings) or in social capital (e.g. personal relationships) can impact the influence of stakeholder groups (Tamm Hallström and Boström, 2010). Powerful and resource-rich participants often have a greater influence on how a standard is finalized than other participants. Instead of trying to influence a standard-setting process according to their interests, those potentially affected by the standard may initiate a competing standard. The barriers for entering the field of standard-setting are rather low in most fields (Rasche, 2010a). Consequently, setting up a competing standard has become a common way of fighting existing standards. For instance, many industry and landowner associations found the rules of the Forest Stewardship Council too strict. In response, they initiated a competing programme, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, with more flexible standards (Gulbrandsen, 2012). Resistance to a standard is not the only reason for the emergence of competing standards. In fact, there are often ‘fundamental similarities between standards which superficially appear somewhat different’ (Brunsson, 2000: 147). In these

management ideas as standards    345 cases, the proliferation of standards is not driven by different interests, but more by the potential advantages of being associated with the development of a particular standard. For example, some standard-setters might be interested in reputational effects, while others, such as consultants, might see a new standard as a way of creating opportunities for offering their services to potential adopters (Seidl, 2007). Competition between standards can sometimes take the form of so-called ‘standard wars’ (Shapiro and Varian, 1999). This tends to be the case in more technical areas, where the coexistence of competing standards creates problems with coordination (Timmermans and Epstein, 2010). In these cases, regulators often attempt to restrict the proliferation of standards (Brunsson, 2000). Reducing the number of competing standards was also one of the main reasons for setting up the ISO, which coordinated the standardization efforts of different national standardization bodies. In non-technical contexts, rival standards can often coexist in what Reinecke et al. (2012) describe as ‘standard markets’, because competing standards focus on different aspects of the activities they aim to standardize. Examining the development of responsibility standards in the global coffee industry, the authors showed that the relevant standards converged on certain core criteria and general principles, but diverged with respect to their focus on different aspects of sustainability.

Diffusion and Use of Codified Management Standards (Phase 2) Once a codified management standard has been launched, a number of actors embark on its diffusion. In this process, a range of new actors emerge and try to shape the diffusion process according to their interests. Typically, the standard-setters also have an interest in the standard’s wide diffusion and try to persuade others that their ‘standards are in the interest of the adopters’ (Henning, 2000: 121). As Henning shows in his study, the issuers of quality standards tried to convince potential followers that their standards would help ensure the quality of particular products and services and thus help companies become more successful. Standardizers also try to convince potential adopters of the value of a standard by referring to existing adopters or to the standard’s expert developers, providing so-called ‘secondary reasons’ (Seidl, 2007: 625) for the standard’s adoption. To that end, they point out that the standards ‘were developed, influenced, or accepted by other significant and highly regarded actors’ (Henning, 2000: 123), signalling the usefulness of those standards. Standard-setters may also point out the potential reputational effects that the adopters of a standard stand to benefit from. For example, being ISO 9001 certified may attract new customers or business partners (Boiral, 2012). However, not all standard-setters are necessarily interested in the wide diffusion of their standard to start with or at all. In some cases, standards are developed merely to convince regulators not to pass any legally binding directives (Ayres and Braithwaite, 1992). In those cases it is often enough to show that a standard has been developed in a particular domain, which appears to be widely adopted.

346    a. rasche and d. seidl Those targeted by a standard often have different interests from the standard-setters. While they sometimes welcome the standards as helpful ‘best-practice’ recommendations (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000b, 2000c; Seidl, 2007), they are often also concerned that the standards, although formally voluntary, might become de facto binding (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000a): companies might be forced by actors who believe that a standard prescribes ‘best practice’ to change their structures and processes in ways that are undesirable from those companies’ point of view and to carry the costs of  adoption (Briscoe et al.,  2005). In order to prevent pressure for change, those ­targeted by a particular standard may try to discredit the standard or its developers (Partzsch, 2011), to dissuade others from adoption, or to develop a competing standard and divert attention to that (Gulbrandsen, 2012). In addition to the standard-setters and their target group, there are ‘third parties’ (Rasche and Seidl, forthcoming) that may also take an active interest in a particular standard, such as customers, suppliers, business partners, and investors. These actors often welcome the development of standards that they may benefit from. For example, quality standards ensure that the products sold to customers meet certain quality criteria (Walgenbach, 2001), while corporate governance standards are meant to ensure that organizations are properly run and shareholder interests are protected (Seidl, 2007). Standards can also help reduce information asymmetries between business partners. Knowing that a prospective business partner has been certified for adopting a particular standard relieves actors of the burden of assessing that partner’s processes and structures (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000c; King et al., 2005: 1092). The third parties that we mentioned, some of whom may be directly involved in the processes of adoption and monitoring of standards, such as consultants, auditors, ­certification agencies, or the mass media, often have very different interests in a standard. For instance, from the viewpoint of consultants, new standards provide opportunities for advising organizations during the process of adoption. There is a whole industry of consultants who specialize in helping companies implement ISO standards. Auditors and certification agencies also make their money by verifying and certifying the implementation of particular standards (Boiral, 2012). While most of the actors who become involved in the development or diffusion of standards do so of their own accord, sometimes standard-setters purposely choose which actors to involve, in order to gain more control over the standardization process. In some cases standard-setters establish committees to oversee the development of a standard, or employ auditors and set up certification bodies to assess and certify compliance with the standard, and bodies that grant formal membership and can revoke it as a penalty for non-compliance. While these measures allow greater control over the impact of a standard, they also increase coerciveness and reduce the element of voluntariness that the adoption of standards typically entails. The standards, or at least their meanings, often change throughout the process of their diffusion. The formulation of standards requires a high level of abstraction and codification, so that they are applicable in a range of contexts. As a result, it is only when a standard is applied in a concrete situation that its contextualized meaning is worked out (Ortmann, 2010; Seidl, 2007). No general rule can regulate perfectly the conditions

management ideas as standards    347 of its own application (Rasche, 2008). Standards, as Ortmann (2010: 207) points out, are characterized by an inevitable ‘partial emptiness’ that needs to be filled through their interpretation from the perspective of the concrete situation. As a consequence, the meanings of standards ‘drift’ with the context in which they are applied (Benders and Van Veen, 2001; Ortmann, 2010). For instance, the SA 8000 standard for workplace ­conditions contains detailed rules about how factories can ensure that workers are treated fairly. However, different cultural and religious norms and traditions can alter the meaning of this standard (Rasche, 2010b). As DeRuisseau (2002: 226) puts it: ‘When is a dormitory sufficiently clean to satisfy the requirements for adequate housing? How much should a factory be allowed to charge a worker for a dormitory room and how many women are allowed to live in the same room?’ Researchers have stressed that standards are inevitably linked to other legal and ­voluntary rules, with which they may compete for attention (Brunsson et al.,  2012; Seidl, 2007). Such linkages can affect the rate at which standards are diffused and may also lead to their reinterpretation. For example, standards that are used as benchmarks for assessing liability claims are linked to legislation (Kieser et al., 2002; Seidl, 2007). Wymeersch (2005) argued that corporate governance standards could be used as benchmarks to assess whether companies are legally liable: As with other soft law instruments, the legal system has a tendency to incorporate the standards of the [corporate governance] codes as the normal benchmark against which conduct in a specific case will be measured. In terms of liability, of interpretation of contract clauses, and so on, it does not seem unlikely that the rules as adopted in the code will be considered the standard.  (Wymeersch, 2005: 418)

In the legal context it might be argued that a standard represents the ‘best practice’ that has been developed by experts and might even become a ‘common practice’ if it is widely applied (e.g. as set out in some parts of customary law). Hence, compliance with the standard is reinterpreted as a default solution. Consequently, companies that deviate from the standard have the burden of proving that their structures and behaviours meet the minimum requirements that the standard sets in order not to be considered negligent and liable for any adverse effects that their operation may have (Kieser et al., 2002; Seidl, 2007).

The Consequences of Turning Management Ideas into Codified Standards One obvious consequence of codifying ideas into standards is the increase in the uniformity of behaviour (Brunsson, 2000: 138). Imitation is a key driver of such uniformity. Ideas often form the basis for copying what other firms have been doing. Furthermore,

348    a. rasche and d. seidl there are several degrees of imitation: for example, a company may simply copy a label that signals an idea, without, however, imitating the practices of the company with which that label is primarily associated. While ideas can be interpreted and applied in various ways (Benders and Van Veen, 2001), codified standards reduce the scope of possible interpretations and can therefore be expected to lead to more uniform behaviour among adopters. However, as we pointed out earlier, even when standards are clearly formulated and dictate specific criteria for measuring the performance of adopters, they do not guarantee uniformity because all standards inevitably leave some space for different interpretations. Decoupling is another possible consequence of turning management ideas into ­codified standards. Decoupling refers to the inconsistencies between the adopters’ daily practices and the formal structures they create in relation to a standard (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000b). For instance, Boiral (2007), who researched the adoption of ISO 14001, showed that while the standard led to some technical and administrative improvements, most daily practices remained decoupled from the standard’s prescriptions. Few employees understood what environmental management really meant in the context of the companies they worked for. Previous research has also shown that decoupling is influenced by a number of factors that are relevant to the discussion of standards in the context of management ideas. For example, Edelman (1992: 1532) found that ‘broad and ambiguous principles . . . give organizations wide latitude to construct the meaning of compliance’. Decoupling may be less of a problem in the case of management ideas that are translated into codified standards, as they leave relatively little room for interpretation and offer fairly precise guidance. Behnam and Maclean (2011) have shown that mechanisms for assurance and monitoring reduce the likelihood of decoupling. This is not to say that management ideas that are translated into codified standards are always implemented as they ought to be. The proliferation of codified management standards has also been claimed to result in an audit explosion (Power, 2005). One of the advantages of codified standards is that they can potentially help reduce information asymmetries: knowing that a company has adopted a particular standard provides information about that company. However as Brunsson and Jacobsson (2000c: 169) have stressed, this typically requires establishing relatively cumbersome processes of auditing and certification: ‘If the informationconveying role of a standard is to be fulfilled, it is often necessary that a third party should certify that the standard is being followed.’ While these mechanisms provide the respective auditing and certification bodies with sources of income, they pose a considerable burden on adopters, who are required to set up an administrative apparatus to document their structures and processes. Furthermore, preparing for the certification process often incurs considerable costs that may outstrip its potential benefits. The codification of management standards is often associated with the diffusion of responsibility for the consequences of following a particular standard (Rasche and Seidl, forthcoming; Seidl, 2007). As Jacobsson (2000: 47) explained, codified standardization is a ‘system in which responsibility is both fragmented and diluted’. Since subscribing to standards is voluntary, standard-setters are seldom held accountable for the consequences

management ideas as standards    349 of their standards and typically claim that it is adopters’ responsibility to decide whether or not to follow them. However, adopters frequently claim that they do not have a real choice, as they are often put under pressure by third parties to comply with those standards. Often, business partners put pressure on organizations to follow particular standards, indicating that they would otherwise not buy their products. For example, in 2015 IKEA decided that all of their cotton suppliers would need to be certified by the Better Cotton Initiative (Sustainable Brands, 2015). Like standard-setters, those third parties that press companies to adopt a certain standard do not take responsibility for the consequences of applying those standards either. Typically, they point out that they are not in a position to influence a standard and that they simply rely on the expert judgement of the standard-setters; they may also claim that they are themselves under pressure from other parties to ensure that their suppliers or business partners comply with particular standards.

Conclusion In this chapter we presented a standards perspective on management ideas. We have argued that management ideas, to the extent that they are formulated as generally applicable rules, can be understood as standards. Conceptualizing management ideas in this way allows us to relate the literature on management ideas to the vast literature on standardization and thus benefit from insights that standardization research has yielded to date. Some management ideas are codified into management standards. Standardization, as we explained, helps increase the legitimacy, diffusion, and durability of such ideas and facilitates their marketization. We also showed that the process of production, diffusion, and application of codified management standards is shaped by distributed actors with a variety of conflicting interests. This process creates unpredictable dynamics and the meanings of the underlying management ideas tend to drift. We furthermore highlighted the potential consequences that the codification of management ideas has, such as an increase in uniformity amongst adopters, decoupling between the adopters’ daily practices and their formal structures, the explosion of audits and certification, and the diffusion of responsibility for the consequences of adopting management ideas. Future research at the intersection of standardization and management ideas should particularly focus on two areas. First, on how the adoption of standards unfolds on the organizational and individual level, which can best be researched through multilevel studies. While there is considerable research into how ideas that are codified into standards diffuse on the macro level, there is little research on this process on other levels. It would be particularly useful to investigate how phenomena such as CEO ideology or leadership style on the individual level may be connected with how, when, where, and why codified management ideas are adopted by organizations. Second, more research is needed to unpack the politics of turning management ideas into standards.

350    a. rasche and d. seidl Currently, little is known about how consultants, publishers, and management gurus influence the process of standard-setting, if ‘their’ ideas become incorporated into a newly emerging standard.

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chapter 19

U n dersta n di ng a n d A na lysi ng R esista nce to M a nagem en t Ide as Darren M c Cabe, Sylwia Ciuk, and Stephanie Russell

Introduction Any discussion of the adoption and consumption of management ideas would be incomplete without some consideration of resistance. This is because managers are not omniscient or omnipotent and are often divided among themselves (Knights and Murray,  1994; Watson,  1994). Indeed, those who initiate or implement management ideas, such as consultants and managers may not be entirely supportive of them (e.g. Larson and Tompkins,  2005). Moreover, those subject to management ideas, be they managers or employees, are not passive (Clark and Salaman, 1998; Sturdy, 1997; see also Bort and Kieser, in this volume) and so resistance is apt to arise from numerous quarters and in multiple ways. Resistance has therefore ‘been and continues to be a key—perhaps defining—thematic of organizational life’ (Mumby et al.,  2017: 1160). Thus, both the development and ultimate impact of management ideas cannot be understood without considering the ways people may resist. Indeed, resistance has been a subject of study for many years and there have been edited book collections (Courpasson and Vallas, 2016; Jermier et al.,  1994) and journal special issues (e.g. Management Communication Quarterly, 2005, 2008; Organization Studies, 2017) dedicated to the topic. However, an overview of resistance to management ideas specifically, is still missing. The meaning of resistance has widened in recent years to include more subtle and less overt acts of dissent (e.g. Knights and McCabe,  2000; Thomas and Davies,  2005). However, Fleming and Spicer (2008: 303), for example, ask whether ‘there is a risk of reducing resistance to the most banal and innocuous everyday actions’. Deetz (2008: 387) likewise, refers to resistance as ‘a catchall term’. Similarly, others (e.g. Hodgson, 2005)

understanding resistance to management ideas    355 observe that ‘resistance’ does not always fully capture the ambiguous and often contradictory actions of organizational members who can engage in shifting oppositional practices that entail both consent and dissent (see Burawoy, 1979; Collinson, 1994; McCabe,  2014; Ybema and Horvers,  2017). While we do not subscribe to a strict acceptance/resistance dichotomy (McDermott et al., 2013), which often places resistance within a negative paradigm (Thomas and Davies, 2005), for the purpose of this chapter, we use the term resistance to describe non-conformant acts and subjectivities in relation to management ideas. In line with Prasad and Prasad (2000) and Mumby et al. (2017), we see resistance as a situated and social practice, the meaning of which needs to be understood in relation to the context in which it is enacted. Scholars have explored many different forms of resistance including formal (Hyman,  1972) and spontaneous wildcat strikes (Gouldner,  1954; McCabe,  2007a). Attention has been given to ‘fiddles’ (Mars, 1982), ‘sabotage’ (Bensman and Gerver, 1963; LaNuez and Jermier, 1994) and ‘making out’ (Delbridge, 1995; McCabe, 2007b, 2014). In recent years, greater attention has been given to less obvious forms of resistance such as humour (Collinson, 1988, 1992); mockery, gossip, and silence (Ybema and Horvers, 2017), whistleblowing (Rothschild and Miethe,  1994; Weiskopf and Tobias-Miersch,  2016); memory (McCabe, 2004, 2010); distancing (Collinson, 1994; McCabe, 2007b); misbehaviour (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999; Knights and McCabe, 2000); cynicism (Fleming and Spicer,  2003); exiting or resigning (Parker,  2014); and the creation of alternative meanings (Hawkins, 2008) and subject positions (e.g. Meriläinen et al., 2004; Thomas and Davies,  2005). This expanded understanding of resistance partially reflects the decline in official strikes in many Western countries, and the loss of unionized heavy manufacturing jobs, but also increased managerial efforts towards controlling meaning, culture, and identity, with an associated rise in post-structural theorizing around identity and subjectivity. As studies have shown (e.g. Knights and McCabe, 2000; LaNuez and Jermier, 1994), resistance is complex, multifaceted, and often contradictory. It is not only accomplished by employees, but a range of actors such as managers (Courpasson et al., 2012; Thomas et al.,  2011), with the latter often subtly colluding with staff (Bensman and Gerver,  1963; Thursfield,  2015). In some instances, managers have sabotaged change (Larson and Tompkins, 2005) and consultants have resisted resistance (Kärreman and Alvesson, 2009) or established ways of working (O’Mahoney et al., 2013). Moreover, clear-cut distinctions between individual and collective resistance can also be misleading (see McCabe,  2007a). For example, seemingly individual acts of resistance may require collaboration with others (Mulholland, 2004; Thursfield, 2015) or can give rise to collective resistance (Courpasson, 2017). Along with some other chapters in this volume, we provide a review and identify three main approaches to resistance to management ideas, those derived from industrial relations, labour process, and post-structural scholarship. In practice, these distinctions are not always clear-cut (e.g. Jermier et al., 1994) and alternative approaches as well as other ways of systematizing this vast body of work could be considered (see e.g. Mumby et al., 2017). Courpasson et al. (2012) have suggested that earlier approaches share

356   d. mccabe, s. ciuk, and s. russell an oppositional understanding of resistance and, by contrast, they focus on a productive approach. As we review the three different approaches, however, we shall see that this dualism between oppositional and productive resistance is problematic. Indeed, in a later section, we will consider literature that has reprised the argument that resistance is positive, facilitative, or productive.

Resistance in Context Historical research indicates that we cannot understand management ideas without considering resistance, nor can we unpack resistance without paying attention to the context through which it emerges, as management ideas are not born and popularized in a vacuum (see Barley and Kunda, 1992; Ramsey, 1977; see also Seeck and Lamberg, in this volume). As we will discuss later in the chapter, resistance might arise in relation to given management ideas or the way in which they are interpreted or introduced. However, resistance is also connected to the historical, contemporary, and political work context. Below, we briefly point to the early writings on the introduction of management ideas and consider how the wider socio-economic context is crucial for understanding resistance. The introduction of management ideas has never been an uncontested process. Indeed, it is interwoven with resistance. Hence, Thompson (1967) explored how the industrial revolution and the early factories were characterized by struggles over time, as management sought to formalize methods of work organization. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these struggles continued in relation to Taylor’s scientific method of rate setting, initially in the USA. Scientific management sought to address ‘systematic soldiering’ or worker endeavours to reduce effort and avoid work. Interestingly, scientific management often encountered more opposition from managers, foremen, owners, and engineers than from workers (e.g. Nelson, 1975; Shenhav, 1999). Ramsey (1977), whose ‘cycles of control’ thesis focused on more humanistic management ideas in the guise of employee participation (e.g. profit sharing, semi-autonomous work teams, consultation), illustrated how participation schemes flourished at times of low unemployment when trade unionism was strong and employees were willing to resist. It was also common during the First and Second World Wars and in the 1960s/70s, culminating in conciliatory ideas related to the Quality of Working Life movement. Since the 1980s, there has been a change in the workplace and new management ideas (e.g. Excellence, HRM, TQM, BPR, Teamwork, Lean) have been both a condition and outcome of this period of transition. A turning point was the 1980s shift towards neoliberalism under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA. De-industrialization also gathered pace in both countries, initiating a period of sustained high unemployment, with both economies moving towards the service sector and the elevation of enterprise (du Gay and Salaman, 1992). Here, employees were

understanding resistance to management ideas    357 urged to be flexible, responsible, and innovative while being promised greater freedom and autonomy (Willmott,  1993). This trend has been followed to varying degrees in countries such as New Zealand (Doolin, 2002), Sweden (Garsten, 1999), and Australia (Sturdy and Wright, 2008). Indeed, Hassard et al. (2011) found evidence of different organizational forms and changes in management across the UK, USA, and Japan, in private and public sector organizations. Whilst there were some continuities (e.g. a drive for cost control), new forms of organizing were widespread. The privatization of public services and deregulation followed by the 2008 global financial crisis have ushered in an age of insecurity and growing inequality. Downsizing or rightsizing, flexibility and restructuring have become popular management ideas. Culture change programmes promoting the ‘culture of the customer’ (du Gay and Salaman, 1992) have spread to the public sector through the New Public Management (Hood, 1991). Indeed, an accelerated use of new management ideas seems integral to this era. Carson et al. (2000) explored sixteen management fashions over five decades and their findings indicate that those introduced in more recent years have shorter life spans than their earlier counterparts. In this context, there has been a burgeoning interest in workplace resistance that reflects the theoretical approaches of different scholars, but also the aforementioned changing nature of work and employment for many frontline employees and managers (e.g. work intensification, declining living standards, insecurity, non-unionism, subjugation through culture change programmes). As we have argued in this section, these conditions can help to explain why people might resist management ideas, but they also account for the shift in the forms of resistance and especially why organized, collective resistance has diminished. In the following sections, we discuss how industrial relations, labour process, and post-structural scholars have explored resistance to management ideas (see Table 19.1). We concentrate on selected empirical articles that exemplify the approach and illustrate what each adds to our understanding of resistance to management ideas.

Industrial Relations Industrial relations as a discipline dominated the study of workplace relations during the post-war period. In the West, this was a period of growing trade union membership and strike activity. Although over recent decades the number of strikes has fallen in many Western countries, this partly reflects structural changes in the composition of the workforce in that employment in heavily unionized industries (manufacturing, mining, steel, shipbuilding) has also declined. Nevertheless, industrial relations scholars have produced a vast body of work that typically focuses on strikes, collective bargaining, and trade union resistance to management (Tapia et al., 2015) in a variety of sectors and among different groups of workers, such as miners (Allen, 2009), post office workers (Beale, 2003; Beirne, 2013) and dockers (Turnbull and Sapsford, 2001). Here, resistance

Table 19.1  Overview of different perspectives on resistance Perspective

Industrial relations

LPT

Post-structuralism

Dominant focus

Trade union–management struggles

Typical motivation for resistance

Threat to the balance of power between unions and management; threat to worker interests

Examples of resistance practices

Union resistance in the form of industrial action (e.g. strikes, wildcats, work to rule, ballots)

Common limitations

Limited focus on subjectivity Limited focus on covert and individual forms of resistance Narrow focus on union–management relations

Worker resistance; control–resistance Struggles in relation to subjectivity dynamics in a context of workplace inequality Need for autonomy, to evade control; reduce Need for authenticity, protection exploitation, combat work intensification against colonizing forces and threats to extant subject positions Collective and individual resistant actions Typically diffuse acts of subversion such as  ‘making out’, fiddles such as distancing, cynicism, surface acting, humour, disruption of official discourses, counter-discourses Focus on action rather than subjectivity Emphasis on identity or subjectivity Preoccupation with management-worker can lead to a preoccupation with relations at the expense of other workplace small-scale disturbance relationships

understanding resistance to management ideas    359 is motivated by a concern to protect the living standards, working conditions, and ‘bargaining power’ of disparate groups. The industrial relations approach focuses upon trade union institutions such as convenors, shop stewards and their organizations such as Joint Shop Stewards Committees (JSSCs), and how unions are able to mobilize resistance. This may arise, for example, when the balance of power between management and workers is threatened by management ideas and the practices they imply. We will now consider two illustrative examples within this strand of theorizing. Beale’s (2003) study of the Royal Mail explores collective resistance to management ideas such as teamwork and flexibility which were perceived as a threat to established relations. Attempts to introduce team briefings resulted in a national dispute in 1988 because the union saw them as ‘a serious challenge to its own channels of workplace communication and to the authority of workplace representatives’ (Beale,  2003: 86). Subsequent efforts to impose flexible working also led to widespread industrial action in 1993 (Beale, 2003). The underlying concern of the resistance was not to avoid labour flexibility, but that workers should have control over how work is allocated. Teamwork was considered ‘a threat to duty systems and seniority principles’ (Beale,  2003: 88). Beale’s (2003) study therefore indicates that the types of resistance that emerged during the industrial revolution (Thompson, 1967) and in response to Taylorism (Nelson, 1975) continue to play out. In the case of an aerospace plant that introduced a High Performance Work System (HPWS), Danford et al. (2004) focused on management attempts to radically restructure the organization using flexibilization, downsizing, and continuous improvement. Management was described by Danford et al. (2004: 20) as trying to ‘soften up’ their interactions with the union by seeking greater employee involvement and establishing new participatory partnership arrangements with shop stewards. Resistance was collective and organized, reflecting a history of adversarial trade union–management relations, where management only engaged with unions when compelled to do so. The trade union organized strikes and official/unofficial overtime bans to limit management prerogative. In the production area of the company, the JSSC resisted a partnership approach because it was contradicted by redundancies and rationalization. By contrast, white-collar workers agreed to cooperate with management, but soon resisted because management could not ‘necessarily deliver on what they had promised’ (Danford et al., 2004: 20). According to Danford et al. (2004: 28), resistance to HPWS is ‘inevitable’ due to ‘the inherent conflict in the capitalist employment relationship’ and these insights tend to place Danford et al. (2004) on the ‘radical’ wing of industrial relations scholarship (Fox, 1966) which shares much in common with Labour Process Theory. Despite its great strength of focusing on the practicalities of how organized workers resist, one limitation of this approach is that it sheds little light on resistance in the growing number of non-unionized workplaces. Another is that it tends to neglect covert forms of resistance and resistance by groups other than shop or office workers. Moreover, industrial relations scholars rarely attend to subjectivity. As Fitzgerald and Stirling (1999), for example, have argued, resistance and militancy have to be considered

360   d. mccabe, s. ciuk, and s. russell not only in relation to the views, attitudes and behaviour of workers, but also in the context of the subjective elements of union leaders.

Labour Process Theory Labour Process Theory (LPT) derives from Marx and was revitalized following the publication of Braverman’s (1974) Labour and Monopoly Capital. As critics have pointed out (see Knights and Willmott, 1990), the initial focus of LPT was on control (Edwards, 1979; Friedman, 1977) but subsequently attention has turned to resistance. The motivation for resistance, from this perspective, is inseparable from the context through which it arises. This is marked by persistent inequalities or, in its own terms, exploitation of workers by capitalists and their agents—management. Rather than a pluralist setting, which is indicative of some industrial relations writing, the employment relationship is understood to reflect a ‘structural antagonism’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999: 29). Nevertheless, it is also understood that management–worker relations are simultaneously characterized by adaptation and accommodation (Edwards, 1986: 5). An important feature of LPT is ‘labour power’ whereby employers only buy the capacity or potential of individuals to work. The ‘indeterminate status of labour power’ (Thompson and Smith, 2010: 4) means that there is always a potential for employees to resist the controls embedded in management ideas. Labour process theorists, like earlier industrial sociologists (e.g. Mars,  1982; Roy, 1952), are interested in acts of resistance, be they collective or individual, organized or unorganized, and so resistance is not limited to trade union struggles. It comprises what Ackroyd and Thompson (1999: 1–2) define as misbehaviour ‘which includes the widest range of behaviour—from failure to work very hard or conscientiously, through not working at all, deliberate output restriction, practical joking, pilferage, sabotage and sexual misconduct’. We will now turn to two studies that illustrate resistance from this approach. Delbridge’s (1995) ethnographic study of a Japanese-owned electronics plant in England explored how employees resisted management ideas (JIT and TQM) in ‘increasingly fragmentary and marginal’ (Delbridge, 1995: 803) ways. This study is useful because the union influence in the organization was low and so to have focused only on union–management relations would have revealed little about how management ideas are resisted. The resistance Delbridge (1995) identified related to work practices and partly emerged when workers could not keep up with production line speed. Certain forms of resistance were restricted (or resisted) by some employees, which reflected that such resistance had a detrimental impact on work colleagues further down the line. It was found that workers resisted the resistance of their peers through verbal abuse or ostracism (Delbridge, 1995). Delbridge (1995) did not refer to these inter-worker dynamics as resistance perhaps because his LPT perspective led him to consider resistance only in terms of workers resisting management not each other. These dynamics

understanding resistance to management ideas    361 also meant that certain forms of off-the-line resistance such as ‘absenteeism’ (which again was not referred to as resistance) were also limited due to their negative impact on workers who would have to make up for their missing colleagues by working harder. In effect, these management ideas redirected resistance into a worker–worker dynamic rather than a worker–manager dynamic (see also Parker and Slaughter, 1988). Delbridge (1995) observed individual acts of resistance whereby employees distanced themselves from the values of the organization such as not wearing a company uniform, not paying attention during team briefings, refusing to engage in problem solving, and avoiding overtime. This labour process approach towards ‘distance’ with its emphasis on actions can be contrasted with what Collinson (1994) called ‘resistance through distance’. Hence Collinson (1994) attended to how employees may subjectively distance themselves from corporate culture demands. Delbridge’s (1995) ethnography allowed for ‘an appreciation of the perceptions and meanings of the actors’ (Delbridge, 1995: 814), but he did not refer to or analyse their subjectivity, which reflects a limitation of some labour process analysis. Nevertheless, this is a powerful account due to its focus on how resistant actions emerge or fail to emerge in relation to management ideas. Delbridge’s conclusion that ‘workers are increasingly restricted in finding ways of resisting management control that are collectively beneficial’ (Delbridge, 1995: 815) can also be contrasted with the findings and arguments of Bain and Taylor’s (2000) study of a call centre. The authors explored a number of management ideas related to what they considered as ‘Team Taylorism’ (Bain and Taylor, 2000: 10), including outsourcing, new technology, teamworking, benchmarking, mystery shoppers, customer care, coaching, and Lean production. This study depicts an intense and tightly controlled work regime where resistance reflected the activities of a small group of employees who sought to organize a trade union. The ‘catalyst’ for ‘union recruitment’ (Bain and Taylor, 2000: 14) was the identification of ‘managerial malpractice’ in relation to health and safety issues. Resistance included union activists monitoring ‘the systems malfunctioning’ (Bain and Taylor, 2000: 14), collecting evidence and publicizing it so as to compel management ‘to remedy the situation’ (Bain and Taylor, 2000: 15). This can be seen as an example of employees engaging in what has more recently been termed ‘productive’ (Courpasson et al., 2012) resistance, which was proactive rather than reactive and reflected issues that concerned the wider workforce. These authors argued that resistant acts and the subsequent growth of trade unionism ‘were actualised through “subjectivity” ’ (Bain and Taylor, 2000: 14) but they are critical of post-structural theorizing, where ‘subjectivity is synonymous with identity, and identity with individualism’ (Bain and Taylor, 2000: 16). Bain and Taylor’s arguments provide an interesting insight into the different ways in which labour process and poststructural approaches understand subjectivity. Hence Bain and Taylor (2000) equate subjectivity with action. LPT enhances our understanding of resistance because it evades a narrow focus on trade union–management relations. Indeed, given the growth of non-union workplaces, we need to be sensitive both to struggles for union recognition and to struggles that do not involve trade unions. A strength of LPT is its focus on varied acts of resistance but

362   d. mccabe, s. ciuk, and s. russell a limitation is that this tends to be at the expense of resistant subjectivities. In this vein, Kärreman and Alvesson (2009) argue that ‘ “fully-fledged” studies of resistance’ need to consider ‘both subjectivity [identity] and action’ (Kärreman and Alvesson, 2009: 1122). Another limitation is the assumption that attending to subjectivity in terms of identity means narrowly focusing on individualism because individualism is only one form of subjectivity (Knights and McCabe, 2003). Indeed, it has been argued that subjectivity is simultaneously collective and individual and so these are not mutually exclusive positions (see McCabe, 2007a). A final limitation is that LPT focuses on how labour resists management and so this tends to marginalize the resistance of other actors (e.g. management, consultants) and forms of resistance that go beyond labour–management relations (e.g. Russell and McCabe, 2015). We will now turn to literature that is more post-structural in orientation.

Post-Structural Theorizing There has been a surge of interest in post-structural ways of theorizing resistance, which partly reflects a concern to address the ‘missing subject’ (Thompson, 1990: 114) of LPT and the question of ‘consent’ (Burawoy, 1979) or how employees (re)produce a capitalist system characterized by immense inequality (Willis, 1977). Also, the notion of alienated subjects who are repressed through power has been questioned through Foucault’s (1977) productive concept of power (Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994; Knights and Willmott, 1989). This theoretical shift has coincided with a decline in trade unionism and a torrent of management ideas targeting employee subjectivity since the 1980s (see du Gay and Salaman, 1992; Willmott, 1993). Together these developments have led to a focus on ‘resistance at the level of subjectivity’ (Meriläinen et al., 2004: 558) and identity (Ezzamel et al., 2001; Jermier et al., 1994; Knights and McCabe, 2000) which ‘opens up for inspection the “complex-media” of capital–labour relations’ (O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001: 459). It is, however, important to note that many theorists who have sought to incorporate subjectivity into an analysis of resistance are sympathetic to and aligned with the concerns of LPT (e.g. Collinson,  1992; Knights and McCabe,  1998; Sturdy, 1992). Theorizing around subjectivity does not therefore preclude an interest in broader issues around power/inequality and indeed key theorists in this area argue that they are entwined (Knights and Willmott, 1989). The focus of post-structural scholars is on the role that people’s attachment to ‘diverse and heterogeneous bases of identification’ (Bardon et al., 2012: 358) can play in resisting the identities promoted by management ideas, such as the team identity (e.g. Knights and McCabe, 2003). Resistance and control are here seen as co-constitutive, fluid, and multidimensional (e.g. Fleming and Spicer, 2008; Harding et al., 2017). The forms of  resistance include dis-identification, cynicism, or humour (e.g. Collinson,  1994; Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Knights and McCabe, 2000; Westwood and Johnston, 2011) and discursive expressions of resistance, for example, to the New Public Management

understanding resistance to management ideas    363 (NPM) including processes of ‘adaptation, subversion and reinscription of dominant discourses’ (Thomas and Davies, 2005: 687), which enable the creation of resistant subject positions and alternative meanings (Clegg, 1994). This resistance is understood to be motivated by a concern to defend or maintain ‘valued conceptions of self ’ (Ashforth and Mael, 1998: 97) in the face of the subjugating pressures of new management ideas (Knights and Willmott, 1989) when ‘the constitution of self or identity is jeopardized’ (Harding et al., 2017: 1210). This approach highlights the complexity and ambiguity of resistance to new management ideas. It demonstrates that resistance is not limited to employees or trade unions, and that it can be gendered. Hence Knights and McCabe’s (2003) research in a building society highlighted the way in which a parental identity (mother, father) and related commitments can resist the demands of teamwork (see also Fleming, 2007; Thomas and Davies, 2005). A recent illustration of this approach relates to what has been termed neo-normative control, whereby some new management ideas extol the virtues of diversity, authenticity, and self-expression, rather than uniformity and conformity. Here, ‘Personal authenticity . . . becomes the very medium through which . . . [subjective domination] is secured’ (Fleming, 2013: 487). Fleming and Sturdy (2009: 578) ask: ‘How might one resist being oneself?’ In answer, Fleming (2013: 482) alludes to the existence of pockets of ‘subversive readiness’ that are manifested in the forging of a different ‘sense of authenticity’ than the official one as well as efforts to oppose individualism through evoking ‘sentiments of solidarity and uniformity’ (Fleming, 2013: 579). Another illustration of this approach is Hodgson’s (2005) study of project management. The author demonstrates how the officially promoted ‘professional’ identity associated with project management was met with ‘a complex mixture of attraction, fear and a profound ambivalence’ (Hodgson,  2005: 61) among staff and managers. On the one hand, organization members appeared to be attracted to a professional identity as it enabled them to position themselves as superior to external consultants. On the other, they mocked the norms of professionalism and project management. This helped staff deal with the challenges they faced in terms of reconciling the expected professional identity with the demands of their daily work which was experienced as much more unpredictable and complex than the one described in project management methodologies. As Hodgson concludes, socially and collectively enacted humour and parody were ‘a means of rejecting and accepting, of adopting and challenging, the role of professional’ (Hodgson, 2005: 62). Although post-structural theorizing adds complexity to our understanding of resistance, its limitation is its focus on relatively ‘low levels of disturbance [such as the] . . . destabilizing, weakening . . . of dominant discourses’ (Thomas and Davies, 2005: 701) or cynicism (Fleming and Spicer, 2003). These forms of resistance typically do not pose a direct challenge to the adoption of management ideas. Nor do they necessarily disrupt work processes, which has led some commentators to describe them as ‘decaffeinated’ (Contu, 2008) because they do not carry the same threat to those in positions of authority as more organized forms of resistance, such as strikes for example. Nevertheless, this does not mean that such resistance is without importance, especially

364   d. mccabe, s. ciuk, and s. russell when management ideas strive to colonize the subjective domain (Willmott,  1993). Although this resistance may not formally challenge management ideas, it can destabilize them and also help to maintain the independence and dignity of those subjected to them. As Edwards et al. (1995) put it, ‘in certain cases the “mental strike” or indifference of one individual . . . could be more damaging to management than a strike by an entire workforce’ (Edwards et al., 1995: 291). Indeed, as Ybema and Horvers (2017) observe, some forms of resistance may be ‘decaffeinated’ by design, as precisely this backstage quality enables them to effectively frustrate the change efforts they seek to de-legitimize.

Productive or Facilitative Resistance: A Contemporary Debate Recently, a ‘facilitative’ (Thomas et al., 2011) or ‘productive’ (Courpasson et al., 2012) understanding of resistance has emerged. The extent to which this perspective is separate and distinct from previous approaches is difficult to establish, not least because some of the literature is overtly managerial, some analytical, and some has a more critical orientation. In terms of the latter, productive resistance is said to take the form of ‘concrete activities that aim to voice claims and interests that are not taken into account by management decisions’ (Courpasson et al., 2012: 801). Courpasson et al. (2012) illustrate this by referring to empirical research where one group of managers resisted another. The ‘concrete activities’ included mobilizing resources, compiling and submitting a ‘report’ that articulated ‘a new agenda’ (Courpasson et al., 2012: 806), the motivation for which was to include other voices than those of top management in ‘significant organizational change’ (Courpasson et al.,  2012: 801) for the ‘good of the organization’ (Courpasson et al., 2012: 816). Thomas et al. (2011) adopt a micro-focus and consider ‘facilitative’ resistance by middle managers in relation to a culture change programme. This form of resistance involved a ‘generative dialogue’ and ‘counteroffers’ (Thomas et al., 2011: 35), which was motivated by a concern to modify rather than to resist the idea of a culture change. The organizational change management literature, by contrast, tends to adopt an overtly managerial version of this approach and seeks to reframe our understanding of resistance. Instead of thinking about resistance as being motivated by opposition to corporate goals or management ideas, it seeks to encourage us to think about how resistance can contribute to them (e.g. Kotter and Schlesinger,  1979), for example, by providing a ‘source of innovation’ (Waddell and Sohal, 1998: 545). It views resistance as ‘a powerful tool’ (Ford and Ford, 2009: 100) of managers or ‘a valuable resource in the accomplishment of change’ (Ford and Ford, 2010: 24). The form of resistance includes asking questions, making complaints, or raising objections to proposed changes (e.g. Ford and Ford, 2009, 2010; McDermott et al., 2013). Authors within this approach recognize that resistance may ‘be motivated by individual’s ethical principles or by their desire to protect’ the organization’s ‘best interest’ (Piderit, 2000: 585).

understanding resistance to management ideas    365 A strength of this overall approach is that it attempts to increase employee voice within organizations but this could equally be seen as a limitation if it merely reinforces the status quo. Courpasson et al. (2012) present productive resistance as a distinctive approach since it ‘includes a mix of compliance and outright confrontation’ (Courpasson et al., 2012: 817) as opposed to previous approaches, which are said to assume ‘a fixed opposition between irreconcilable adversaries’ (Courpasson et al., 2012: 816). It has to be acknowledged, however, that productive resistance echoes earlier accounts that highlighted how consent and dissent are blurred (Burawoy, 1979; Jermier et al., 1994). Indeed, LPT commentators, for example Delbridge (1995), have asserted that ‘The interrelations of management and labour are dynamic, confused and confusing. To consider these relations as only conflictual is unrealistic’ (Delbridge, 1995: 806). He continues that ‘workers have not only sought to resist managerial authority in the workplace and nor have their counter-control actions always been to the ultimate detriment of capital’ (Delbridge, 1995: 807). Delbridge therefore alludes to resistance being productive for capital, whereas other scholars have highlighted that resistance can unwittingly aid management control through generating ‘consent’ (Burawoy,  1979; Sturdy, 1992; Willis, 1977). As discussed above, Bain and Taylor (2000) illustrated how resistance can address managerial malpractice in relation to health and safety issues. One could therefore argue that this is productive for management and employees even though Bain and Taylor (2000) did not frame their arguments in this way. We can see then that there are overlaps between traditional LPT and a productive understanding of resistance. This is also the case in relation to post-structuralism or scholarship interested in identity/subjectivity. Hence Collinson’s (1994) ‘resistance through persistence’ is consistent with productive resistance because through it ‘subordinates seek to demand greater involvement in the organization’ (Collinson, 1994: 25). He discussed successful employee resistance to gender discrimination and depicted this as an ‘oppositional strategy’ (Collinson,  1994: 28) characterized by overlapping ‘consent, compliance and resistance’ (Collinson,  1994: 51). Although not described as such, resistance to discrimination was productive for the employee and employer because management was seeking to create a new corporate culture that ‘included a strong commitment to equal opportunities’ (Collinson, 1994: 41). The resistance used the ‘culture change’ initiative to justify challenging ‘management practices’ (Collinson, 1994: 50) and it ‘had the effect of promoting equal opportunity throughout the company’ (Collinson, 1994: 52). Knights and Vurdubakis’ (1994) post-structural or Foucauldian analysis of power and resistance highlighted that both are productive. Hence resistance was argued to play ‘the role of continuously provoking extensions, revisions and refinements of those same practices which it confronts’ (Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994: 180). Although not explicitly stated, both Thomas et al. (2011) and Courpasson et al. (2012) appear to take this as their starting point and so analyse ‘the concrete struggles in which power relations are embedded’ (Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994: 183) or how practices of resistance achieve ‘extensions, revisions or refinements’ (Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994: 180). However, what they pay less attention to, is that ‘the outcomes of resistance’ are ‘as unpredictable as the conditions that make it possible’ (Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994: 189).

366   d. mccabe, s. ciuk, and s. russell So what are the differences and similarities between productive/facilitative resistance and prior theorizing? One similarity with LPT and post-structuralism is that the analysis is not limited to trade union–management relations. Despite Courpasson et al.’s (2012) distinction between earlier oppositional approaches and their own, it is apparent that authors working in different traditions have already argued that relations between management and employees are not simply oppositional. Industrial relations, LPT, and post-structural theorists have already highlighted that resistance can be productive but this is not always explicit in these accounts and one has to infer it from them. These accounts implicitly stress that resistance can be productive for employees but they tend not to consider whether it is for the wider organization.

Conclusion This analysis of resistance to management ideas arguably raises more questions than it answers, thus highlighting the need for further research. What can we take from the approaches that have been outlined? We believe that they highlight that our understanding of resistance is produced and constrained by our theoretical lens or scholarly traditions that allow us to see some things but not others. Although the approaches are often rooted in different philosophical assumptions and are therefore not easily reconcilable (see also O’Mahoney, in this volume), we see considerable potential for cross-pollination between them which could help to advance our understanding of resistance to management ideas. As we have discussed in this chapter, industrial relations scholars have largely attended to union resistance but this only provides a partial picture of resistance and, as scholars within that discipline recognize (Tapia et al., 2015), it confronts problems when the empirical terrain shifts. Still, we see potential for detailed future studies within this tradition to enrich our understanding of the organization and mobilization of collective resistance to management ideas among unionized workers. Future studies can explore how resistance to management ideas is mobilized and enacted by workers in less traditional and more dispersed employment settings underpinned by the more precarious employment relationships associated with the ‘gig’ economy. Here, unionization itself can be seen as an act of resistance. This expanded focus can include not only new settings but also other professional groups which have tended to be studied within other approaches. Labour Process Theory, by contrast, has provided insights into individual and collective acts of resistance to management ideas and is grounded in an appreciation of the inequalities that characterize the employment relationship. This focus on acts is important but it has tended to be at the expense of subjectivity, which has been the focus of post-structural scholars. Future work underpinned by LPT can, therefore, be enriched by considering resistant acts while staying attuned to issues of subjectivity.

understanding resistance to management ideas    367 Post-structural scholars who have elucidated resistance at the level of subjectivities, in turn, can enrich their analysis of resistance by providing more detailed accounts of the material forms of dis-identification and ‘the material conditions in which people are embedded’ (Bardon et al., 2012: 360). This could help to illuminate why some organization members might be more susceptible to management ideas than others. This broadening of the focus of post-structural resistance in relation to materiality has been advocated by Knights and McCabe (2016) through their use of Actor-Network Theory and it opens up new possibilities for research. Similarly, Harding et al.’s (2017: 1210) performative theory of resistance aims to shed light on ‘the formations within and through which control and resistance are materialized’. Attention can also be given to how the reconfiguration of space/place creates new struggles and forms of resistance related to the ‘gig’ economy and insecure forms of employment relating to migrant workers. It would be valuable to know what management ideas these workers are exposed to and how and with what effects these unorganized workers resist. In our chapter we have also pointed to the emerging and still very disparate approach which sees resistance as facilitative or productive (Courpasson et al., 2012; Thomas et al., 2011). While the premise that resistance can be productive is itself not new, more research is needed to unpack the productive side of resistance, the conditions under which it emerges and the effects it produces. Empirical research is particularly needed to explain the relevance of such arguments for employees as well as managers and to explore both successful and failed ‘entrepreneurial actions’ (McDermott et al., 2013) of a wider range of resisters enacting change. The usefulness of this debate is that it draws our attention to the practicalities of how resistance is mobilized and organized, which can be lost if our analysis becomes too micro-focused or preoccupied solely with shades of subjectivity. If resistance can be reconsidered in term of its productive implications for the wider organization and framed accordingly it could help to redefine negative conceptions of resistance. To some extent, trade unions already do this, for instance, when strikes are presented as being about public safety on the railways or improvements in the public health service. LPT and post-structural scholars rarely offer guidelines about how to resist, which Courpasson et al. (2012) attempt to do, but this is implicit in industrial relations approaches, at least in relation to trade unions. There are tensions in being prescriptive when it comes to resistance because we cannot assume that all resistance is ‘good’ nor can we know the outcomes of resistance. Much, of course, will depend on the context of such struggles. This type of tension reflects that established approaches insist that ‘resistance cannot be examined as if it were separate from workplace discipline and control’ (Collinson, 1994: 51) or the broader conditions of power and inequality and this context needs to be considered in relation to productive resistance. This is significant because if resistance merely reinforces extant corporate power relations and inequalities then should it be regarded as productive? As our arguments so far have indicated, we are loath to spell out resistance strategies or tactics because of the unequal context through which resistance

368   d. mccabe, s. ciuk, and s. russell arises and also because even with the best intentions outcomes cannot be predicted. What may be successful in one context may prove disastrous in another; what fails in one context may succeed in another. Certainly, empirical research is needed to explore such dynamics but problems of generalization will remain. Our primary focus has been on resistance to management ideas and so we have only briefly touched upon how resistance relates to gender and discrimination (see also Prichard and Alakavuklar, in this volume). We are aware that resistance in relation to other forms of discrimination (age, race, sexuality) requires far more attention. Although a significant body of work already exists (e.g. Collinson, 1992; Kerfoot and Knights, 1993; Thomas and Davies, 2005), it would be useful to consider how specific and contemporary management ideas perpetuate or contribute to inequalities and how resistance emerges in relation to them. We agree with Thomas and Davies (2005: 731) that there is considerable potential for studies inspired by the feminist perspective and its deep appreciation of difference in relation to ‘voices, contexts, forms and outcomes’ to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of intra- and inter-group resistant practices and processes in relation to management ideas. Similarly, more work is needed on the ‘situated performance of resistance’ which would unpack different configurations, intersections, and ‘resistance-compliance blends’ (Ybema and Horvers, 2017: 1249) in, around, and between different organizations (see e.g. Courpasson and Vallas,  2016; Mumby et al., 2017; Russell and McCabe, 2015). To conclude, according to Edwards (1986: 42), employees ‘find a means of living with the system as they find it’; they ‘do not simply enter work and then seek a means of resistance’. This indicates that precisely why and how agents resist, be they managers, unions, consultants, or workers, individually or in collaboration, needs to be investigated in the context of shifting economic conditions. The creative, collaborative, and intimately contextualized faces of resistant practices along with their intended and unintended outcomes merit further attention. In particular, we see potential in studies adopting longitudinal designs and more immersive methods of data collection such as ethnography and netnography, which would allow us to explore the patterns, shifts, and effects of resistance (work) in situ over time.

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chapter 20

Per for m a nce I mplications of M a nagem en t Ideas Christopher Wickert, Jost Sieweke, and Riku Ruotsalainen

Introduction Management gurus, business consultants, and all those who create management ideas commonly stress the positive implications that their ideas have for performance. According to conventional wisdom, adopting management ideas—such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and High Performance Work Systems (HPWSs)—influences organizational performance positively and ultimately increases profitability and share prices. Consequently, the adoption of management ideas has been a lure for managers in business contexts and beyond. Considering the high confidence that both the creators and the consumers of management ideas have in their effects on performance, one might expect that the empirical support for a positive relationship between such ideas and performance is overwhelming. However, while some studies provide evidence that management ideas can indeed improve performance (e.g. Hendricks and Singhal, 2001; Waddock and Graves, 1997), other studies suggest that their effects on performance are only transient (e.g. Powell, 1995) and highly contingent (e.g. Combs et al., 2006). This evidence seems to vary, depending on the type of management ideas and the aspects of organizational performance that are considered. Although scholars have been aware of the disparities for some time now, they still struggle to explain holistically under which conditions management ideas contribute to performance (see also Sharma and Sharma, in this volume).

performance implications of management ideas    375 In this chapter, we disentangle the relationship between management ideas and performance and discuss the methodological and conceptual difficulties that the ambiguous results of the extant literature entail. For instance, researchers typically examine how particular aspects of management ideas impact organizational performance, but often neglect the potential effects of such ideas that may accrue at different levels of analysis (e.g. the individual, industry, or societal level). A further problem is that few studies transcend the boundaries of separate scholarly communities to link different theoretical and scholarly traditions and develop more integrative theoretical models on how and when various aspects of management ideas interact and produce aggregate effects on performance. However, to realize their goals, organizations need to integrate the activities of several actors as well as a number of different structures, processes, and technologies. To gain an integrative understanding of how, when, and why management ideas influence organizational performance, we explore various literatures. To that end, we will look more closely at different scholarly communities, the research approaches that these communities typically adopt, and the theoretical models and empirical results that they have produced. Our review generally supports the claim that management ideas can often enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of organizations. However, it also shows that the potential of such ideas for performance is contingent on a range of organizational and environmental factors. Furthermore, it indicates that whether management ideas do affect performance or not depends on the ability of managers to generate a shared understanding of the idea among the members of the organization and to align the diverse interests of those who are called to implement them. As we will show, researchers have rarely looked beyond the short-term effects of ­management ideas on an organization’s operational and financial performance. As a result, the long-term and broader consequences of management ideas—especially those that traverse organizational boundaries and affect entire industries, the society, and the natural environment—are still poorly understood (see also Wright, in this volume). To stimulate further research, we will discuss two distinct sets of complicating factors. We will first present two particular dilemmas that management ideas pose with regard to performance, which relate to focusing on the short-term vs. the long-term and industry-wide effects that adopting management ideas may have when organizations become ‘addicted’ to fashionable management ideas. We labelled the second set of complicating factors the ‘sustainability paradox of management ideas’. These factors relate to the effects of management ideas on performance beyond the boundaries of the organization that adopts them. For example, these effects may have an impact on broader societal metrics, such as the sustainable usage of natural resources. These sets of complicating factors will serve as a starting point for several avenues that future research could follow to examine critically the consequences of management ideas on managerial practices, organizations, and the society at large.

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Review of the Literature on the Link between Management Ideas and Performance Although scholars have been trying for decades to identify the determinants of organizational performance (e.g. Teece, 2007) and how best to study them (e.g. March and Sutton,  1997), the results remain inconclusive. Cross-sectional studies and selfreported data on organizational characteristics, although commonly used, do not allow researchers to infer causal relationships (e.g. March and Sutton, 1997; Staw, 1975). For instance, data generated through surveys typically suffer from social desirability bias, because informants tend to exaggerate the effects of ideas they have adopted on performance in the effort to present their organizations in a favourable light (e.g. Wang et al., 2015). Apart from methodological challenges, identifying the causal determinants of organizational performance is complicated because the success of management ideas typically depends not only on internal factors that influence the integration of activities and processes in the pursuit of collective organizational goals (e.g. Swink et al., 2006), but also on external factors, such as competitive pressures (e.g. Barnett and McKendrick, 2004). This suggests that ‘there is no one optimal type of management system’ (Burns and Stalker,  1961: 125), because which design is optimal for each organization depends on the interplay of multiple factors, such as the type of industry and the work environment. Because of the complications of studying the effects of management ideas on performance, understanding whether, how, when, and why management ideas are related to organizational performance requires paying equal attention to empirical evidence, methodological choices (i.e. the chosen level of analysis and how the related constructs should be operationalized), and the theoretical basis on which these effects are interpreted. We will first explore how various scholars have examined the effects of management ideas on performance and present a review of past research that reflects the key themes discussed in the literature. Our review is not exhaustive, but highlights the most influential studies on the topic.

Key Approaches to Studying the Implications of Management Ideas for Performance Works that study the implications of management ideas for performance can be broadly grouped into four approaches. Each approach focuses on a different set of organizational resources and on how management ideas enable organizations to use these resources more efficiently and more effectively. We termed the first of these the ‘technological resources-focused approach’, because scholars in the areas of operations management

performance implications of management ideas    377 and strategic management tend to examine how management ideas that are related to technological resources (e.g. TQM) improve the efficiency of production processes. Second, scholars who follow the human resources-focused approach examine how and when ideas for managing human resources—such as HPWS (i.e. ‘high-performance work system’), ‘diversity management’, and ‘talent management’—enhance the performance of individuals and teams. Third, scholars who have adopted the relational resources-focused approach are interested in social and environmental issues in the ­context of management—for instance, on whether CSR leads to superior organizational performance. Finally, scholars who have adopted the knowledge resources-focused approach focus on how management ideas, such as Knowledge Management and Project Management, can boost performance by fostering the effective creation and sharing of  knowledge within and across organizations. Table  20.1 summarizes the four key approaches to studying the implications of management ideas for performance.

Technological Resources-Focused Approach Management ideas that focus on technological resources encompass a variety of practices and systems, including TQM and business process re-engineering (BPR). Although the specific focus of each idea in this category differs, all are commonly used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of organizations through the better management of technological resources. Researchers often refer to the resource-based view (Barney, 1991) to explain the relationship between such management ideas and organizational performance (e.g. Powell,  1995) or operations-related arguments, such as improvements in production processes, to justify the relationship (e.g. Altinkemer et al., 2011). One of the most popular technological resources-focused management ideas is TQM. This idea is based on the assumption that ‘the costs of poor quality . . . are far greater than the costs of developing processes that produce high-quality products and services’ (Hackman and Wageman, 1995: 310). While early studies often treated TQM as a single construct, recent studies treat TQM as a bundle of interrelated practices, including leadership, people management, supplier quality management, and customer focus (e.g. Nair, 2006). Several studies have found a positive relationship between TQM and company performance (e.g. Hendricks and Singhal, 2001). Surprisingly, there is evidence that so-called ‘soft’ TQM practices, such as leadership, people management, and customer focus, are stronger predictors of firm performance than so-called ‘core’ practices, such as planning, process management, and information and analysis (Nair, 2006). While this evidence suggests that soft TQM practices are more important than core practices, subsequent studies argued that these two categories of practices are interrelated. More specifically, they suggested that soft practices create the conditions within a firm that are necessary for core practices to influence its performance (see Rahman and Bullock, 2005), which indicates that the different bundles of TQM practices interact closely. Although research has provided evidence for a positive relationship between ideas related to TQM and firm performance, it also points to several complications in the relationship. For instance, Nair’s (2006) meta-analysis highlights the impact of contextual factors (such as firm size) and organizational structure (such as control and

378    c. wickert, j. sieweke, and r. ruotsalainen

Table 20.1  Common approaches to studying the effects of management ideas on performance Technological resources-focused approach

Human resources- Relational focused approach resources-focused approach

Knowledge resources-focused approach

Main scholarly communities

Operations management; strategic management

Human resource management

Key management ideas studied

Total Quality High Performance Management, Work Systems, Business Process Diversity Re-engineering, Management, Lean Management Talent Management How management How management ideas enhance ideas enable the performrecognition and ance of removal of individuals inefficiencies and teams in in production organizations processes

Strategic management; operations management; information systems; organization theory Knowledge Management, Project Management

Typical analytical focus

Theoretical foundations

Resource-based view; operationsrelated arguments

Typical level of analysis (independent variable)

Organization; Unit

Resource-based view; human capital theory; theories of employee well-being Team; Individual

Social issues in management; sustainability; organization & management theory Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Sustainability

How management ideas increase revenues and decrease costs by more effectively managing relationships with stakeholders Stakeholder theory, resource-based view; theory of the firm; institutional theory Field/industry; Organization

How management ideas support knowledge creation and sharing between actors

Knowledge-based view; resourcebased view; organizational learning literature Field/industry; Organization; Unit; Team; Individual

exploration). Lack of attention to these factors might explain why many TQM projects fail (e.g. Shin et al., 1998). Another popular technological resources-focused management idea is BPR, which involves redesigning business processes in a radical manner to achieve greater efficiency (O’Neill and Sohal, 1999). Overall, there is evidence that successfully completed BPR projects lead to better performance in the long run (e.g. Altinkemer et al., 2011). However, BPR has also been associated with a number of problems that hamper its  ­successful implementation (e.g. Grover et al.,  1995). A crucial finding is that

performance implications of management ideas    379 c­ ompany-wide BPR projects are more closely associated with negative returns in the initiation stage than functionally focused projects; probably because company-wide projects are more likely to fail and both types of BPR projects are related to similar performance improvements. In sum, research on technological resources-focused management ideas has provided evidence that these ideas are associated with higher firm performance. Interestingly, the so-called ‘soft’ practices that derive from such ideas (e.g. people management) appear to be at least as important for improving firm performance as the ‘core’ practices. However, there are several important contingency factors that complicate the relationship between technological resources-focused management ideas and firm performance.

Human Resources-Focused Approach Under the term ‘Human Resource Management’ (HRM), scholars have discussed a range of ideas that focus on the management of work and employment in organizations. An extensive body of research has emerged in the past decades that is devoted to understanding how human resources, diversity, and practices of talent management affect organizational outcomes (e.g. Combs et al., 2006; Huselid, 1995; Posthuma et al., 2013). High-performance work systems (HPWSs), which are combinations of HRM practices that aim to influence simultaneously various workforce characteristics related to firm performance, are a case in point. HPWSs typically encompass comprehensive recruitment and selection procedures, incentive compensation and performance management, training, employee participation and involvement, and flexible work arrangements (Huselid, 1995). Much research supports the view that when these practices are bundled into a HPWS they produce reinforcement effects and synergistic effects that result in higher organizational performance than they would individually (e.g. Posthuma et al., 2013). Scholars in the HRM field assert that HPWSs enhance the knowledge, skills, and abilities of employees, empower them to leverage these capabilities for their organization’s benefit, and increase their motivation, commitment, and overall job satisfaction. Through these effects on the individual level, HPWSs lead to lower turnover and higher workforce productivity. Additionally, scholars have suggested that HPWSs indirectly improve the indicators of firm performance, such as accounting returns and market value (Becker et al., 1997). While research has generally found a positive relationship between ideas that are related to HRM and various dimensions of performance, some scholars emphasize that these effects are contingent on the degree of strategic fit and on the type of work being conducted. Subramony (2009) has argued that the implications of HPWSs for performance are more pronounced in manufacturing than in services, because ideas that are connected to HRM often have a synergistic relationship with technological resources-focused management ideas such as TQM. Becker et al. (1997) emphasized the importance of establishing coherent sets of HRM practices, but at the same time warned of the harmful effects of ‘deadly combinations’. For instance, implementing team-based work arrangements but relating compensation to individual performance

380    c. wickert, j. sieweke, and r. ruotsalainen is a detrimental combination. Consequently, whether HPWSs and other HRM practices will improve a company’s performance depends largely on how they are implemented as part of the organization’s strategies and procedures and on whether managers take into account the nature of the work as well as various external factors from the organization’s environment. Several other factors complicate the relationship between human resources-focused management ideas and firm performance. Jensen et al. (2013), for instance, suggest that while mainstream literature purports that HPWSs enhance organizational performance, this improvement may result in role overload, burnout, and heightened pressure for individual employees. The ‘dark side’ of HPWSs may thus be deleterious to individual employees. We will consider these complications later on in this chapter. First, however, we will discuss management ideas focused on relational resources, zooming in on the popular concept of CSR.

Relational Resources-Focused Approach Corporate social responsibility reflects the view that the social licence to operate is granted by stakeholders, so firms need to manage systematically their relationships with stakeholders and the resources the latter provide or withdraw. The concept of CSR emerged as a powerful management idea that ‘has risen to unprecedented popularity throughout the global business community’ (Crane et al., 2013: 4). Business firms small and large now promote social and environmental responsibility as a core aspect of ­management, together with more traditional aspects, such as marketing, accounting, or finance (Wickert et al., 2016). In essence, CSR can be understood as a management concept for the systematic ­integration into business conduct of environmental, social, and ethical concerns, often along the supply chain and in close collaboration with stakeholders. Naturally, the central question that has concerned many managers and researchers alike is whether there is a link between ‘doing well’ and ‘doing good’. The relationship between corporate social and corporate financial performance has been investigated continuously since the 1970s. Over the years, researchers have drawn on a broad range of theories, such as instrumental stakeholder theory, agency theory, and the resource-based view (see Orlitzky et al., 2003; Wang et al., 2015 for meta-analytic overviews). Some have even called this relationship the ‘holy grail’ of CSR research (Devinney, 2009: 45). However, it seems that this grail has yet to be found. Many studies draw on the resource-based view to argue that the relationship between CSR and financial performance is positive. According to this view, competitive advantage is linked to having a unique CSR profile (e.g. Waddock and Graves, 1997). Other studies use economic arguments to explain this relationship—for instance, they suggest that improving efficiency leads to cost savings (e.g. McWilliams and Siegel, 2001). There are, however, studies that have found no evidence for such a relationship (see Orlitzky et al., 2003), while others have suggested that the relationship is negative (e.g. Garcia-Castro et al., 2010). The latter studies view CSR measures as costly ways of adjusting core business processes; or when making donations these are regarded simply as additional

performance implications of management ideas    381 expenses. Overall, the available evidence suggests that CSR cannot universally produce favourable financial returns. Two aspects of CSR may be crucial to understanding why scholars reach this impasse; surprisingly, however, they have not been sufficiently explored: first, many scholars struggle with the question of how to measure CSR. This difficulty arises partly because what CSR involves has moved from philanthropy and charitable donations (‘how the money is spent’) to core business operations and increasingly extends to a firm’s global supply chain. In other words, stakeholders such as NGOs and civil society now pay close attention to ‘how the money is made’ (Wickert et al., 2016: 21). This shift in attention has significant implications both for costs and potential payoffs from CSR, because stakeholders nowadays urge companies to integrate CSR thoroughly into organizational strategies and procedures. In sum, the various aspects of CSR affect performance in different ways—for instance when comparing charitable donations vs. pollution prevention measures or fair wages. Second, isomorphic processes in how CSR is executed by companies affect the performance potentials it can generate. CSR experienced an unprecedented growth in popularity among business firms, which has led to a high degree of institutionalization of the idea: no large MNC can afford not to position itself with regard to CSR; what is more, CSR practices have become increasingly standardized (Haack et al., 2012). For instance, most companies now follow generally accepted frameworks, such as the principles of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) or ISO 26000, as guidelines for managing CSR. This makes it hard to differentiate between multinational corporations on the basis of their CSR behaviour, as it is hard for companies to create a unique CSR profile. Both the difficulty of measuring how CSR is implemented and the difficulties that result from isomorphic processes in the application of CSR frameworks complicate the relationship between CSR and performance and thus require much closer investigation.

Knowledge Resources-Focused Approach Many scholars who have studied management ideas focus on how such ideas enable organizations to ‘create new knowledge, disseminate it throughout the organization, and embody it in products, services, and systems’ (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995: 3). Studies that follow this approach show that management ideas, such as ‘knowledge management’ and ‘project management’, enable organizations to generate new knowledge and build on that knowledge to develop innovations, both of which can improve organizational performance. However, generating innovation is a complex social process: individuals (e.g. Gray and Meister, 2004) or teams (e.g. Haas, 2006) develop new products, services, and processes, which are subsequently commercialized and implemented. A number of strategic management scholars have drawn on the knowledge-based view, the resource-based view (Barney, 1991; Grant, 1996), and the literature on organizational learning (e.g. Cohen and Levinthal, 1990) to examine the impact of ‘knowledge management’ on the financial and operational performance of firms (Arthur and Huntley, 2005; Dyer and Nobeoka, 2000). Their findings generally show that companies that can create collective knowledge to generate innovative products, services, and

382    c. wickert, j. sieweke, and r. ruotsalainen processes perform above average (e.g. Dyer and Nobeoka, 2000; Ofek and Sarvary, 2001). Similarly, the literature on information systems indicates that knowledge management that is based on such systems can enhance organizational performance. Some scholars suggest that information systems can have a direct effect on performance (e.g. Choi et al., 2010). Others have shown that technological support moderates the relationship between the social process of sharing and creating knowledge and organizational performance (e.g. Massey et al., 2002). However, both groups of studies focus on explaining organizational performance and have rarely addressed the implications of knowledge management on the industry level. One notable exception is the study by Ofek and Sarvary (2001), which examines how the development of new services by professional service firms may have a negative impact on their long-term performance. Other scholars have investigated how the idea of ‘project management’ impacts the performance of teams that develop new products. Sharing and integrating information to control how resources are deployed for a specific project is central to the idea of ­project management. While there is evidence that project management has a positive effect on both the efficiency and effectiveness of teams that develop new products (e.g. Tatikonda and Montoya-Weiss, 2001), some researchers point out that the effectiveness of innovation projects depends on contextual factors, such as the degree to which project teams can make decisions autonomously (Haas, 2006). Swink et al. (2006) argued that while project management can improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of such projects with slack resources, tightening control over highly efficient projects and team members may decrease the quality of the inventions that these projects generate. The literature on operations management examines how and when creating and ­sharing knowledge supports the production processes that companies need to develop in order to commercialize innovative products and services. Research in this area shows that while the successful implementation of new production processes can improve operational performance (e.g. Carrillo and Gaimon, 2000), the magnitude of this effect depends on whether all departments involved form a shared understanding of these processes (Fugate et al., 2009) and align their interests (Lapré and Van Wassenhove, 2001). However, as Arthur and Huntley (2005) pointed out, the positive impact of new processes on operational performance can decline over time.

Summary In many cases management ideas are positively related to organizational effectiveness and efficiency. However, whether such ideas can improve performance depends on the fit between a specific management idea and various organizational characteristics. Studies that focus on technological resources suggest that management ideas affect positively the financial and operational performance of firms, but also show that these effects depend on ‘soft’ support practices for managing human resources and organizational culture. Similarly, studies that focus on human, relational, and knowledge resources show that management ideas can improve organizational performance, but emphasize that the relationship between management ideas and performance is often complex and contingent on the characteristics of an organization (such as organizational

performance implications of management ideas    383 size, strategy, and structure) or an industry (e.g. the manufacturing industry is different from the services industry in many respects). This leads us to conclude that management ideas can, but do not necessarily have, positive effects on performance. A further finding of this review is that the research methods that a study applies affect  the relationship between management ideas and organizational performance. While studies based on cross-sectional data report relatively unambiguously that the link between various ideas and performance is positive, they commonly suffer from methodological and conceptual limitations. As a result, their findings are commonly challenged by research based on longitudinal designs. For instance, some studies show how social processes that relate to the implementation of a management idea determine whether this idea will affect performance or not (Haas, 2006; Swink et al., 2006). Generally, these studies report that a management idea affects performance only when the various departments, units, functions, and divisions that are involved in its implementation support the implementation process, have a shared understanding of this idea, and their interests are aligned. This suggests that interpretive barriers and diversity of interests can prevent the successful implementation of evidence-based new processes. Similar barriers are likely to impede the implementation of more complex management ideas, such as CSR (Wickert and de Bakker, 2018). However, as our review indicates, research on social processes that might either promote or impede the implementation of management ideas remains scant. Overall, we found that there is empirical support for the argument that management ideas improve organizational performance. However, when and how this positive link materializes is contingent on a number of factors, which, as we have shown, complicate considerably the efforts of managers and organizations who wish to reap the benefits of certain management ideas they have adopted. What our review also shows is that so far research has predominantly focused on investigating the implications of management ideas for performance at a single level of analysis, such as individuals, teams, and organizations. A further limitation of previous research is that it takes a rather short-term ­perspective, although some studies have considered the potentially negative impact of management ideas on a company’s long-term performance (e.g. Ofek and Sarvary, 2001). However, relatively little is known about the transitory effects of management ideas on performance on different levels of analysis. Below, we disentangle these effects and call on researchers to pay more attention to the hitherto little-examined effects of management ideas on entire industries or the society at large.

Complications in the Management Ideas–Performance Link Establishing a causal link between management ideas and performance is challenging because of the complications that we mentioned earlier and will expand on below. We propose a fresh perspective on investigating the link between management ideas

384    c. wickert, j. sieweke, and r. ruotsalainen and performance and argue that these complications help explain why management ideas often do not lead to superior returns, especially in the long term. The first complication describes two performance dilemmas of management ideas that may explain an idea’s potentially diminishing returns which arise from its own popularity. The second complication is called the ‘sustainability paradox of management ideas’ and describes how management ideas can cause unintended and potentially harmful effects on the societal level.

Two Performance Dilemmas of Management Ideas Organizations face two performance dilemmas when deciding upon the adoption of management ideas. The first case, the ‘fashion-addict dilemma’, shows that the adoption of a management idea may push adopters into a vicious cycle of constantly adopting new ideas whose positive effects on performance diminish in the long term. Research has shown that while ideas can improve an organization’s short-term performance, their positive effects may decrease over time. For example, a meta-analysis of the relationship between CSR and a company’s financial performance shows that it has been decreasing steadily over the forty-year period from 1970 to 2010 (Pankrutskaya et al., 2017). The so-called ‘Red Queen’ theory of competition (Barnett and McKendrick, 2004) points out one reason why the positive effects of specific management ideas diminish over time. This theory indicates that organizations that face fierce competition are likely to imitate their competitors in order to reduce risk and secure their survival. If these organizations become aware that a management idea has improved the performance of a competitor, their rivals will probably also implement that idea (Derfus et al., 2008). Indeed, management ideas are typically adopted by many organizations within and across industries, where the rate of adoption depends on the presumed effects of an idea on performance and on how well its inventors or promoters (e.g. consultants, management gurus) sell that idea (Sturdy, 2011; see also Collins and Wright, both in this volume). Staw and Epstein (2000) suggested that the wide adoption of management ideas may be the result of a ‘bandwagon’ effect. In that case, organizations adopt popular management ideas more or less independently of their measurable effects on performance and mainly because they expect reputational gains and want to be perceived as innovative. If an increasing number of competitors adopt a management idea, in the long term this can create problems for the focal organization that introduced it early: if we consider market competition as a zero-sum game—that is, some organizations make gains at the expense of others, which suffer losses—we can expect that the performance of the focal organization will decrease over time, because its idea will no longer lend it the competitive advantage that uniqueness and inimitability confer. Banerjee (2008: 61), for instance, argued that if CSR is indeed a competitive strategy, ‘it is not a particularly valuable one in terms of its imitability: the very visible nature of CSR practices makes it easier for competitors to develop similar strategies’.

performance implications of management ideas    385 According to the Red Queen theory, the trajectory of negative performance increases the pressure on the focal organization to look again for new ideas that will give it a fresh dose of competitive advantage. Soon, however, rivals will copy these new ideas too (Schneider et al., 2017) and the cycle will continue. The competition that the Red Queen theory describes may explain the faddishness of management ideas, or of ‘management fashions’ (Abrahamson, 1996), which trap organizations in a vicious cycle of constantly looking for and implementing new ideas to improve their performance, as the effects of highly popular ideas on their performance wane. In the end, the main beneficiaries of management ideas might be the mediators of the ideas (e.g. consultants), who provide the much-needed new ideas to ‘fashion addicts’. This may also explain in part why many organizations use consulting services so extensively (Pemer et al., 2014). While there is constant pressure on companies to search for new and superior management ideas, they also need to avoid becoming an ‘idea fashion addict’. This, however, confronts managers with a second set of complicating factors, which we call the ‘complexity dilemma’: the problems that management faces when deciding which of various ideas to implement in order to create sustainable effects for the organization’s performance. According to the resource-based view (Barney, 1991), whether a management idea can create long-term effects on performance depends on the characteristics of the idea. In this case, the problem is that the factors that contribute to the diffusion of management ideas within an industry, such as the degree to which an idea is understandable and easy to implement, also complicate the generation of long-term effects on performance (Powell, 1995). For instance, if it is relatively easy for competitors to adopt and implement a specific idea, the competitive advantage that this idea confers, due to its uniqueness, is diminished or even lost. The resulting dilemma is that, on the one hand, an organization must strive to adopt ideas that are complex and that isolating mechanisms (e.g. social complexities, causal ambiguities; see Le Breton-Miller and Miller, 2015) make its implementation difficult and might prevent competitors from also adopting it. On the other hand, the more complex an idea is, the higher the chance that the organization’s attempt to implement the idea will fail. This may then create high costs and prevent organizations from exploiting the potential competitive advantage that springs from that idea. As we have already shown, the poor implementation of a management idea can have negative implications for a firm’s performance. We conclude that the reason why the effects of certain management ideas on performance decrease over time is that many rivals adopt the same idea, which destroys the  competitive advantage that it conferred to the original user. This pattern makes many organizations ‘addicts’ that constantly search for new ideas. The very same factors that make management ideas attractive in the short term explain why their effects on performance diminish in the long term. To prolong the positive effects of management ideas on performance, organizations must turn towards complex ideas that are difficult and costly to implement. However, prolonging these effects successfully may have paradoxical and detrimental effects on other actors, beyond the boundaries of the adopting organization. We discuss these effects below.

386    c. wickert, j. sieweke, and r. ruotsalainen

Management Ideas and the ‘Sustainability Paradox’ The large-scale adoption of management ideas across entire industries may create problems not only for the managers of individual organizations, but also broader problems on the field level. More specifically, while management ideas can help an organization improve its performance, they may have negative effects on other actors, even on most other actors. If that is the case, the large-scale adoption of an idea may make the field as a whole less sustainable: management ideas may lead to a ‘sustainability paradox’. The sustainability paradox can be illustrated by looking at the relational resourcesfocused approach that we reviewed above. Environmental economists introduced the concept of the ‘rebound effect’ (see Herring and Sorrell, 2009 for an overview) to describe situations in which the gains in efficiency and the reduction in resource consumption that a few actors achieve originally can lead to an overall increase in the consumption of those resources in the broader society. A case in point is the idea of eco-efficiency, which is related to management ideas such as CSR and TQM. While making the production and consumption of resources such as energy more efficient may seem like a good way of reducing the use of natural resources, empirical evidence suggests that when efficiency improves, the overall consumption of resources can increase. Indeed, research on the rebound effect has challenged the optimistic view that increasing efficiency has invariably positive effects (e.g. Herring and Sorrell, 2009). These researchers have argued that improving the efficiency of energy production lowers the effective cost of energy relative to what that cost might have been otherwise, but substitution and income effects, which result from price changes, lead to an overall increase in consumption. The rebound effect thus describes a paradoxical scenario, where individual organizations that apply eco-efficiency measures such as CSR and TQM can improve their performance, but the overall consumption of certain resources (such as electricity and resulting CO2 emissions) rebounds. However, the long-term negative consequences of eco-efficiency typically do not burden the adopting organization, but society as a whole is affected by environmental problems like increased emissions. Management ideas may thus also produce opposite outcomes to those originally intended, if the longterm effects they have beyond the boundaries of adopting organizations are not taken into account sufficiently.

Expanding Research on Management Ideas and Performance Our review of the literature on how management ideas affect performance and the ­complications we identified at different levels of analysis opens up interesting questions for future research. First, scholars should pay more attention to how the broad adoption

performance implications of management ideas    387 of management ideas impacts performance outcomes at different levels of analysis. For example, they could examine how temporal patterns of adoption in specific industries influence the performance of firms over time and what implications management ideas may have for other external stakeholders and civil society more generally. Furthermore, researchers could investigate which actors appropriate the rents of certain ideas. Although there may be a positive link between ideas and performance, a closer look may reveal that this does not necessarily hold for the adopting organization, but for the seller of the idea. While firms may see their returns diminish once an idea is adopted across their entire industry, consulting firms, business schools, and gurus selling fashionable ideas may benefit disproportionally at the expense of the ‘buyers’ of their ideas. Second, in order to understand better why management ideas do not always have an effect on performance, it is necessary to study in greater depth the social processes that support or hinder the implementation of such ideas. A recurrent theme in research on management ideas is that their effects on performance can only arise if there is a shared understanding of the idea within an organization. But how can managers promote that? For example, how do framing and issue-selling influence the implementation process? Wickert and de Bakker (2018) suggest that specifically in the case of social issues like CSR, managers selling those ideas need to build strong relationships with the potential buyers of the ideas and draw on various tactics to convince buyers about the value of the idea. Another important question is how management ideas can be implemented in particularly complex contexts, such as healthcare, where the interests of various groups within the adopting organizations are dissimilar or even contradictory. If managers fail to create a shared understanding of the value of certain ideas, resistance on the part of employees is likely to inhibit the successful implementation (Wickert and de Bakker, 2018; also McCabe et al., in this volume). Future research could examine how the tensions and conflicts that arise from the implementation of a management idea in organizations that have multiple goals could be resolved.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have explored how management ideas impact various dimensions of  organizational performance. We have shown that management ideas can indeed enhance performance. However, a closer look at the literature reveals that this link is highly complex. We have argued that when many organizations in an industry seek to gain and sustain a competitive advantage by adopting the same management ideas, the positive impact of these ideas on organizational performance is likely to diminish over time. Moreover, the broad adoption of management ideas may cause unintended negative effects that accrue at other levels of analysis; for example at the level of individual employees or of society as a whole. The complications that are closely connected to the link between management ideas and performance offer rich territory for further empirical and conceptual inquiry. Future research on this topic should illuminate how,

388    c. wickert, j. sieweke, and r. ruotsalainen when, and why management ideas have sustainable effects on a holistically understood measure of performance.

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pa rt i v

C ON T E X T S

chapter 21

th e (geo -)politic s of  m a nagem en t ide as three moments in the trajectory of an instrument of power Marie-Laure Salles-Djelic

Introduction Management today has become a taken-for-granted technology and a powerful ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1975). Management ideas (and practices) are everywhere—in business schools and private firms, in public services and not-for-profit organizations, in  churches, hospitals, sports clubs, museums, and universities (Christensen and Laegreid, 2013; Engwall et al., 2016; Powell and Steinberg, 2006). Management ideas even frame and shape what we are or at least what we should be as professionals or parents, and the way we should handle relationships, conflicts, teams, self-presentation, stress, and even love and sexual life (Hancock and Tyler, 2009; see also Hancock and Tyler, in this volume). We are all managers now, or at least we should be—of our professional and personal lives (Grey, 1999). Our bookstores are full of (self-)management books and guides that promise the holy grail of full control (Garsten and Grey, 1997). The taken-for-granted role of management today and the widespread use of management ideas could easily lead us to forget that the word was essentially non-existent in most corners of the world only sixty years ago. Management and management ideas are not the natural habitat of humanity. Instead, they are historically inscribed and socially constructed institutions. Tracing the historical dynamics that have enacted the contemporary institutionalization and dominance of management ideas is a necessary first step to the de-naturalization of this powerful and often taken-for-granted institution. De-naturalization, in turn, is indispensable to change and to the consideration of alternatives (Badian, 1972: 12).

394   m.-l. salles-djelic Such an historical exploration is all the more necessary given that the institutionalization of management has come together with its neutralization and universalization. Management is often associated with claims of scientific purity, universal rationality, best practices, and political and ethical neutrality. Management ideas circulate with the promise to foster efficiency and to minimize power issues. In reality though, management and management ideas are neither neutral nor de-politicized. Arguably, we can better understand the contemporary taken-for-grantedness and dominance of management and management ideas if we follow through time their trajectory as instruments of power (Bendix, 1956; Braverman, 1974; Djelic, 1998; Jacques, 1996; Shenhav, 1999). Our main argument in this chapter is that, throughout the twentieth century, the ­trajectory of management has coevolved with the tightly connected fates of American ­capitalism and imperialism. We identify three main moments in this trajectory. Although precise origins remain a matter of debate (Kiechel, 2012; Merkle, 1980), modern management and management ideas were born as power tools for decision-makers without ownership rights when corporate capitalism emerged in the USA at the turn of the twentieth century (Djelic, 1998; Roy, 1997; Sklar, 1988). Later on, management and management ideas were mobilized as geo-political (soft) weapons for the Cold War, in the first phase of the ‘American Century’ (De Grazia, 2009; Mélandri, 2016). Paul Hoffman, administrator of the Marshall Plan, claimed that the ‘American assembly line’ would overcome the ‘Communist party line’ (Carew, 1987). Finally, once communism died in the early 1990s, management ideas crossed all remaining borders as the dominant ‘regime of truth’ of a hawkish neo-American form of capitalism—corporate, financialized, and globalized (Spicer and Böhm, 2007). Management ideas became, then, a new hegemony, the crest of the globalization wave reinterpreted as the latest (last?) stage in the American Century and a form of advanced imperialism (Taylor, 2000). We start this chapter with a rapid exploration of the word ‘management’, its evolving meaning and early circulation before the twentieth century. This conceptual exploration is quite telling in relation to the contemporary nature of management as a political ­project. We then consider in turn each of the three main moments in the political and geo-political trajectory of management and management ideas during the twentieth century. As we document the evolving trajectory of management as an instrument of political and geo-political power, we debunk the myth of political neutrality. And we show, in passing, the important role of management ideas in entrenching gender, race, and national stratifications.

The Travels of Words: Exploring the Roots of Management To manage is, etymologically, to act or operate (agere) with one’s hand (manus). In that sense, ‘management’ could be seen as a ‘genetic feature of humanity’ (Le Texier, 2013: 191). The widespread use of the word though, is recent. Google NGram tells us it only

the (geo-)politics of management ideas    395 0.02 0.015 0.01 0.005 0

1900

1950

1980

American English

1990

2008

British English

Figure 21.1  ‘Management’ in books—American English, British English—Google NGram

0.0025 0.002 0.0015 0.001 0.0005 0

1950 French

1980

1990 German

2008 Italian

Figure 21.2  ‘Management’ in books—French, German—Google NGram

expanded in American English in the 1920s and that this use of the term spread to other languages only later, essentially from the mid-to-late 1980s. We also searched for the closest German (Unternehmens Leitung), French (gestion), or Italian (gestione) translations and found that their use increased in parallel to that of management since the 1950s and particularly since the late 1980s (see Figures 21.1 and 21.2). Before this twentieth-century incarnation and circulation, we can track earlier episodes in the life of the word ‘management’. An early ancestor is the Italian word maneggiare used from the seventeenth century. Originally, the word meant ‘to control’, ‘to keep in one’s hand’ with respect to a horse. In France, the term manège was coined to refer to the ring where horses were being trained and tamed and by extension to the associated practices. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, both the Italian word maneggiare and the French word manège came to have a broader meaning and to suggest a way of doing things, of getting around, sometimes even of manipulating others for one’s own ends. In French, the word manigance was coined as a derivative to refer to the more cunning forms of such practices (Lafaye, 1858). Another parallel route takes us to the eighteenth-century French word ménagerie— which has close etymological connections with the word manège. That word was used to  suggest the domestic taming of farm animals and by extension ‘keeping house’ since both then went together. Towards the end of the eighteenth century and more

396   m.-l. salles-djelic clearly in the nineteenth century, the word became detached from its original association with the economy of the household and morphed to refer to a place where animals were being husbanded, tamed, and controlled. Rapidly, though, the term came to evoke a more disorderly picture—suggesting mayhem and chaos instead of control. The term became a synonym of the slang ‘zoo’—indicating a chaotic space or situation in general. In English, the term ‘manage’ was initially a direct translation of the French manège used to refer to the training and taming of horses (Webster’s Dictionary). Early nineteenth-century texts using the term ‘management’ extended it to the taming of animals in general, of plants and agricultural domains and progressively of infants and children, aborigines and colonized groups, convicts and criminals, but also of the poor (Google NGram study of texts using ‘management’ in the English corpus between 1800 and 1860). This conceptual exploration of the words leading up to the modern term management is quite telling about the contemporary nature of management as a political project. First, the exercise brings to the fore the power and control dimensions that framed the notion from the beginning. Second, it suggests the manipulative, cunning, and ‘nudging’ potentialities associated with management. Third, it reveals the stratification implications of management. Some are managing and others should be managed for their own good—the weak and the unruly, the poor and the colonized. Finally, it questions the very possibility of order and control—underscoring instead the inherent limits of any attempt at reining in horses, animals, infants, convicts, colonized people, or, one would surmise, organizations and men and women. This short exploration thus undermines a number of the modern claims of management—claims to political and ethical neutrality, claims to efficiency and equity, and claims to control and mastery. In the following sections, we see how those features play out in the evolving trajectory of modern management as an instrument of power.

Management and the (American) Corporation: Ensuring Control and Building Legitimacy The modern institution of management cannot be understood without reference to its historical association with a particular form of capitalism. Management is the ‘software’ of a new kind of capitalist system (‘hardware’) that emerged in the USA at the turn of the twentieth century (Djelic and Amdam, 2007). The reinvention of American capitalism in that period was profound. The system that emerged had six striking dimensions brought together in Figure 21.3. First, the passing of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 led to a significant restructuring of the competitive environment. Cartels were outlawed, but lawyers realized that tight combinations and mergers, when they took place within a single state, could escape

the (geo-)politics of management ideas    397 Oligopolistic Competition

Joint Stock Corporation

Stock exchange and financial markets

Large Firm

Separation ownership/ control

Professional Management

Figure 21.3  American corporate capitalism and management

antitrust regulation (Djelic, 1998). The unexpected consequence was a merger wave on an unprecedented scale and the institutionalization of oligopolistic competition (Sklar, 1988). Second, this restructuring placed the large firm at the core of American capitalism (Chandler, 1994). Third, these integrated giants became incorporated under a new legal status—the holding company or joint stock corporation. This status made it possible to create a corporation for the sole purpose of owning stock in other firms (Roy, 1997). Fourth, these joint stock companies were often associated with dispersed ownership and the separation between ownership and control was an important consequence (Berle and Means, 1932). Fifth, owners became holders of shares (‘shareholders’) and those pieces of paper were soon tradable on stock exchanges which hence became central conduits for corporate financing (Navin and Sears, 1955). Sixth, as owners/ shareholders stepped out of day-to-day decision-making, they left open a space that was taken over by salaried decision-makers—or managers as the latter came to be called. The new industrial or service behemoths required tools and techniques making it ­possible to plan, coordinate, control, and decide in spite of organizational size and in the absence of a legitimacy that had traditionally come with ownership. Corporate c­ apitalism, then, implied the emergence of professional management. Soon, dynamics of institutionalization were entrenching and expanding professional management. Business schools were set up around the country with the objective of training large numbers of managers (Khurana, 2007). The pioneer was the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1881, followed by the Haas School of Business at Berkeley in 1898 and the Tuck School at Dartmouth College in 1900. In 1908, the Harvard Business School was set up and launched an innovative degree programme— the Master in Business Administration (MBA). In the 1930s, a new industry emerged in the USA—management consultancy—with a bright future ahead (Engwall et al., 2016; McKenna, 2006). A dedicated press and the development of professional associations further strengthened and institutionalized professional management (Alvarez,  1998; Kjaer and Slaatta, 2007).

398   m.-l. salles-djelic In a matter of decades, the ‘visible hand’ of managerial hierarchies became the main regulating principle within the new corporate giants (Chandler, 1977). The politics of, and around, management played out in that period, mostly within the USA. Managerial hierarchies were initially built to handle the coordination and control problems created by the new mergers and to turn aggregates of formerly independent units into a single operating entity. ‘Scientific management’ was then the dominant management idea (Hounshell, 1985; Nelson, 1980; Noble, 1977; Shenhav, 1999). Its deployment turned out to be a powerful tool in the hands of decision-makers without ownership rights—the managers—in their relationship with two groups that also had significant stakes in the corporation, labour and shareholders. Its successful diffusion was also decisive in empowering a new class (white-collar workers, mostly men) and imposing a new way of life, a new culture and architecture that would henceforth symbolize and define the twentieth-century USA (Guillén, 2006). The formalization and diffusion of scientific management generated significant leverage in the interaction with labour. The rational allocation of time and the regulation of motions (including through the mediation of machines and assembly lines) were ­powerful tools for the taming of labour. Time and motion studies and the associated reorganization of work transferred knowledge of the production process from labour to the central technocracy of the firm—a mix of engineers and professionalized managers (Nelson, 1980; Shenhav, 1999). Taylor’s objective was explicit in that respect (Taylor, 1911). The control which labour exerted over the production process and work practices (through implicit know-how in particular) was a source of power. That power translated into ‘soldiering’—slowing down and in the process ‘stealing’ time and money from employers. Scientific management was engineered to crush that and to deliberatively transfer knowledge over work practices, hence control and power to a new technocracy. In exchange for this large-scale appropriation of knowledge and power, workers were granted a piece-rate pay system—that heightened competition, weakened collaboration and the capacity to organize, mobilize, and resist (Braverman, 1974). Scientific management was a powerful system of control and helped ‘manufacture (labour) consent’ (Burawoy, 1979). In retrospect, it was a ‘cheaper and cleaner’ alternative to the violent policing and crushing of strikes and labour movements. And indeed, as (scientific) management imposed itself within American corporations the violence of industrial relations did not disappear, but it waned significantly (Kochan et al., 1994). The formalization and diffusion of scientific management also made it possible to keep shareholders at bay, if not marginalize them altogether (Berle and Means, 1932; Roe, 1996). As management was redefined from a practice to a science (Taylor, 1911) and became embedded within the most prestigious universities, it significantly gained in status and legitimacy. However, the process was not easy. University hierarchies and well-established disciplines initially strongly opposed the academic integration of business and management (Engwall and Zagmani, 1998). A Harvard professor feared the university would ‘sully the robes of Chaucer and Shakespeare with seekers of gold’ (Ewing, 1990: 267–8). In the words of the economist Thorstein Veblen, a college of commerce ‘belongs to the corporation of learning no more than a department of athletics’

the (geo-)politics of management ideas    399 (Veblen, 1918: 209–10). This resistance, however, did not block the progressive inscription of management in American universities—the large donations that came with the creation of business schools may be a partial explanation. And soon, the MBA became a ‘licence to manage’ imbued with scientific and academic legitimacy that formally put decision-making and control in the hands of a salaried elite of white-collar workers (men) with no ownership rights. Shareholders, in that context, were further pushed to the periphery when it came to decision-making, power, and influence. Managers were ‘strong’, owners were ‘weak’ (Roe, 1996). This trend would only be reversed from the 1970s when the return of the shareholder happened together with, and through, the professionalization and managerialization of ownership. Individual and dispersed shareholders had largely been displaced by then. Large pension funds and institutional investors, which were themselves managerial corporations, essentially owned American corporations (Hawley and Williams, 1997). The development of corporate and managerial capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century in the USA also had important symbolic and cultural consequences. The scientific management principles that now ruled the organization of work within the corporation also shaped the aesthetics of the period (Guillén, 2006). The ­hierarchical superiority of management and its gendered (male) nature translated into the urban high rise—the (white male) corporate management elite inhabited a vertical space t­ owering down on other members of the firm and on society at large (Hanson and Pratt, 1995). In fact, management left its cultural imprint on American society as a whole, well beyond downtown skyscrapers—with an impact on dress code, lifestyles, the triumph of a ­consumer society, gender stereotypes, and the marginalization of non-white communities. Management imposed itself, in other words, as an increasingly powerful cultural project with a significant performative effect on many sides of life in the USA (Mills, 1951).

Management Ideas as Geo-Political Weapons: The Dynamics of Diffusion after 1945 Until the end of the Second World War, management as defined above remained peculiarly American. Admittedly, there had been an interest in scientific management in certain circles in Europe during the 1910s and the 1920s (Devinat, 1927; Guillén, 1994). Implementation never went far, though, nor was it very successful, with the exception, arguably, of the Soviet Union where the triple promise of rationality, productivity, and control was detached from its capitalist framing (Merkle,  1980; Wren,  1980). Things changed, however, after 1945. The particular geo-political context of the immediate post-war period was the background for the diffusion of management from the USA to some other parts of the world (mostly Western Europe and Japan). The war had left Europe (and Japan) in a state of profound destitution, destruction, and chaos. It had

400   m.-l. salles-djelic fostered political crisis and regime breakdown in many countries and reshaped the geo-political balance of power to the benefit of both the USA and the USSR. This geopolitical redefinition crystallized after 1947 with a clear division of the world into two spheres. With the launch of the Marshall Plan, the Western part of the European continent was to become unambiguously and solidly anchored to the American sphere of influence (Djelic, 1998). The USA had reached superpower status by then and projected into the world insolent wealth and power. The peculiar character of American capitalism was striking— hence the connection was easily made between American wealth and success and its distinctive form of capitalism. The desire, in Western Europe, to imitate and import a model that was a promise of success met with the willingness, in the USA, to export that model and evangelize (Carew, 1987; Djelic, 1998). The Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), the American agency in charge of the Marshall Plan, was the cornerstone of that missionary project. The European Recovery Programme (better known as the Marshall Plan) had been adopted by the American Congress on the condition that it would be run in a ‘business-like way’ with a strong involvement of the American business community (Arkes, 1972). The small group of businessmen (as they were all men) who came to exercise control over Marshall Plan institutions were connected to large American public corporations. A shared vision was the ‘United States of Europe’, a continent where the workings of the economy would be patterned after the model of American capitalism to ensure stability, peace, and the containment of communism. The ECA team believed in the efficiency and superiority of an economic space where competition combined with large-scale mass production and where corporate ownership structures implied a professionalization of management. In the long run, those were necessary conditions for the preservation and expansion of American economic, but also political, interests. Initially, the Marshall Plan was defined as a programme of financial and material assistance—providing for the large-scale transfer of machinery and equipment from the USA to Western European nations. As the ultimate objective, however, was a radical transformation and redefinition of European economies along the lines of the American model of capitalism, the large-scale transfer of machinery and capital would not be enough. Members of the ECA were soon convinced that the infusion of a culture of ‘­productivity’ was necessary to the success of their ambitious undertaking. What was meant by a culture of productivity then was essentially the combination of two sets of (American) management ideas—scientific management and the human relations school findings (Djelic, 1998). Scientific management promised efficiency and mass production. The human relations school pledged social peace and labour engagement to countries that worried about strong communist influence (Carew, 1987). Here again, the desire to imitate (on the European side) met with the wish to project and promote. With the launch of the productivity drive in 1949, professional management and management ideas became objects of export/import between the USA and Western European countries (Kuisel, 1988). The combination of scientific management and human relations school

the (geo-)politics of management ideas    401 ideas and findings was constructed as a productivity enhancing apparatus—a dispositif in the Foucaldian sense (Foucault,  1975). As such, the transfer on a large scale of management ideas became a key element of post-war US geo-politics—the soft power dimension of the strategy of containment. The productivity drive was a large-scale technological assistance programme that was set within the framework of the Marshall Plan. At the core of that programme was the transfer of managerial knowledge, ‘best practices’, and management ideas. On the US side, the ECA collaborated with the National Management Council, the Society for the Advancement of Management, and the American Management Association. A ­productivity missions programme was the most striking and original feature of these politics of productivity. American experts came to European countries (type B missions) and European teams were sent to the USA (type A missions). Type A missions lasted on average six weeks and teams had generally between ten and thirty members. Some missions were industry-based and others were more generalist. There were generalist missions on statistical and marketing techniques, accounting and cost control, management consulting and business education. But the bulk focused on scientific management and human relations ideas and techniques (Carew, 1987; Djelic, 1998). These teams were supposed to learn, through immersion and direct contact, from the American experience and to find direct inspiration in those bodies of management ideas that the USA had pioneered. European team members were to bring back ideas, models, knowledge, skills, methods, and best practices. Teams shared responsibility with different national productivity agencies for implementation and for the diffusion of what had been acquired during the trips. In the end, the productivity missions programme was key to the Western European ‘discovery of management’ (Kuisel, 1988). Team reports all shared at least one common conclusion: in the USA, the running of a company was set up and institutionalized as a ‘profession’. Differences between the European style of ‘direction’ and the American understanding of professional and scientific ‘management’ were too important not to be striking. Management was a ‘science’ and Americans ‘had a clear lead’ (Djelic, 1998). A special case was the ‘young experts’ teams where participants were promising young men sent to American business schools for periods of up to one year (225 by 1958). These ‘young experts’ were to go through a ‘complete indoctrination course in ­principles of industrial and business administration’ and would later become teachers in European-based management programmes and training sessions (Djelic, 1998: 207). The technical assistance programme hence contributed significantly to the diffusion of the institution of management education from the USA, where it had been pioneered, to Western European countries. As a follow-up to type A missions, the ECA sponsored training sessions where a lecture by an American expert was combined with open debates. The themes for those sessions ranged from ‘structural and organizational problems of the firm’ to ‘leadership’, ‘human relations in the firm’, ‘planning and control’, ‘market studies and marketing’, or ‘professional management associations’. Again, we see in those themes the importance of the two sets of management ideas identified above—scientific

402   m.-l. salles-djelic management and the human relations school. National productivity agencies also took the initiative to hold training seminars and to institutionalize ­continuing education programmes in business management. The idea was to provide large numbers of business leaders with an overview of modern ideas and methods of management (Commissariat Général à la Productivité, 1956: 58). Short-term training programmes were specifically aimed at European actors already in the labour force. Another stage, however, was the training of a new generation of European business decision-makers. A radical reshaping of the Western education system was envisaged. The ECA once again gave the impulse to such an in-depth reform. When the European Productivity Agency (EPA) was created in 1953 under pressure from the ECA, it singled out the development of business education as one of its most pressing responsibilities (Documentation Française,  1959: 4). Working with the ECA, the Ford Foundation, and the National Management Council, the EPA championed national efforts and helped with the development of business education in all Western European countries. It organized regular conferences and meetings where national delegations could share their experiences, learn from each other with regard to business education, and compare methods or curricula. A climax in the work of the EPA was the creation in 1959 of a European business school, INSEAD, in a small town near Paris, with significant input and resources provided by Harvard Business School (Barsoux, 2000). In the context of an intense geo-political fight between the USA and the USSR, management ideas and institutions were mobilized in that period as real and symbolic weapons. Scientific management and the human relations school findings were identified as consequential management ideas that should be exported from the USA and imported and transplanted into a continent in dire need of reinvention. In that context, management ideas were instruments of soft power for the USA—they were a mechanism to foster wealth and prosperity, but also, and more importantly, cultural, social, and political alignment in what was seen as a ‘clash of civilizations’. Management and management ideas were symbolically equated with a modernization agenda, a superior model of economic organization that revealed an advanced form of civilization. The USA embodied this superior form of civilization—the legitimation for the technical assistance programme had clear moral and colonialist overtones. In his 1949 inauguration speech, which announced the technical assistance programme, President Harry Truman made it clear: We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.  (Truman, 1949)

Under-developed areas included Western Europe; in fact the entire world beyond the USA was an under-developed area in that sense. The promise of triumphant (American) modernity and civilization was contrasted on the one hand with the backwardness and (moral) failure of the old continent and with the looming spectre of Communism.

the (geo-)politics of management ideas    403

Framing the Hegemonic Backbone of Neo-Liberalism: Institutionalization and Naturalization after 1989 The following years confirmed the progressive expansion of management in those parts of the world that were on the US side of the Cold War, hence concentrated in Western Europe, Japan, and some parts of South America. Starting in the 1960s, private US-based actors came to relay, sustain, and replace state and public institutions as drivers of the diffusion of management ideas (Gemelli, 1998; Servan-Schreiber, 1968). Foundations, but also American firms opening subsidiaries, US consulting firms, and service ­providers following their clients were instrumental in that respect (Kipping and Engwall, 2002; McKenna et al., 2003). There were three main paths for this expansion. First, managerialization intensified through the structural transformation of European capitalism. Corporatization, here again under influence of the American model, fostered the need for professional managers (Boltanski, 1982; Djelic, 1998). Second, the emerging European field of management education, through its aura of modernity and its promise of professionalization, became an attractive alternative to existing forms of universitybased education. In Europe alone, 400 business schools had opened by the late 1980s. They became, over time, the dominant career pathway to the commanding heights of European private firms. While the humanities had traditionally been at the core of economic elite training in Britain, with law or engineering in Germany and France, things started to change from the 1960s onwards (Cassis,  1997). The trend was towards an increasing role for business and management studies in the training of private economic elites—with, in the process, a fair degree of homogenization across national boundaries (Thomas et al., 2014; see Engwall and Wedlin, in this volume). Third, expansion took place through domain imperialism. While initially management was a governance technology developed in and for private business organizations, its impact was progressively felt well beyond. Ever since the 1970s, management has entered into areas of social and human life that until recently had been structured and ruled by very different kinds of logics. The consequence has been a managerialization of ‘nearly everything’ (Hancock and Tyler, 2009; Vinten, 2000). The geo-political upheaval of the late 1980s fostered an acceleration of this expansion. The fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, opened up new frontiers—and since then management and management ideas have gone East, in the broad sense of the term (Clegg and Palmer, 1996; Kostera, 1995; Sturdy and Gabriel, 2000). Management spread as a set of tools and practices, as a technology of governance, and as an increasingly dominant culture. The intellectual and scientific sphere around the production and diffusion of management knowledge and management ideas also expanded and matured significantly during this same period. Reach and scope became transnational, but with a clear d ­ ominance and presence of American hubs. American journals became global

404   m.-l. salles-djelic references and targets for scholars everywhere in the world. American-based professional associations entered into internationalization paths. The number of business schools exploded and the MBA went from being a uniquely American degree to being a global label or ‘licence to manage’ with in fact surprisingly little local adaptation and translation (Lamb and Curie, 2011). In the meantime, English imposed itself as the lingua franca of this intellectual and scientific community (Boussebaa and Brown, 2017). As the density of the transnational field of management knowledge production and diffusion intensified significantly, the number of management ideas that circulated increased as well. Still, we can point to a broad family of management ideas that have been dominant and highly influential during that period—those ideas framed around the ‘maximization of the shareholder value’ principle. We find there, agency theory and its many variants and applications in corporate governance, finance, marketing, strategy, audit and accounting, and even organizational behaviour and human resource management, human capital theory, Lean management, transaction cost theory, and a number of other domains. Those management ideas have had significant influence in the broad field we described above—in themselves, but also in generating reactions and counter ideas including, for example, stakeholder theory or theories of the ­commons. This central role of the ‘maximization of shareholder value’ family of ideas developed in parallel to the financialization of corporate capitalism (Erturk et al., 2008; Krippner, 2005). Arguably, financialization can be seen as the return, with a vengeance, of the owner or more exactly of the shareholder. If we think about it analytically, the progress of managerialization and the progress of financialization should, if not exclude each other, at least generate conflicts and contradictions. What happened instead, is that the two trends came in time to reinforce and strengthen each other (Heusinkveld, 2014; Nicolai et al., 2010; Rhee and Fiss, 2014). The result has been a compromise, leading maybe to a strange monster—the financialization of management and the managerialization of financial markets. This is arguably an interesting way to conceptualize what is understood under the broadly used label of ‘neo-liberalism’, which crystallizes in the field of management ideas around the central idea of a ‘maximization of shareholder value’. As the foam of the neo-liberal wave, management ideas and practices have spread to many spheres of social life (Grey, 1999). New Public Management in particular, and its international success has carried management ideas to state administrations, to the health and education sectors, as well as to prisons and national security administrations (Bryans, 2000; Christensen and Laegreid, 2001; Kirkpatrick et al., 2009; Regini, 2011, van Grinsven et al., 2016). Even cultural, sports, and not-for-profit organizations have been strongly influenced by management ideas (Lindqvist,  2012; Maier et al.,  2016). Undeniably, this is having a profound impact. With the neo-liberal turn, the nexus of power dynamics appears to have become the link between financial markets and the rest of the world. Through mechanisms that we still need to uncover, management and management ideas have completely been co-opted and integrated into contemporary financialized capitalism. Arguably, management has been transformed and harnessed so as to serve the interests of contemporary shareholders—which are themselves most of the time large corporations (Palpacuer et al., 2011). Furthermore, the cobweb-like

the (geo-)politics of management ideas    405 reach of management and management ideas is today such that it is probably more apt to talk of hegemony rather than power. Management has become a tentacular regime of  ­disciplinary discourse and practice (Foucault,  2010) that inscribes the power and interests of financial shareholders at the very heart of ourselves, our organizations, and even our states. Naturally, this is not always a simple and smooth process and there are loci of resistance and contestation to this powerful colonization trend that should be studied more carefully (Commisso, 2013; Davies and Leonard, 2004; Vauchez and Willemez, 2007).

Conclusion The twentieth century can arguably be dubbed the century of management. At its beginning, management emerged in the USA as a technology of governance, a set of ideas and related practices, and even more importantly as an instrument of power and legitimacy for decision-makers who were neither owners nor shareholders. The second half of that century was marked by the rapid diffusion of management across geographical space and social domains. Broad-based diffusion came together with the institutionalization, in many countries, of management education as the new dominant form of elite training. While management programmes still exhibit diversity, global diffusion comes together with powerful homogenizing pressures (Thomas et al., 2014). The ranking business that emerged in the 1980s has had an impact, while the predominant role of American academia in the development of management knowledge, ideas, and texts has further reinforced standardization in curricula and contents (Engwall et al., 2016). In the process, management has become a global elite language—a category through which a transnational class of leaders is being produced and reproduced. Institutionalization fosters, over time, a kind of naturalization. Whatever becomes institutionalized takes on a form of taken-for-grantedness that makes it essentially transparent or invisible to us, even though it is highly structuring of what we do and even of who we are. Hence, as management became institutionalized, it has increasingly come together with claims of neutrality, scientific purity, and universality. Management and management ideas are projected as fit to apply equally well across and beyond ­cultural and domain boundaries. Management also apparently evacuates all political debate—as a technical best practice, management is depicted as a path to a superior form of modernity that overcomes costly and conservative political fights and conflicts. We have shown that this claim to neutrality is not valid—either historically or today. Management was born as a political instrument for non-owning decision-makers to impose themselves and their interests against both labour and shareholders. In this first stage, the dominant management idea was scientific management that played this role to perfection. After the Second World War, management diffused from the USA to other parts of the world as a weapon in the Cold War between American capitalism and Soviet communism. The dominant management ideas in that second stage were

406   m.-l. salles-djelic (still) scientific management, that carried promises of efficiency and productivity, and the human relations school, that pledged social peace and labour engagement. Finally, we showed how management not only survived the end of the Cold War, but in fact expanded further as the foam of the neo-liberal wave that ensued. In this third stage, the dominant set of management ideas were those connected with the maximization of shareholder value objectives and the financialization of capitalism. Management must be understood as an institution—a defining and structuring ­institution of contemporary capitalism. Management ideas shape the way we relate to the world and even who we are to a significant extent. Today those ideas decidedly have a transnational reach. As shown above, the institutionalization of management and management ideas through time and space is better understood as reflecting mechanisms and processes of diffusion, imitation, and ‘learning by example’ (Strang, 2010). Exploring these mechanisms and processes of diffusion, we have brought to the fore the political and geo-political turning points historically that fostered the diffusion and institutionalization of management in our world over the last hundred years. The institutionalization of management and the broad social inscription of management ideas through powerful mechanisms of socialization such as education have facilitated their neutral and de-politicized reinvention. We have started to open what generally remains a black box—the social and power dynamics through which management has been transformed into a neutralized and de-politicized technology. Management is a ­powerful, if not dominant, template today. The deconstruction of the process through which it became such a powerful technology of governance, across domains and geographies, is an important step towards the de-naturalization and hence fragilization of that template. Our very capacity to think about alternatives hinges upon an historical ­reinterpretation of management as a politically and geo-politically situated instrument of power. The next step would be to draw on and dream up alternatives and their possible consequences (Parker et al., 2007; see also Parker, in this volume). What would it imply, for example, if we were to nurture—rather than manage—our organizations or our relationships?

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chapter 22

M a nagem en t Ideas a n d the Soci a l Construction of Orga n iz ations Shawn Pope and Patricia Bromley

Introduction The study and practice of contemporary management is, first and foremost, about ideas. The recent expansion of management activity, and the burgeoning body of related research and teaching, is in large part driven by notions about what management can and should do. Although research on management ideas has become an important subject in its own right, the link between studies of management ideas and organization theory as a whole is rarely examined (Sturdy, 2004). Our aim in this chapter is to outline the role of management ideas in the broader cultural project of constructing proper organizations, and to provide a conceptual framework for situating specific management ideas (e.g. TQM, CSR, Balanced Scorecard) in a larger social context. We begin our analysis by delineating several major cultural transformations that influence the nature of contemporary management ideas, and then discuss how management ideas drive both the expansion of organizations and their social construction into responsible actors. Our analysis serves to underscore, in the end, that management ideas are central to the sociological study of organization and management. A host of important studies examine how and why organizations adopt specific management ideas. Many of these studies investigate the relationship between idea adoption and organizational performance, often providing a critical analysis of the a-rational diffusion of fads and fashions (Abrahamson, 1991, 1996; Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999; Carson et al., 2000; Czarniawska, 2005; Kieser, 1997). Notable studies have chronicled, for example, the diffusion of matrix management (Burns and Wholey, 1993), poison pills

412    s. pope and p. bromley (Davis,  1991), knowledge management (Scarbrough and Swan,  2001), enterprise resource planning packages (Krumbholz and Maiden, 2001), organizational downsizing (Lee and Strang, 2006), telehomeworking (Peters and Heusinkveld, 2010), and process frameworks such as total quality management, six sigma, Lean manufacturing, and the ISO 9000 standards (David and Strang, 2006; Strang, 2003; Strang and Jung, 2005). A consistent finding has been that diffusion is most robust and lasting if a management idea is perceived to improve competitive standing or comes to be associated with market or category leaders (Strang et al., 2014; Strang and Macy, 2001). In this diffusion literature, organization theory has been usefully deployed to understand the forces that lead management ideas to spread widely throughout organizational fields. Organization theory provides three main accounts of management idea diffusion. Rational/functional accounts focus on the linkages of management ideas to efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability, seeking to confirm a causal connection between the adoption of a management practice and organizational performance (Huselid, 1995; see also Staw and Epstein, 2000). Power/conflict accounts emphasize the interests of elites (or networks of elites) in the adoption and spread of management ideas, including those who run or own organizations (e.g. Davis, 1991; Davis and Greve, 1997). Institutional accounts, finally, provide social and cultural explanations for the flow of management ideas, pointing to shared definitions of rationality, widely accepted professional standards, patterns of relations among organizations, and mimicry in the face of uncertainty (e.g. DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Strang and Macy, 2001). Organizations in this latter account often decouple the adoption of management ideas, which have external sources, from their concrete application to internal organizational processes (Bromley and Powell, 2012; Meyer and Rowan, 1977). In this chapter, we build upon these latter institutional accounts within o ­ rganizational theory. We spell out arguments about how wider cultural foundations contribute to the broad scope of contemporary management ideas. Our cultural explication of the concept of ‘management idea’ seeks a deeper understanding of the proliferation of these ideas, and of the resulting organizational changes across sectors and domains. Our chapter proceeds by introducing our main conceptual schema, which depicts our four sets of hypotheses. We end by drawing implications from our arguments and suggesting future scholarly directions.

The Construction of an ‘Organizing Society’ That organizations in our contemporary culture are ‘social actors’ is an emerging ­proposition in organization theory (Bromley and Meyer, 2015; Brunsson and SahlinAndersson, 2000; King et al., 2010). The fundamental role of management ideas in this cultural shift is less studied. We present in this section a definition of what it means for

management ideas and the construction of organizations     413

Cultural Rationalization

Individual Rights & Capacities

Scientization

Education & Professionalization

Proposition 1a Proposition 1b Organization Society

Management Society

Proposition 3a: Expanding organization, in numbers, locations, domains, and formal complexity; Increasing standardization of organizational form across sectors. Proposition 3b: Organizations increasingly constructed as actors.

Proposition 2a: Management ideas increasing in numbers, locations, domains, and formal complexity. Proposition 2b: Management ideas increasingly cutting across sectors.

Propositions 4a, b

Figure 22.1  Management ideas and the construction of organizational actors

an organization to be an actor and outline the cultural transformations that have contributed to an expansion of organizational actorhood. Figure 22.1 illustrates our core arguments, where bold arrows represent original theoretical contributions and light arrows extant argumentation. Existing institutional research (see the light arrow in the top left of Figure 22.1) has connected ‘cultural rationalization’ to our ‘organizing society’—a social milieu in which organizations have become ubiquitous, but also increasingly formalized and standardized in their structural makeup (Bromley and Meyer 2015; Bromley and Sharkey, 2017; Hwang and Colyvas, 2011). Greater understanding of the origins of our organizing society is important, as organizations are the meso-structures that oversee so many of our social purposes—from scientific advancement and democratic governance to the protection of human rights and the education of the masses. Weber (1922) identified rationalization as a process whereby means–end (rational) calculation, rather than tradition, values, or emotion, became increasingly accepted as an appropriate basis for human behaviour. More recently, Drori et al. (2006: 202) have drawn upon Weber to define cultural rationalization as ‘the explicit organization of clearly defined social entities and their roles, relationships, and activities around clear and general rules and toward clear and general purposes’. Expanding especially since the Second World War, cultural rationalization has been an outgrowth of three sweeping social transformations (listed in the uppermost box of Figure 22.1). The first is the very high legitimation of scientific methods, which has fuelled our enthusiastic collective pursuit of objectified knowledge. Scientization describes this rampant process in which scientific knowledge is increasingly privileged over other forms of knowing and convincing, such as tradition and religion, emotion and personal experience (e.g. Drori et al., 2003). Scientization connotes a social project rather than a purely technical enterprise. It suggests a cultural movement that has extended beyond

414    s. pope and p. bromley the hard sciences and technical domains to reach very far into our personal and social lives. An example concept capturing this forceful expansion of scientization is ‘medicalization’. This term describes the subjecting of ever more facets of human experience (e.g. sleep, personality, mood, loneliness, obesity) to categorization, diagnosis, and management by medical professionals (Conrad, 1992). Medicalization is evident, for instance, in the evolution of our understanding of prostitution—no longer perceived as a moral choice or simply a legal matter, but also as a potential medical and psychological concern whose deep socio-economic origins need to be holistically understood and remediated. The second transformation is the increasing construction of human beings as vested with a wide range of rights and capacities. Brought about by recent civil and human rights movements in the West and increasingly worldwide, this transformation has rendered individuals as fundamental social units whose status is sacred and inviolable (see Durkheim’s ‘cult of the individual’; Elliot,  2007; Jepperson,  1991). Marking this ­transformation has been an expansion in the ranks of individuals. Previously excluded groups—blacks, gays, women, children—have gained status in the past century. The rights of these new individuals have meanwhile proliferated (Elliott, 2007). No longer limited to education, voting, due process, and safe working environments, these rights are now verging upon clean air, universal healthcare, basic income, the Internet, and many other topical concerns. Individuals, finally, have become more empowered in recent decades. They have been vested with capacities to make myriad important decisions—about healthcare, schooling, jobs, friendships, neighbourhood, identity, and so forth. The effect of these changes is an overall increase in individual actors and actorhood (Meyer and Jepperson,  2000). Meyer (2010: 3) gives a helpful definition: ‘An actor, compared with a mundane person or group is understood to have clearer boundaries, more articulated purposes, a more elaborate and rationalized technology. An actor is thus much more agentic—more bounded, autonomous, coherent, purposive and hard-wired—than a person.’ Actors are the entities in our society with legitimated rights, capacities, and responsibilities, the entities empowered to pursue interests and effect social change. The third transformation is the massive societal expansion of education (Benavot et al., 1991; Meyer et al., 1992). Education has expanded in available subjects, duration, and intensiveness. Not only primary, but also secondary, post-secondary, and lifelong education are increasingly expected of individuals (Jakobi, 2009). The highest levels of our education system mould individuals into professionals—accredited and credentialed users of scientized knowledge in real-world settings (Schofer and Meyer, 2005; Suárez and Bromley, 2012). This third transformation is, of course, intertwined with the previous two: an expanded education system disciplines the amplified actorhood of ­empowered individuals. It inculcates into these individuals legitimated courses of action, which are oriented around rationalized, scientized knowledge while conforming to progressive, humanistic values. Due to these cultural transformations, it is now possible to imagine a ‘world society’ built on similar bedrock—empowered, educated individuals pursuing rationalized, socially sanctioned ends and increasingly drawing upon the authority of scientific knowledge to persuade and influence (Meyer et al., 1997).

management ideas and the construction of organizations     415 As noted in prior research (see the light arrow of Figure 22.1), these broad cultural transformations have impacted not only individuals but also the collective structures of contemporary society—namely, organizations. Organizations are now cast by these cultural transformations into the same mould of their individual members. Organizations, too, are now routinely treated as though they are autonomous, bounded social actors. Not simply an aggregation of their members’ activities, and not reducible to a nexus of economic contracts, organizations are now imbued legally and in the cultural imagination with anthropomorphic qualities. There are numerous trappings of this cultural shift towards singularized and individualistic organizational identity. Organizations now brand themselves as having essentialist, highly moralistic traits (e.g. Google’s famous slogan ‘Don’t be Evil’). They pen mission statements that feature humanistic objectives in addition to ones that are merely technical (e.g. Wal-Mart’s motto to ‘Save Money; Live Better’). They construct personas characterized by explicitly enumerated ‘core values’ (e.g. Coca-Cola’s ‘Integrity and Passion’ are human-like values listed alongside the business-like ones of ‘Collaboration and Quality’). Finally, organizations articulate and display their responsibility to broad classes of social constituents, for example through sustainability reports and through participation in multi-stakeholder venues such as the World Economic Forum (Pope and Lim, 2016). Oftentimes organizations enact their social responsibilities with great creativity and discretion, as when the fashion brand Kenneth Cole created the highly distinctive ‘Awearness’ movement to support military veterans. The organization, this is to say, now has an enlarged purpose (‘Mission’) and a greater sweep of actorhood (‘Vision’), but also a more integrated personality (‘Values’). How these three cultural transformations have shaped management ideas is less studied (see the bold arrow in the top right of Figure 22.1). In taking up this subject, we discuss first the impact of scientization on management ideas. Scientization, connoting the cultural authority of presumably generalizable knowledge, is now the dominant mode of thinking about organizations. The management discipline, indeed, was founded on scientization. The publication of Frederick Taylor’s ‘principles of scientific management’ (emphasis ours) is considered by many historians as the dawning of modern management. Taylor’s principles explicitly cautioned against unscientific methods, such as ‘rules of thumb’ and tradition, and instead advocated for theoretically oriented and empirically valid approaches to recruit workers, execute organizational tasks, and assess performance (see Shenhav, 1995, for a more detailed history). Henri Fayol (1916), for similar reasons, is considered a foundational figure for the management discipline, also due in large part to the highly scientized nature of his influential analytic framework. This framework laid out a set of fourteen management principles, enumerated and organized under such high generalities as the ‘division of work’ and ‘authority and responsibility’. The turn to scientized knowledge that marked the founding of management as a discipline continues to the current day (e.g. Hambrick, 2007). Scientization increases the basis for new management ideas by framing ­organizational problems as having general and abstract solutions that are transportable across local and particular settings. Inevitably, as the resulting scientized knowledge is shown in some

416    s. pope and p. bromley instances to be false or comes to interact with intractable situated problems, an opening is provided for waves of competing and compensatory management ideas about what actually works. As such, while we have witnessed numerous revolutions in the various theoretical paradigms of organization theory, the scientific epistemology that underlies it all has been highly resilient, remaining largely unshaken in the past hundred years. The second cultural transformation, the empowerment of individuals and their vesting with expanding rights and capacities, also provides a basis for the proliferation of management ideas. Most directly, organizations now seek to incorporate the latest thinking on how to respect and motivate their employees. Human relations, as with scientization, was an early emphasis in the management discipline. The embrace of scientization that marked the founding of the management discipline was quickly met by calls from organizational psychologists for a more holistic management of the ‘human side of the enterprise’ (McGregor,  1957). The famous Hawthorne Studies (Mayo, 1949), for example, suggested that the depiction of workers-as-machines (as in Taylor’s time-motion studies) needed to be amended with attention to worker social and emotional well-being. The vesting of humans with rights and capacities that continued throughout the last century led to a profusion of legislation that directly impacted organizations. Laws have been created in domains as disparate as minimum wage, occupational health and safety, overtime, whistleblowing, unions, child labour, forced labour, sexual harassment, and age, gender, and sexual orientation discrimination. Human relations, even today, continues to drive new frontiers in management ideas. Myriad popular magazines now rank companies on progressive personnel practices such as maternity leave and telecommuting. Consistently ranking as the best place to work in America, Google Inc. for example is somewhat famous for its free meals, free gym memberships, free nap pods, and free massages. These practices, it should be noted, are held out by Google as one of its competitive advantages. The cultural emphasis on rights and capacities extends beyond individuals to social aggregations. The rise in management ideas for respecting individuals has coincided with the advent of ideas for respecting classes of stakeholders more broadly (Freeman, 1984). Not only primary stakeholders (managers, investors, employees) but also secondary (communities, regulators), tertiary (media, academia), and notional stakeholders (the environment, unborn children) are now thought to have standing before organizations. As a result of this stakeholder empowerment, organizations now engage in relationship management of all sorts, much of it formalized into standing organizational departments. Commonly there are departments for human relations, but also for shareholder relations, public relations, and government relations. There are also new venues for multi-stakeholder interaction, including trade associations and chambers of commerce, but also sustainability coalitions and private–public partnerships such as the United Nations Global Compact (Meyer et al., 2015). The more general point is that the discourse of rights and obligations has moved the purview of management ideas from industrial concerns to the broader realm of human and stakeholder management.

management ideas and the construction of organizations     417 It should be underscored that the effect of individual rights and capacities on management ideas is dynamic. Rather than simple diffusion, human rights discourses create a movement towards newer ideas. For example, Edelman et al. (1999) show how an emergent cultural discourse on human rights provided the opening for an entirely new arena of management ideas. Their historical account focuses on the new kinds of antidiscrimination employment laws that were spurred by the civil and women’s rights movements. They note that organizations were unsure of how to achieve legal compliance, and so relied on professionals to create solutions, resulting in the proliferation of grievance procedures overseen by compliance offices. These management ideas diffused quickly across organizations as they became accepted by the courts, thereby triggering further expansion of the roles of human relations departments and internal counsels. Lastly is the cultural foundation of education, particularly the expansion of professionalization through higher education. This cultural shift, too, has directly impacted management ideas. Indeed, a large proportion of the expansion of higher education is specifically in the realm of business administration. Of all US undergraduate degrees, for example, business degrees are the most conferred by a large margin—about 21 per cent of undergraduate degrees and 25 per cent of masters programmes. Business schools are the entities that have been the most central in legitimating management ideas as valid and in certifying individuals as competent to deploy this knowledge. Illustrating the point, scholars such as Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall (2002) have outlined how business schools (as the producers of management knowledge) and consultants and other business professionals have expanded in scope and scale, and with them the number and variety of management ideas (see also Engwall et al., 2016). By populating the business field with consultants and other professionals who are linked up to the deepening and dynamic stock of business knowledge through lifelong training and memberships in practitioner associations, the educational system has prepared the management field with numerous receptor sites for the rapid and extensive diffusion of management ideas. Overall, these trends generate new management ideas and solidify the category of ‘organizational actor’ as a standard form. The presence of more formal organizations in more domains gives rise to additional new management ideas. More formally, the arguments above lead to the following propositions about when and where to expect an expansion in the stock of management ideas. Proposition 1a:  Increased cultural rationalization generates an expansion of management ideas. Proposition 1b:  Increased cultural rationalization creates an organizational society, which further generates an expansion of management ideas. Management ideas, as suggested above, have increased in number, but they have also spread to new organizational domains. There are increasing ideas, not only about how to improve quality or efficiency, but also how to manage workers, the environment,

418    s. pope and p. bromley and stakeholders more generally. Maternity leave, ergonomic desks, sustainability reporting, and fair trade sourcing are examples of new organizational domains that have been heavily theorized in recent years. The potential for management ideas to annex and colonize new organizational areas, as discussed above, stems from the nature of scientization, which employs abstraction to commensurate disparate domains. It also stems from the rise of modern individuals educated in ‘scientized’ discourses and empowered to deploy it through courses of professionalization. Proposition 2a:  Management ideas are expanding to new domains. Management ideas are also increasingly applicable to a broadened range of organizational forms. Organizational form, as a term, suggests distinctions by o ­ rganizational sector (private, public, and voluntary), type (university, charity, foundation, or firm), and legal structure (for-profit, non-profit, trust). The boundaries of organizational forms, in practice, are increasingly blurred. Management ideas increasingly cut across previously disparate organizational populations. For example, o ­ rganizational branding, a recently popular management idea, can be applied not only to firms, but also to departments, divisions, non-profits, or even to entire countries. Sustainability certificates can be awarded to products or services, but also to facilities or parent companies. Charities, hospitals, and schools now have codes of conduct, codes of ethics, or whistleblower policies the way many businesses do. Sensitivity training, to take another management fashion of recent decades, could as easily be required of charity workers as the employees of a Fortune 500 firm. Or a hospital could implement a focus on corporate culture, strategic vision, or core competencies, much like a city council, university, or restaurant chain. Churches can and do hire consultants to develop rational strategies for how to expand their congregations and increase member satisfaction (Putnam et al., 2012). The hypothesis below emerges from these and earlier arguments. Proposition 2b:  Management ideas increasingly spread across organizational forms. As management ideas arise in new domains and spread across forms, they provide a new basis for delineating the proper boundaries of organizations. The case of corporate social responsibility (CSR) illustrates this well. CSR has become extremely widespread, despite its unclear linkages to profitability for most organizations (Margolis and Walsh, 2003). The vast majority of the world’s largest corporations now publish annual sustainability reports and have extensive website sections dedicated to communicating CSR programmes, policies, and initiatives (Tsutsui and Lim, 2015). CSR is a construct that fundamentally rethinks the scope of organizational duty, ‘embodying new assumptions . . . that both reinforce and challenge the institutional model’ (Windell, 2006: 1). CSR challenges the institutionalized model by expanding an organization’s duty to include environmental, community, and social concerns that are tangential to core operations. At the same time, CSR reinforces the institutionalized

management ideas and the construction of organizations     419 model, based on neo-liberal economic principles, by vesting organizations (rather than governments or regulators or third-party welfare groups) with the responsibility for effecting important social changes. CSR discourse, it is important to note, has spread across organizational forms, contributing to a more standardized blueprint for proper organizing regardless of sector (Pope and Meyer, 2015). Originally targeted to businesses, CSR discourse increasingly implicates, for example, non-profits. Many non-profits now participate in the CSR movement in equal standing with corporations. Many now have codes of conduct and  are rated according to their transparency and accountability (Bromley and Orchard,  2016). Non-profits now publish responsibility reports through the Global Reporting Initiative, certify the sustainability of their facilities through the LEED programme, or participate in global CSR associations such as the World Economic Forum. Of course, CSR is not the only management idea that non-profits have borrowed from businesses, in the process contributing to increased isomorphism across organizational forms. Non-profits have also adopted a business-like emphasis on metrics, expressed in new courses of strategic planning (Bromley et al., 2012) and formal programme benchmarking and evaluation (Hwang and Powell, 2009). Non-profits, lastly, have become more like businesses through the adoption of softer marketing skills related to logos and branding campaigns (Delmestri et al., 2015; Drori et al., 2013). Proposition 3a:  Management ideas provide new content that redefines the boundaries of proper organization. By selecting from the enlarged stock of management ideas available in the discursive environment, management engages in moments of decision-making that enables organizations to enact their status as actors. Actorhood is not routinized, but discretionary. Bureaucratic administration suggests activity, not actorhood. Rational calculation and decision involves integrating and balancing a set of considerations that are difficult, if not impossible, to accurately weigh, and thus requires actors for legitimation and accountability (Brunsson, 1982, 1990, 2007). Organizations as actors must seek out new ideas of how to do things better, scan the environment for threats, and aim to continually innovate and improve. Organizations generally choose from the stock of legitimated management ideas because, as discussed above, they are beholden to a larger and larger set of empowered stakeholders, who will heavily punish failures not premised on norms of good practice. Management acts out its actorhood by searching for and adopting or rejecting management ideas. The associated processes of evaluating and deciding to keep or drop management ideas is premised on the stock of management ideas itself, which sets the boundaries of legitimate organizational actors in an environment of ­multilateral accountability and extensive professionalization. This leads to the following proposition: Proposition 3b:  Management ideas provide occasions for an organization to enact its status as an actor.

420    s. pope and p. bromley Our final argument is that the relationship between organizational actors and management ideas is bi-directional. While management ideas constitute organizations as actors, as organizations become standardized as actors, management ideas spread more easily. For point-to-point diffusion to occur smoothly, as observed by Strang and Meyer (1993), receptor sites have to be socially constructed as essentially similar. In the present case, organizations are constructed as rather standardized social actors—actively scanning their environment for sources of improvement and insight into proper activity. A good organizational actor, thus, will take up a new management idea more easily than an organization that is less of an actor. As professionalized and empowered managers scan their environments for good and justifiable ideas, as management ideas become more abstract and more portable across sectors, such that new recommendations can be imagined to apply to any organization, management idea diffusion increases in reach and intensity. These arguments help to explain a key finding of a historical analysis of the sixteen major management fads since the 1950s (Carson et al., 2000). Recent decades saw a larger number of highly popular management ideas, which tended to diffuse more broadly. Whereas the 1960s saw only one major management fashion (sensitivity training), the 1970s saw two (quality of life programmes and quality circles), the 1980s saw four (corporate culture, total quality management, ISO 9000 standards, and benchmarking), and the 1990s saw six (employee empowerment, horizontal corporations, vision, re-engineering, agile strategies, and core competencies). This study, this is to say, seems to demonstrate that the organizational system itself has become more amenable to management idea diffusion. In sum, we argue: Proposition 4a:  Management ideas will diffuse more rapidly as organizations become actors. Proposition 4b:  The diffusion of management ideas will extend across organizational forms (e.g. firms, non-profits, government agencies) as organizations become actors. The influences that generate the spread of management ideas across organizational forms likely come in two directions. First, organizations that are actors are more likely to adopt any given idea, even ideas that are not intended for their form, because organizations see themselves as an abstract unit. Second, because management ideas are becoming more abstract, the ideas themselves are more likely to apply to an array of organizational forms.

Limitations and Future Research We have sketched our arguments in broad strokes. We do not, for example, consider the expansion of which arena of scientization (e.g. an academic field, the consulting industry, the business press, etc.) is more strongly associated with management idea

management ideas and the construction of organizations     421 expansion. Our arguments are also not based on an original dataset. Future empirical study could usefully collect and classify a longitudinal sample of management ideas to refine our general arguments and tease out the mechanisms involved. Importantly, our arguments do not suggest an inevitable trajectory of management idea expansion, nor do they imply organizational homogeneity. Our causal story is rooted in specific cultural transformations that vary across time and contexts. It is quite plausible, for example, that the trends we identify are stronger in contexts where centralized and/or traditional forms of authority are weaker. It may be the case, further, that we will see a return to older organizational forms with the recent resurgence of nationalism and populism in some quarters of the globe. Existing studies indicate the possibilities of further research in this direction. For example, CSR-related management ideas appear to have diffused much earlier throughout Western societies where there is a greater emphasis on individualism and discretionary virtue (Matten and Moon, 2008; also see Guillén,  1994). Likewise, management ideas related to quality circles have emerged and diffused more readily in Eastern cultures where there is a greater emphasis on collectivism and social cohesion (Dahlgaard et al., 1998). Empirical study of the domains that most attract management ideas would also be useful. Adopting a management idea is perhaps particularly attractive when there is no obvious functional solution; professional managers take on the role of creating rules and making sense in domains where the problems are not merely technical. Sometimes responses are defined by law or accounting rules, but sometimes a quasi-professional (e.g. chief trust officer, chief sustainability officer) legitimates the organization’s approach by drawing on dominant ideas in the wider field. Our main contention is that adopting ideas is not just about diffusion. As professionals, managers and consultants bring in ideas, they reshape the boundary of the organization, defining what it can and should do. Ideas are central in determining where organizational boundaries will exist, as these boundaries are constructed rather than natural demarcations. Suddaby and Viale (2011), for example, outline in detail how professionals are a source of institutional change—in the process (perhaps unintentionally) defining and constructing ­organizational actors.

Conclusion and Implications As the study of management ideas has grown, scholars have increasingly noted the importance of linking this research to broader organization theory. Responding to these calls for cross-fertilization, we have formed initial arguments that suggest that the study of management ideas is, or should be, central to understanding organizations as social constructions. We have drawn on institutional theories to observe that management ideas play a central role in setting the boundaries and roles of organizations. We have pointed to cultural transformations related to individualism, scientization, and mass education that have driven the expansion of management ideas (in numbers and

422    s. pope and p. bromley domains), shape their nature (abstract), and influence their subsequent diffusion (increasingly rapid and indiscriminate across organizational forms). This recognition of the role of management ideas in constructing organizations in general (not just in solving technical problems of specific types of firms or non-profits) helps to explain why management ideas are now spreading so readily across different sectors and domains (for-profit, non-profit, government agencies). In addition, we have focused on the centrality of management ideas in the construction and enactment of organizational actorhood. Management ideas do not just flow from and into fixed organizational entities; as ideas emerge and diffuse, they reshape our understanding of what an organization can and should do. Specific ideas are often ephemeral, but as a whole their expansion is linked to durable, deeper notions of actorhood that are increasingly based on the notion that organizational actors should be socially responsible. Moreover, linking management ideas to organizational actorhood provides purchase on understanding waves of reform as endemic to the system (beyond the particularities of why any single idea comes and goes; see Power, 1997, for similar arguments about auditing). Organizational actors should be actively scanning the ­environment for strategies and practices to adopt and evaluating and monitoring their current practices. This expectation of actorhood provides an overall explanation for why we see a general proliferation of managerial ideas along with rapid waves of diffusion and deinstitutionalization. The chapter in this volume by Martin Parker details an additional implication of our analysis. His chapter, likewise, observes the hegemony that management ideas have gained in organizational discourse, the prevailing perception that management ideas offer ‘the best way to organize’. Parker contrasts management ideas, singular and prescriptive in their pursuit of greater organizational control and performance, with the dizzying variety of organizational structures that humans have devised. Communes, sects, charities, associations, matriarchies, and dozens of other examples are rooted in ‘other places, other times, other politics’ and associated with a very wide range of organizational processes and desired outcomes. Parker suggests that this rich ­organizational history and the many insights that can be gleaned from it have been lost by our ­ontological commitment to the elitist notion of ‘management’. Our chapter, in short, could be read as a backstory to Parker’s: management ideas have become so ascendant and so unshakeable because they have been ushered in by tectonic shifts to our cultural bedrock. Parker’s chapter puts forward a worrisome implication of this expansion: since management ideas presuppose managers and hierarchy, their expansion may create and reinforce occupational inequality. A final implication that emerges from our analysis is that the elaboration of management ideas contributes to organizational expansion. Abstract management ideas allow for the creation of standardized practices across organizations and throughout ­organizational fields (see also Rasche and Seidl, in this volume). Myriad widely known institutions, practices, and ideas can be imported rather quickly and easily to constitute local settings. Management ideas connect organizations to the wider world, embedding them in a discursive time and place. An odd consequence is that a tension emerges whereby an organization that adopts more outside ideas is more of an actor, but one that

management ideas and the construction of organizations     423 is constructed by, and dependent on, external cultural resources. Management ideas not only emerge from cultural and societal transformations, they also contribute to them by providing the conceptual foundations of a global organizational society. The implications of management ideas extend, in short, far beyond management.

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chapter 23

The Role of Fa mily Fir ms i n Cor por ate Susta i na bilit y Pramodita Sharma and Sanjay Sharma

Introduction In this chapter, we examine the management idea of corporate sustainability that has emerged in response to societal concerns about climate change, clean air and water, warming oceans and rising sea levels, the destruction of natural capital, and income inequality and poverty. Over the past three decades, as these issues have grown in visibility and urgency, efforts at multiple levels have attempted to facilitate the adoption of this idea by business organizations. Even as the urgency and global awareness of sustainability challenges grows, the concept of corporate sustainability has not yet become a widely adopted panacea for businesses (cf. Bort, 2015). Examples of successful adoption in family-owned businesses suggest lessons that may be learnt in diffusion of this idea to business firms in general. Thus, our chapter is framed around the following question: How do family businesses integrate sustainability practices into their products, process, and business models and what lessons from such firms are applicable to non-family firms? In addressing this question, we begin by briefly explaining the concept of sustainable development and the barriers to diffusing it widely in business. The subsequent section develops arguments to examine why one type of business organization, the family firm, is more likely to adopt and integrate the idea of corporate sustainability. Drawing primarily on examples from cases of three family firms, we explain how two defining features of family firms are likely to facilitate the integration of the sustainability idea in these firms. First, family firms have a transgenerational temporal orientation and longer leadership tenures that facilitate the integration of new ideas into organizational culture and systems, practices, and routines. Second, decision-making in family firms is usually

428    p. sharma and s. sharma by a dominant coalition of a small group of closely related individuals that facilitates a shared vision and the organizational control to align employees behind the vision. An understanding of how the management idea of corporate sustainability is adopted by family firms not only has the potential to draw lessons for non-family firms, but is critical in and of itself because family firms constitute 60 per cent to 98 per cent of all businesses in most countries (e.g. Fernández-Aráoz et al., 2015; La Porta et al., 1999). While a large proportion of small and medium business is family controlled, a McKinsey study in 2010 found that 60 per cent of private sector companies with revenues of over $1 billion in emerging economies were owned by founders or families. It is estimated that by 2025, family-owned businesses will represent nearly 40 per cent of the world’s large firms, up from 15 per cent in 2010 (Björnberg et al., 2014), necessitating research into this fast-growing segment of the economy. Family business scholars have only recently turned their attention to understanding questions related to innovation and entrepreneurship in family firms (e.g. Cohen and Sharma, 2016; Goel and Jones, 2016). This is an opportune time to examine the diffusion of sustainability ideas in family firms and begin the process of co-consumption of these ideas (cf. Ansari et al.,  2010; Heusinkveld et al., 2011; Reay et al., 2013), especially as the next generation contemplates its entrepreneurial role in society. We further argue that not all family firms will be equally adept at adopting the corporate sustainability idea. Mid- to large-sized firms, controlled by families that play an active leadership role in their institutional environments, are in a better position to lead ­sustainability initiatives within their organizations. The timing of adoption of the idea in the lifecycle of the family firm would also influence the degree of adoption. We conclude by suggesting that policies to encourage broader adoption of corporate sustainability could focus on these family firms as important catalysts. In the concluding section, we offer recommendations for initiatives for wider diffusion of corporate sustainability ideas, followed by a few emergent research questions.

Corporate Sustainability: Concept and Diffusion The Brundtland Commission Report titled Our Common Future put forth the idea of sustainable development as the ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED, 1987). This report posited that sustainability of the planet and its non-renewable resources are linked tightly to social equity within and across generations. It called for balancing economic development with social justice and environmental preservation, thereby necessitating changes in political, economic, and social systems. This includes a role for business as a central player in the global economy. Major sustainability challenges such as climate change transcend national boundaries. Hence, early efforts at diffusion were via multilateral agreements such as the 1997 Kyoto

the role of family firms in corporate sustainability    429 Protocol and 2015 Paris Climate Accord. However, sovereign countries that have to implement these agreements are subject to internal priorities and political landscapes. The withdrawal of the USA from the Paris Accord in June 2017 is an example of the difficulty of implementation at a national level. The widespread media coverage of such agreements and popular documentaries like the Oscar award winning The Inconvenient Truth were instrumental in increasing awareness of the general concepts of sustainable development. Popular books such as Natural Capitalism (Hawken et al., 2017 [1999]) and Capitalism at the Crossroads (Hart, 2005) presented corporate sustainability as a challenge of business innovation and radical transformation to secure the future of firms by preserving and substituting depleting natural resources with services; insuring against unpredictable weather patterns due to climate change that add considerable risk and costs to their operations; and addressing social inequities that enhance operating risk and cost by sparking political conflicts, terrorism, and instability (Sharma, 2014). The concept of triple bottom line urged firms to measure their performance on three dimensions of people, planet, and profits (Elkington, 1997). Efforts at enhancing social justice and environmental preservation while fostering economic development amongst the poor sparked grassroots initiatives such as the ‘Base of the Pyramid (BoP)’ network and unique business models such as the Grameen Bank and Grameen Phone. In 2006, global awareness of sustainable development received a boost with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohammed Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, a not-for-profit focused on enhancing social justice via micro-entrepreneurship. The management idea of corporate sustainability has been advanced in a number of ways. Academic societies such as the Organizations and Natural Environment (ONE) Division of the Academy of Management (AoM), Greening of Industry Network (GIN), and the Group of Researchers on Organizations and the Natural Environment (GRONEN), bring together academics, practitioners, government, and NGOs to foster discussions on the role of business, public policy, and civil society in addressing ­sustainability challenges and diffusing solutions, and best practices. Consultants help translate the academic research into implementable practices via corporate training workshops and coaching. A few college/university programmes have emerged to develop the next generation of business and public policy leaders capable of handling the challenge of sustainable development. Examples include graduate level programmes with a focus on sustainability at Bocconi, Cornell, Duquesne, HEC (Paris), Nottingham, Michigan, Oregon, and UNC-Chapel Hill. While most of these programmes add specializations by saddling a few sustainability courses onto their existing programmes, others like the Sustainable Innovation MBA (SI-MBA) at the University of Vermont have reinvented the MBA by developing fresh courses and a brand-new programme fully integrated in multidisciplinary research, teaching, and immersion experiences that embed students in firms to develop new business models and implement sustainable ventures (Sharma and Hart, 2014). Knowledge about corporate sustainability has grown over the past three decades as scholars in multiple disciplines have explained the motivations of firms to undertake sustainability strategies, processes used to build organizational capabilities to adopt and implement sustainability strategies, and linkages of such strategies to financial

430    p. sharma and s. sharma ­ erformance. This research has primarily relied on data from large public firms with p dispersed ownership. Such businesses have the resources, technology, and global reach to undertake disruptive innovations in business models, processes, products, and supply chains in order to generate positive social and environmental impacts, while creating shareholder value. Nevertheless, sustainability practices are far from a universal norm. We need greater understanding of why and how, other than a few leaders, business firms in general adopt and effectively implement sustainability ideas to fit their unique contexts (Heusinkveld et al., 2011; see also Rasche and Seidl, in this volume). We explore this by examining the unique organizational context and characteristics of family enterprises. We begin by explaining the importance of the organizational context, that is, why does ownership and control by a family matter to the adoption of corporate sustainability? Family firms generally have longer-term orientation, longer leadership tenures, and decision-making by a closely knit dominant coalition that can facilitate a shared vision and effective organizational control. While these characteristics increase the likelihood of adoption, the diffusion of corporate sustainability between different family firms would differ depending on the firm’s engagement with the institutional environment and the timing within the family business lifecycle. We elaborate these concepts below.

The Role of Organizational Context We contend that the diffusion of corporate sustainability is inhibited because research and practice has mainly focused on a very small segment of large, mostly publicly listed companies and paid limited attention to the globally dominant organizational form of family firms. Since family firms usually have a focus on transgenerational continuity, they tend to have longer time horizons than non-family firms (Chua et al.,  1999). Separation of ownership and control in publicly listed firms, short and declining ­managerial tenures (from 4.6 years in 2014 to 4.2 years in 2016 according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics), and a focus on quarterly reporting of financial data, lower incentives for managers of publicly listed firms to make resource investments that would yield benefits beyond their tenure at the firm. In contrast, family firms are controlled and managed with an intention for transgenerational continuity and the business follows the vision held by a dominant coalition, a small closely knit and often related group of people. These factors provide the leadership of family firms with the ability and willingness to invest patiently for benefits that would only be accrued by future generations (De Massis et al., 2014; Miller and Le Breton-Miller, 2005a, 2005b). The vision has a significant impact on the strategy of a firm at a point in time because of the influence of the controlling family (Lansberg, 1999), and a likelihood of being stable over time as the family has a central influence in shaping lifelong values of subsequent generations (e.g. Brigham et al., 2014; Gomez-Mejia et al., 2011; Nicholson, 2015). Given these characteristics of family firms, and their deep-rooted, widespread, and growing impact on the global economy and society, not only can we learn from their

the role of family firms in corporate sustainability    431 experiences in implementing sustainability practices, but the full engagement of family firms in spreading corporate sustainability can significantly increase the co-creation and co-consumption of this management idea (cf. Heusinkveld et al., 2011; Rogers, 2003). Below we discuss factors that drive businesses in general to adopt corporate ­sustainability. Then, using case examples, we discuss the unique attributes of family firms that make them more likely to integrate this idea in the organization (Ansari et al., 2010; Rogers, 2003).

Diffusion of Corporate Sustainability in Family Firms Institutional forces influence how external ideas enter the sphere of an organization and drive it towards sustainability strategies that are isomorphic with other organizations in the field (Hoffman,  1999). Nevertheless, adopters are not passive accepters (Ansari et al., 2010; Oliver, 1991). Responding to the influences of stakeholders in their immediate environment, adopters moderate and/or mediate the influence of institutional forces on their firm’s sustainability strategy to create a better fit between an external practice and their unique context (e.g. Jennings and Zandbergen, 1995; Reay et al., 2013). The corporate sustainability literature has shown that managerial values and attitudes play a critical role in the development of firm-specific capabilities that enable the successful adoption and implementation of sustainability practices in organizations (e.g. Bansal, 2003; Cordano and Frieze, 2000; Fineman, 2006; Sharma, 2000). The firm’s owners, top management team, and board of directors have a significant influence in championing and driving the adoption of a firm’s sustainability practices (Anderssen and Bateman, 2000; Kassinis and Vafeas, 2006; Walls et al., 2012). As the concept of ­sustainability continues to evolve, managers need the time, discretion, and motivation to develop a shared vision and meaning of sustainability within their firm in order to build a case for investment of resources for implementing the vision. Drawing on data from three family firms, we elaborate why family firms have a higher propensity for the adoption of the corporate sustainability idea. Supreme Creations, based in London is a second-generation family business and the world’s largest manufacturer of reusable bags, packaging, and promotional textiles. It is a vertically integrated firm owning most of its supply chain including manufacturing facilities in India and imbues fair trade and sustainable practices across every stage of its supply chain. Amongst its many recognitions is the Prince of Wales Business in the Community Award. Interface, based in Atlanta is a second-generation family business that pioneered closed loop operations to manufacture recyclable carpets and floor coverings. Their founder, the late Ray Anderson who died in 2011, was a legendary global advocate of sustainable business and established long-term goals for a continuous corporate journey towards mission zero (in terms of carbon footprint of the firm’s operations) that have

432    p. sharma and s. sharma catalysed constant innovation in the firm. Benziger Family Winery, based in California, is a third-generation family business and a pioneering leader in biodynamic practices in its vineyards and wineries. All three firms have not only led by adopting and diffusing sustainability ideas and strategies but have been active in their respective institutional environments to facilitate adoption by others.

Temporal Dimension Diffusion of information, adoption of new ideas, and development of knowledge within a firm require implementing deep changes that take time. Ryan and Gross’s (1943) classic study of 259 farmers in two Iowa towns illustrates this process. The study revealed a modal frequency of seven years in spread of knowledge about a sturdier and more productive hybrid corn seed, while complete adoption occurred ten years after the idea was first introduced. Even when the clear performance and financial advantages of hybrid corn were demonstrated by the most trusted of influencers, their neighbours, farm operators including late adopters, at first dedicated only a fraction of their field to the new corn so they could experiment with it before complete acceptance. Sustainability initiatives vary in terms of the time required, resource investments needed, the level of coordination across various corporate departments, and perhaps most importantly in their compatibility or fit with the prevailing organizational norms, values, and culture (Ansari et al., 2010; Roome, 1992). Some initiatives such as eco-efficiency can be undertaken within short time frames. For example, 3M developed its 3P (Pollution Prevention Pays) and Dow its WRAP (Waste Reduction Always Pays) initiatives quickly in the early 1990s and have since saved billions of dollars via reduction of waste, material use, and energy savings. However, initiatives that have the greatest environmental and social impact such as developing new clean technologies, new business models that substitute services for physical activities, and developing a sustainable supply chain take time to materialize (such as the deep changes in its business model made by Interface), require high levels of resource investments, and may generate returns only in the longer term (Hart, 1995). Long-term orientation comes naturally to family firms as the incumbent leaders often view themselves as stewards working for their next generation (Craig and Moores, 2017). For example, during a conversation, a second-generation family member of the Benziger Family Wineries in California explained the adoption of the sustainability idea: Our family has run the Benziger Winery for over two decades with a great deal of passion and love for the craft of winemaking. For many years, we followed conventional practices without giving it a second thought. One morning I looked out of the window and saw our family’s children headed to school through a cloud of herbicide being sprayed by our low flying crop duster. That is when I had my epiphany. We lived on the land—the winery was our home—our children would continue to live in this community and the land. We owed it to the family and to our future

the role of family firms in corporate sustainability    433 generations and to the land to work toward a sustainable ecosystem that would be healthy and productive forever. The unexpected by-product of a sustainable winery has been a dramatic improvement in our wines which have won many awards for quality and taste. Perhaps the entire farm ecosystem shares the joy of the family in the land and this joy is manifest in wine quality.  (Emphasis added)

Benziger Family Wineries are now one of the leaders in biodynamic practices in the industry. These practices go beyond organic methods in not only eliminating all chemicals but also adapting to the unique terroir and ecosystem of the vineyard and incorporating environmental influences such as the phases of the moon and knowledge of life forces to bring about balance and healing in the soil. The adopted changes have led to a series of awards for the quality of Benziger Family wines, and in turn, higher prices and profits. Similarly, Ray Anderson, the founder of the family firm Interface, spoke about the emergence of the firm’s vision: As we began our long journey to climb the sustainability mountain, at each turn and at each phase new challenges opened up and presented new opportunities and ­avenues for innovation in our products, processes, operations and supply chains. We continuously challenged ourselves pushing the goal-posts further as we headed toward mission zero.

In examining the business from the lens of sustainability, the firm saw itself as providing customers with aesthetic and comfortable floor surfaces rather than carpets. Interface changed its business from selling carpets to leasing floor comfort via carpet tiles. The company maintains ownership of the carpet tiles and is responsible for keeping them fresh and clean. Its employees perform monthly inspections and replace worn or stained tiles, which are recycled in its manufacturing. The tiles are self-stick, significantly ­reducing glue fumes used to lay traditional carpets. This model has converted the business from a seasonal business to a steady year-round revenue stream. This is a win-win for all: the customers can write off lease charges against income and have consistently fresh-looking carpets; Interface’s profits are higher due to the leasing fees and lower use of energy and a closed loop raw material cycle; and the environment gains via significantly lower landfill disposal and lower material and energy use. These changes helped Interface become the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpets for residential and commercial markets. Most family firms have transgenerational ambitions and may realize these in unique ways. In some cases, the roots of sustainability sown at the founding of a venture are amplified as the next generation joins. Supreme Creations started as a pioneer in substituting jute bags for plastic in stores such as Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury, Top-Shop, and Nike. On joining the business, Smruti Sriram, the 22-year-old daughter of the founder, accelerated the vision by converting the simple jute bag from a sustainable grocery carry bag into an upmarket sustainable fashion accessory carried by top models, film stars, and well-known musicians. The firm now has over 50,000 global clients. Smruti Sriram

434    p. sharma and s. sharma explains that while sustainable products attract an increasing number of people, ‘you need to create something that beautiful people are proud to wear’. Increasingly medium and large family firms combine responsible ownership with professional executive leadership to ensure transgenerational continuity of vision (Nicholson, 2015; Ward, 2004). Anderson at Interface, recognizing a diversity of passions amongst the family’s second-generation members, used his strong control over the firm to bring in professionals with a passion for, and expertise in, implementing ­sustainability practices to, in his words, ‘embed sustainability into the long-term mission and strategy of the company’. Others choose to pass the controlling ownership and leadership to the next generation of the family. The third generation of Benziger Wineries is in major operating roles alongside the second generation. Their fourth generation, still young children, are being introduced to the business and its sustainability vision. Regardless of the pathway chosen to transition leadership in family firms, the long leadership tenures in family firms facilitate their ability to leave an indelible mark on their companies. Implementing sustainability initiatives requires managers to continuously stay connected with evolving knowledge in the field, adapt these ideas to fit their context, ­motivate employees to innovate, and embed the new ideas into organizational routines. Managers with short stints at different organizations are less likely to leave strategic deep-rooted and long-lasting imprints at any one organization. Even those endowed with deep connections in their professional community and a good understanding of sustainability principles, need time to contextualize these ideas in the organization, build the trust of influential shareholders and the dominant coalition, and rally support for testing the ideas before eventual implementation. While experienced managers with a positive orientation towards solving sustainability challenges are able to implement changes quickly, their departure from the organization before such initiatives are fully embedded into routinized practices will make it easy for those negatively impacted by these changes to revert to old familiar practices. Family firms, on the other hand, have a longer temporal perspective that reconciles sustainability (transgenerational equity) with family business (transgenerational continuity).

Effective Organizational Control Unlike standardized management ideas such as Six Sigma, organizations cannot adopt corporate sustainability ‘off-the-shelf ’ (Ansari et al., 2010). It requires deep changes in organizational processes, systems, operations, and culture and a deeper reconfiguration and modification to suit the organizational context (Reay et al., 2013). Diffusion and adoption of such practices will therefore be significantly influenced by the degree of technical and cultural fit with an organization, the political skills and clout of the championing manager(s), and the extent to which such practices can be tested. Ideas that can be adopted on a trial basis with smaller investments are more likely to gain acceptance (Ansari et al., 2010; Reay et al., 2013; Rogers, 2003).

the role of family firms in corporate sustainability    435 Developing a shared meaning and vision in an organization becomes increasingly difficult as a firm grows larger and more complex with multiple layers of managers, several quite distant from the top management team and the controlling owners of a firm. Thus, a closer connection between owners and managers of a business, as found in family businesses, is helpful to develop and implement the sustainability vision of a firm. For example, successive generations of the family firm SC Johnson have adhered to the core family vision of stewardship and responsibility towards society. Under the previous CEO, Sam Johnson, and after succession to Fisk Johnson, the company has embraced sustainability by analysing its products and reducing or eliminating toxic chemicals and developing micro-entrepreneurship in slums such as Kibera in Kenya to raise incomes and self-sufficiency at the base of the pyramid. The tenures of employees of family firms also tend to be longer (Miller and Le BretonMiller, 2005b) because such firms are slow in laying off employees during difficult economic conditions. This helps build resilient trust and loyalty among employees (Block, 2010). This trust complemented with organizational control systems that empower employees, enable them to innovate to support the sustainability vision. Supreme Creations owns a modern factory in Pondicherry in India, with its own design, printing, stitching, and finishing departments providing control over quality and ensuring a supply chain that meets the highest sustainability standards. While the location in India provides low cost economies in manufacturing, 90 per cent of the workers are women and 60 per cent come from underprivileged backgrounds. The workers are paid a living wage that is higher than that earned by other workers in the region and the working conditions are amongst the best in the garment industry. As a result, their worker turnover rate is 4 per cent compared to the industry average of 10–15 per cent. Dot Foods Inc. is the largest food redistributor in the USA with sales of over US$4.5 billion. It employs over 4,000 workers. The family attributes its success to employee loyalty. In the 1970s, when it was a small business, founders Robert and Dorothy Tracy established an employee retirement plan and maintained a no-employee-lay-off policy, even when they lost two major contracts in the 1980s. In 1999, the employees thanked the Tracys by raising $25,000 to buy a 53-foot trailer so that the firm would not have to ­relocate outside of Mount Sterling, Illinois (Cohen and Sharma,  2016). This form of resilient trust is difficult to build within top management teams of non-family firms consisting of professionals with personal agendas and goals, short tenures, and devoid of the power that comes with the alignment of ownership and leadership. Innovation to address sustainability challenges is catalysed by integrating sustainability into the corporate identity and providing managers with the discretionary time and resources to experiment (e.g. Sharma et al., 1999). Family firms are likely to be more agile because they have an advantage in internal diffusion of ideas and practices due to shorter channels of communication, shared values, and the role of dominant coalitions (e.g. Duran et al., 2016). Hence, they are more likely as compared to non-family firms to develop a shared internal understanding and vision to implement sustainability ­strategies and practices. In Benziger Wineries, with an aim to stay at the leading edge of sustainability practices, four generations of the family work together and meet regularly

436    p. sharma and s. sharma to discuss the latest developments in biodynamic and sustainability practices around the world. In Supreme Creations, the father and daughter work together to innovate around the sustainability vision. According to Smruti Sriram, the next phase is to develop a distinct brand identity for the firm through design instead of being the ‘brand behind the brand’.

Diffusion Differences between Family Firms While a longer temporal perspective and effective organizational control are the defining features of family firms (Bluedorn, 2002; Sharma et al., 2014), we recognize that not all family firms are currently leaders in the adoption of corporate sustainability initiatives. The active role of family members in their institutional environment and the timing of adoption are important factors.

Active Role in the Institutional Environment Ryan and Gross’s (1943) study mentioned above revealed that the spread of knowledge and the spread of conviction (motivation to adopt) were distinct processes influenced by different community members. Adoption of new ideas is rapid when members of an organization’s dominant decision-making coalition connect with, and are active in, their market, industry, or professional associations (e.g. Burt, 1999; Rogers, 2003). Leaders of these organizations are integral members of their professional communities that lead efforts to contextualize and co-create knowledge for their industries and regions (e.g. Heusinkveld et al., 2011; Reay et al., 2013). Research on Spanish and Italian family firms showed that when family members take an active leadership role in their professional associations and external community, they are more successful in driving and championing strategic changes within their firms (e.g. Parada et al., 2010; Salvato et al., 2010). This is especially relevant since the meaning of sustainability is evolving and socially constructed in interactions between a firm and its stakeholders including industry associations, professional bodies, regulatory agencies, and local communities (Sharma, 2014). The active participation of the firm in more proximate channels such as industry associations and communities influences idea penetration and subsequent adoption at organizational levels. R. Sriram, the founder of Supreme Creations, actively lobbied the British High Commissioner in India to provide incentives and subsidies from the UK government to build the jute bag factory in Pondicherry; lobbied big grocery stores in the UK and companies such as Nike to substitute jute bags for plastic ones; and lobbied

the role of family firms in corporate sustainability    437 for the imposition of a 5p levy on plastic bags to not only reduce waste but also boost the firm’s business. Smruti Sriram networked with celebrities to adopt the jute bags as a fashion and environmental statement. Ray Anderson of Interface became an advocate for corporate sustainability, speaking to leadership teams of companies all over the world including prominent companies unrelated to his industry such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, inspiring them to accelerate adoption of sustainability ideas. Similarly, the Benziger family members are advocates for sustainable practices and are willing to provide e­ xpertise to other wineries in Sonoma and Napa Valleys in California. They are also advocates for such practices with local and state government, industry associations, regulators, retailers, and restaurants. Long-lived family firms are deeply embedded in their communities and are more responsive to both external and internal stakeholders (Miller and Le Breton-Miller, 2005b; Pearson et al., 2008). They have an advantage in developing a richer and evolving understanding of sustainability via interactions with their constituents. Hence, we expect controlling families whose members are actively involved in their local and professional communities, are better positioned to lead and diffuse sustainable development initiatives.

Timing in the Family Business Lifecycle The vision of sustainability can emerge with the founder(s) as was the case with Ray Anderson of Interface or R. Sriram at Supreme Creations, or carry over as the longterm philosophy of stewardship as with the SC Johnson family. It may be reinforced when the next generation joins forces with the founding generation as in the case of Supreme Creations. It may emerge during times of leadership succession when a next-generation family member with a strong vision of a sustainable business takes over as in the case of the second generation of Benziger Wineries. New values and norms are rarely introduced during the ‘working together’ phase when the dominant coalition does not change (Gersick et al., 1997). This is because going against established norms will create conflict and add risk to an established business model that family members will wish to avoid. A change towards a vision of sustainability may also happen when the family business growth matures and the firm faces saturated markets. At this stage, the family is more likely to seek major strategic rethinking and shift as each generation tries to carve its unique contribution to the legacy firm (Chrisman and Patel, 2012; Kammerlander and van Essen, 2017). Facing saturated markets and seeking to make their own distinct mark on the family firm, the next generation of family members may be more likely to explore opportunities in emerging markets and in new business models that address sustainability challenges. They may be more conducive to experimenting with ­sustainability initiatives related to renewable energy, clean water, and service-oriented models to substitute material intensity as has been done by firms such as Interface, Airbnb, Flixbus, Uber, or fair-trade

438    p. sharma and s. sharma supply chains that foster micro-entrepreneurship amongst the poor, such as SC Johnson’s initiatives in Kenya.

Conclusion and Future Research We started by asking how family firms implement ideas of corporate sustainability and how other firms can learn from their experiences. We argued that because family firms tend to have a long-term orientation, effective control by a small group of closely related individuals, and dominance of economies in most countries, they can effectively bring sustainability ideas into practice. Thus, we contend that lessons drawn by examining the diffusion of sustainability in family firms can generate insights for non-family firms seeking to adopt corporate sustainability. Given the need to unleash the ingenuity of business in addressing sustainability challenges, there is need for not only scholarship but also integrated academic programmes that incorporate unique family business dynamics into business education while integrating sustainability as the driver of long-term competitive imagination and growth (Hart and Sharma, 2004). Executive education programmes that bring together scholarship in family business and sustainability with practitioners from family and non-family firms have the potential to facilitate and catalyse knowledge building and adoption of corporate sustainability and transfer of knowledge from family to non-family controlled firms. Such programmes would generate research and teaching cases to unleash the power of the dominant sector of the global economy (family business) to solve our s­ ustainability challenges. While most of the literature on corporate sustainability has focused on large public firms, there are a few studies that examine the impact of the family firm on the community, society, and the environment. These include studies by Berrone et al. (2010), Dyer and Whetten (2006), and Sharma and Sharma (2011). Dyer Jr and Whetten (2006) studied corporate social responsibility and citizenship as community and philanthropic initiatives. They found that family firms whose owners and managers personally identified with their firm were more likely to undertake corporate social practices, and concluded that having the family name on the business led them to avoid any practices or actions that might damage the firm’s reputation. Building on these findings, van Gils et al. (2014: 193) noted that ‘family businesses are more attuned and attentive to social issues and stakeholders than nonfamily business. Noneconomic motivations (e.g. reputation, socioemotional wealth, and stewardship) appear particularly salient to family enterprises.’ They concluded with a call to understand ‘how and why family firms make socially conscious decisions’ (van Gils et al., 2014: 202). This call has still not been fully addressed and offers an area of fruitful research. However, family firms have both a bright and a dark side that may in turn make them more likely to enhance or to inhibit the adoption of the management idea of ­sustainability. On the positive side, when relationship conflict is minimized in family

the role of family firms in corporate sustainability    439 firms, the kinship ties and shared history of the family and business can facilitate the development of shared norms and trust in family, leading to causally ambiguous decision-making mechanisms that are critical for organizational capability development and deployment (cf. Coleman, 1990; Pearson et al., 2008). On the negative side, family involvement in business can be dysfunctional as it adds complexity to business by intensifying the degree and tenacity of conflicts amongst family members who may have differences in their visions and goals (Eddleston and Kellermanns, 2007; Grote, 2003; Sorenson, 1999). In turn, such differences cause confusion in strategic direction and possible paralysis of action in the dominant coalition as divergent powerful family groups pursue competing objectives (Gersick et al.,  1997). Both the extent of family involvement in business and its consequences as reflected in the relationship conflicts within the controlling family, are likely to vary across family firms and within a family firm over time. Moreover, the intensity of relationships and relationship conflicts within the family group is generally higher both in positive and negative directions as compared to similar non-family groups. Furthermore, because family firms are more likely than non-family firms to base their decisions on non-economic criteria that relate to the creation and preservation of socio-emotional wealth, relational conflicts (or a lack thereof) are more likely to influence decision-making. Although efforts are under way to develop valid and reliable measures for sustainability performance (e.g. the stewardship climate scale by Neubaum et al., 2017), sustainability remains an under-researched phenomenon in the family business domain. At the same time, there are calls to adopt a greater temporal perspective in both sustainability (e.g. Bansal and DesJardine, 2014) and family business research (e.g. Sharma et al., 2014). The time is ripe for scholars and educators to use the temporal lens to link the sustainability concept to the family firm context with a potential to bridge the gap between global level multilateral agreements on sustainability challenges and organizational level implementation to diffuse and adopt the concepts at the local level to generate innovations and solutions. This presents opportunities to examine how sustainability ideas are adopted and adapted by family firms to deliver a triple bottom-line performance across generations, and build on these findings to improve uptake in all types of firms. We hope that the ideas set out in this chapter will help to encourage such initiatives.

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chapter 24

M a nagi ng Pu blic Serv ice Professiona l s U n der N ew Pu blic M a nagem en t Michael Reed

Introduction Over the last four decades, public service professionals across a range of Anglo-American political economies and welfare systems have been forced to adopt a core set of management ideas associated with New Public Management (NPM) (Ackroyd, 2013; McLaughlin et al., 2002; Moran, 2007; Newman, 2001, 2005, 2013; Pollitt, 2007; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). The NPM paradigm has passed through a series of conceptual iterations and adaptations that have enabled it to absorb innovations in management thinking concerning ‘culture’, ‘leadership’, and ‘networks’ and to revitalize its relevance and meaning for the organization and control of public service professionals. While by no means confined to Anglo-American contexts (Hall et al., 2015; OECD, 2010; O’Reilly and Reed, 2011; Reed and Wallace, 2015), professionals and managers working within these systems especially have found themselves struggling to cope with successive waves of institutional reform and organizational restructuring. These changes radically questioned, if not totally undermined, previously taken-for-granted assumptions about ‘public service’ and professionals’ key role in ensuring that it is protected. Previously stable and bureaucratically well-ordered institutional environments and work domains (Abbott, 1988; Hood, 1991; Newman and Clarke, 2009) have been progressively subjected to policies and programmes of privatization, marketization, franchising, and financialization. The NPM paradigm has intellectually mutated from a relatively low-level configuration of administrative ideas aimed at incremental technical reform into a fully-developed neo-liberal strategy of ‘creative destruction’ (Barzelay,  2002; Hood,  1991; Raco,  2013;

444   m. reed Styhre, 2016). Thus, the core management ideas embodied within a NPM paradigm have legitimated and mobilized a fundamental transformation in the work situation of public service professionals—how their roles are defined, performed, evaluated, and developed (Clarke, 2005; Clarke et al., 2007; Raco, 2013). Indeed, the possibility of flexibly exercising professional autonomy within a rule-based system—‘bureau-professionalism’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997)—has given way to a regime of ‘network-consumerism’ in which the layers of organizational complexity and competitive uncertainty become so dense and elongated that nobody seems to be able to answer the key question of ‘who is in charge around here?’ (Buchanan et al., 2007). Public service professionals now operate in a world dominated by ideological instability, political division, and organizational fragmentation that is likely to continue to define their work situations over the next decade or more. The rationale for this chapter is to identify key management ideas that have constituted the NPM paradigm as it evolved. It will analyse their impact on the work of ­professionals as they adapt to the new ways of designing and delivering public services. It will also assess the longer-term implications of the transformation in organizational forms and occupational practices that NPM has legitimated, particularly as it undergoes a ‘neo-liberal turn’ towards intensified market fundamentalism on a global scale (Cahill, 2014). While not underestimating the internal contradictions and tensions entailed in the neo-liberalism that later forms of NPM have facilitated, the chapter suggests that there is sufficient resilience and durability within NPM to sustain its status as the dominant management paradigm shaping policy formulation and implementation in public services. In this respect, the exposition and analysis provided in this chapter initially focuses on the underlying intellectual continuities that have shaped management thinking in this field by highlighting the status of NPM as a ‘unit-idea’ which has the capacity to encapsulate and communicate universal truths about the nature of management theory and practice (Nisbet, 1970). Once this initial specification of NPM as a ‘unit-idea’ has been outlined, the chapter moves on to trace its ‘conceptual career’ in a number of different public service systems. It is a generic intellectual framework that has creatively absorbed and reworked other key management concepts, such as ‘culture’, ‘leadership’, and ‘network’ as they have taken on increasing salience for management theory and practice. Subsequently, the impact of this, now institutionalized, but still dynamic and creative, NPM paradigm on management thinking will be assessed. Finally, the future prospects for public service professionals under the new regimes of control and accountability that NPM has legitimated and ushered in will be considered.

NPM as a Unit-Idea Nisbet (1970) argues that unit-ideas have four key characteristics which give them their status as ‘governing concepts’ within their field of application. First, they must have generality across a wide range of groups of thinkers, rather than be limited to the work of single individuals or coteries within the field. Second, they must have continuity in the

public service professionals and new public management   445 sense of being observable and relevant throughout all phases of a field’s intellectual development and history. Third, they must be distinctive in that they identify and define what makes their conceptualization of the field significantly different from others. Finally, they must be fully developed in that they constitute narrative frameworks within which ‘vision and fact unite; [that is] within which insight and observation are brought together’ (Nisbet, 1970: 5–6). Unit-ideas offer a generic conceptualization of a field of interest and possess sufficient analytical power, organizational coherence, and practical relevance to give them the degree of intellectual resilience and historical longevity required to sustain themselves as ‘governing perspectives’. While there are obvious parallels here with Kuhn’s concept of ‘paradigm’ (Hacking, 2012), unit-ideas don’t achieve the degree of cognitive and ­organizational closure associated with ‘normal science’. Rather, they must retain the internal intellectual flexibility and porosity which equips them to adapt to changing contextual conditions—what has been termed elsewhere ‘interpretive viability’ (Benders and Van Veen, 2001). However, unit-ideas must retain the intellectual and practical capacity to absorb, reshape, and revitalize other ideas that may have been around for some time, but now require analytical resuscitation and empirical refurbishment. Since the 1980s, a plethora of management techniques have been transferred from the private to the public sector in order to generate a series of incremental design and process innovations often aimed at improving the operational efficiency and effectiveness of public service organizations, seemingly overburdened by bureaucratic ‘red tape’ and managerial inertia (Barzelay, 2002; Kirkpatrick and Martinez, 1995; Pollitt, 1993). By the early 1990s, these relatively low-level and operationally focused, ‘technical fixes’, such as advanced policy evaluation methodologies or more effective organizational redesign tool-kits, had coalesced into a system-level change narrative. NPM began to take on doctrinal status and significance as a strategy of cultural and structural transformation through which public service organizations and their personnel, particularly their front-line professional employees, were to become entrepreneurial, performance-driven, market-disciplined, and micro-managed (Clarke and Newman,  1997; Dunleavy and Hood, 1994; Hood, 1991). Ten years later, the doctrinal status and significance of NPM seemed assured as it took on an increasingly international standing and relevance beyond the Anglo-American welfare systems in which it had originated (McLaughlin et al., 2002; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). While the way in which NPM was theorized, legitimated, and implemented was open to historical, geographical, and institutional ­variation (e.g. Ashworth et al., 2013; Hall et al., 2015), a core set of ideas could be identified as providing the doctrinal configuration around and through which NPM could be mobilized as a ‘unit-idea’. The ideological traction and geographical reach which NPM had achieved by the first decade of the new millennium could not disguise internal contradictions and tensions. Only through continuous injections of relatively high-level, conceptual innovation and political reinforcement could NPM hope to maintain its status and significance as a ‘unit-idea’. It needed to speak both to the strategic needs of policymaking elites and the operational requirements of system managers, desperate to sustain an overall narrative

446   m. reed to give some sort of coherence and credence to their, seemingly random and chaotic, interventions. Thus, twenty years after its embryonic emergence as a technical intervention, subsequently infused with cultural and political significance, NPM began to absorb new understandings. Here, as set out below, the management ideas of ‘culture management’, ‘transformational leadership’, and ‘network governance’ resonated with a neo-liberal ideology and policy paradigm that exuded self-confidence in its power and authority (Hood and Dixon, 2015). These ideas were seen to be at the leading edge of private sector management innovation, extolling the liberating virtues of post-bureaucratic organizational forms and the hybridized modes of managed professional firms (Du Gay, 2000). Culture change management had been a central concern for NPM from its earliest formulations, but it assumed even greater importance as NPM began to assimilate ideas and techniques from organization theory and management consultancy literature. This emphasized the centrality of ‘managing through values’ for reimaging and re-engineering public services as entrepreneurial enterprises driven by the search for ‘excellence’ (Styhre, 2016; Watson, 2001). Indeed, the ‘reinvention’ of government and welfare that NPM began to promise, as it moved through the second phase of its development from the late 1990s/early 2000s, was driven by a deep-seated rejection of a still-dominant bureaucratic culture valorizing an administrative ethic of ‘responsibility’ over an entrepreneurial culture of ‘action’ (Du Gay, 2000, 2005). Only by sweeping away the outmoded, if not obsolete, commitment to bureaucratic constraint and to equity through a radical culture change programme driven by the imperatives of competitive excellence and performance enhancement could the new modes of policy delivery associated with NPM be brought to life (Clarke, 2005). This reinvention of government and welfare through a sustained programme of ­radical culture change management also required a revolution in thinking about ‘leadership’ and the ways in which leaders were identified, selected, and developed (O’Reilly and Reed, 2010, 2011). Public service culture, the exponents of NPM insisted, was dominated by a hybrid model of professional and managerial leadership in which deferential collegiality, hierarchical patronage, and informal collusion were the prevailing ­mechanisms through which power was distributed and influence exercised. In its place, NPM proffered a model of ‘transformational leadership’ in which public service managers and professionals were to come together to form ‘coalitions of the willing’ dedicated to joined-up, participative modes of service organization and governance. These would be much more open to the growing influence of ‘citizen/consumers’ on the co-production and evaluation of service delivery (Clarke et al., 2007; Newman, 2013). Finally, radical transformations in cultural forms and leadership mechanisms were to be institutionally re-embedded within modes of ‘network governance’. This combined centralization of strategic policymaking with devolution of operational management, consistent with the drive to break down functional silos and break up professional monopolies (Ferlie et al., 1996, 2013; Pollitt, 2007; Strategy Unit, 2006, 2008). Horizontal networks of professionals, coordinating their expertise across a complex range of specialisms, such as cancer research and treatment networks, were expected to translate

public service professionals and new public management   447 policy directives emanating from a much smaller, more streamlined political centre into rolling programmes of practical intervention. Here, scarce resources were targeted to solve highly complex and seemingly intractable problems. Within these horizontal networks, still centrally directed and evaluated, senior professionals were expected to play a critical leadership role in developing, designing, and legitimating the informal norms and formal mechanisms through which ‘network governance’ became a viable mode of self-regulation and management. This was evident in fields as diverse as local government best practice, social services benchmarking, and leadership development programmes in the health and education sectors (Newman, 2013). In this respect, NPM absorbed a shift towards self-managing ‘networks of expertise’ by institutionally ­re-embedding them within governance regimes that retained significant elements of hierarchical decision-making alongside devolved operational control (Reed and Wallace, 2015).

NPM and Neo-Liberalism Towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, increasing doubts about the capacity of the ‘new NPM’ to cope with the escalating complexity and uncertainty of public service organization and delivery began to be heard within elite policy circles, as a much more strident and politically confident neo-liberalism gained ideological ascendancy. This was based on market liberalization and its supporting delivery mechanisms— privatization, consumerism, contracting, outsourcing, downsizing, casualization, and (de/re)regulation (Blyth, 2013; Cahill, 2014; Crouch, 2013, 2016; Davies, 2014; Peck, 2010; Raco,  2013; Styhre,  2016). Public service managers and ­professionals within AngloAmerican welfare systems especially, were now expected to internalize, or at least conform to, a new policy and governance regime driven by ‘an open-ended and contradictory process of politically assisted market rule… that has always been about the capture and reuse of the state in the interests of a pro-corporate, free-trading market order’ (Peck, 2010: xii, 9). This neo-liberal playbook for the direction, control, and management of public services would entail a dramatic shift, for managers and professionals alike. It was a move away from internal ethical protocols and disciplinary-based mechanisms of accountability towards external systems of performance review that elevated ‘market-based principles and techniques of evaluation to the level of stateendorsed norms’ (Davies, 2014: 6). Once the logic of market competition and its technologies of calculation is legitimated as universal, managers and p ­ rofessionals find themselves in a situation where sectional interests and contestable values have been transformed into unchallengeable ‘common sense’, deeply embedded within the institutional cultures and structures that now dominate their working lives. Neo-liberal managerialism contains several contradictions and tensions that offer public managers and professionals the opportunity to exploit ‘organizational spaces’ where, not insignificant elements of occupational autonomy and control can be secured and even extended (Buchanan et al., 2007; Newman, 2013). The key structural contradiction

448   m. reed concerns the recurring oscillation between a centralizing drive (that pushes strategic control over policymaking into the hands of a small number of remote and unaccountable executive bodies) and a decentralizing dynamic calling for enhanced levels of devolved operational autonomy and stakeholder participation (Hoggett, 1991, 2005). The core ideological tension was expressed in a policy commitment to push the marketization and corporate franchising of public services as far and as quickly as possible, alongside a parallel commitment to secure enhanced levels of consumer accessibility and citizen accountability through mechanisms such as personalized service and the co-production of service delivery (Bowman et al., 2014; Clarke et al., 2007). It was left to the operational judgement and ingenuity of front-line service managers and professionals to fill in the gaps and suture the fissures which these contradictions generated. This involved a plethora of compromises and fixes in order to sustain service delivery at some minimum level of acceptability often in the face of austerity-driven budget cuts, increasing levels of demand, and heightened levels of organizational fragmentation (Buchanan et al., 2007; Farrell and Morris, 2003; Ferlie et al., 1996, 2013; Newman, 2005, 2013). Parallel power relations began to develop, presenting new opportunities for professionals to circumvent managerial control (Currie et al.,  2012). These spaces include appropriating for their own purposes the operational techniques associated with neo-liberal NPM such as quality control assessment, culture change programmes, and financial risk evaluation. In turn, however, new cadres of ‘specialist designers, advisers, and evaluators’ emerged to operate new surveillance and performance systems over front-line service managers and professionals (McNulty, 2003; McNulty and Ferlie, 2004; Miller, 2005; Raco, 2013). In this respect, neo-liberalist managerialism comes to produce a ‘neoliberal bureaucracy’ that subjects service managers and professionals to a regime of detailed and continuous micro-level surveillance and control, more intrusive and restrictive than anything experienced under the old-style ‘bureau professionalism’ hybrid that had dominated public service management until the 1980s. By the time we get to the early 2000s, we can identify the emergence of a neo-liberal governance regime that provides the administrative infrastructure through which policy elites within Anglo-American welfare systems can begin to implement the programmes and practices that will transform public services from producer-dominated cartels into consumer-driven markets. This transition within neo-liberal managerialism has been described by Hibou (2016) as a hybridized form of bureaucratization that followed a ‘twin-track differentiation trajectory’; first, it is spread by reformist organizations using a generalizable restructuring template, and then by detailed systems of instrumentation and techniques of assessment and control. Throughout both these trajectories, private corporate power plays a ­strategic role in ensuring that public service reform comes into line with the rules of the market and the requirements of private enterprise. This hybridization of public–private power generates a new governance regime in which legal, parliamentary, and formalized rule-based systems of regulation and accountability are superseded by executive orders, secondary legislation, and commercially confidential financial partnerships r­ adically blurring the constitutional distinction between the public and private domains of

public service professionals and new public management   449 decision-making. Public service professionals find themselves operating in an increasingly ‘deinstitutionalized’ environment in which public accountability is hollowed-out by private corporate power and the state is privatised at local, regional, national, and international levels of governance (Jessop, 2016; Seymour, 2014). This process has drastically curtailed, if not totally subverted, the capacity of bureau professionalism, and the legal-rational bureaucratic structures on which it normatively and organizationally depended, to resist. Front-line public service managers and ­professionals are then left with the pivotal role of ‘assembling—the alignment of disparate programmes and practices, and the search for coherence in the face of an increasing multiplicity of governmental objects and actors’ (Newman, 2013: 52) that neo-liberal NPM generates. Indeed, one of the innovations which neo-liberal managerialism has promoted in response to the very fragmenting tendencies which it released is the concept of a unitary ‘public service corporate culture’. This aimed to reorientate and reintegrate a wide range of occupational groups around a new set of norms associated with consumer choice, individual personalization, market discipline, and private contracting (Dardot and Laval, 2013; Davies, 2014; Newman and Clarke, 2009). Once these ideas have been sufficiently well-promulgated and inculcated across and within public service occupational groups, professionals and managers will, it is claimed, be finally liberated from the bureaucratic cage in which neo-corporatism had previously ensnared them. Sweeping away the cultural mishmash of collective provision, administrative regulation, rule-based equity, and public transparency that had defined and legitimated ‘bureau professionalism’ became the crucial precondition for the successful mobilization of a counter-cultural movement around ‘public services’. Aligning this with ‘transformational leadership’ and ‘network governance’ provided exactly the right combination of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power through which public services were to be remade for a twenty-first century world dominated by globalized neo-liberal capitalism and the perpetual cycles of ‘creative destruction’ that it demanded. However, the authority, status, and role of public service professionals within this ‘brave new neo-liberal world’ were now more contestable, uncertain, and precarious. Individuals found themselves cut adrift in a world where the normative and institutional supports that had previously provided them with secure occupational identities, formal organizational authority, and defined employment status were being eaten away. They were undermined by a political ideology, policy regime, and governance discourse profoundly distrustful of ‘elite authority’ and the claims to ‘expert knowledge’ on which it depended (Crouch, 2016; Leicht, 2016).

Public Service Professionals Remade We have seen how the ideological, institutional, and organizational context within which public service professionals operate has been radically transformed by successive phases and reincarnations of management ideas embedded in NPM-led reform

450   m. reed since the 1980s. This has culminated in a form of neo-liberal NPM crystallizing around a regime of market fundamentalism and technocratic governance that rejects the political compromises and organizational trade-offs characteristic of ‘bureau professionalism’ and the neo-corporatist system of conflict resolution (Fairclough, 2010). Within such regimes, public service professionals seem to be relegated to a secondary role. They become facilitators and coordinators of services that are now driven by market competition, individualist consumption, and ‘value for money’ rather than by expert knowledge, collective good, and client need. They no longer occupy leading positions in the decision-making hierarchies and networks through which policy is formulated and implemented. Professionals once found little or no need to legitimate their role in aligning scarce resources. But they now find themselves in a situation where they struggle to be heard, much less to be listened to, above the cacophony of competing voices that clamour for attention within the ‘marketplace for public services’. Yet, as research continues to demonstrate (Buchanan et al., 2007; Currie and White, 2012; Kirkpatrick et al., 2005), professionals remain the central players in mediating and translating higher level policy initiatives and structural reforms into implementable programmes and practices. They still remain organizationally pivotal within a public service change process that refuses to conform to the ‘discursive imaginaries’ promulgated by neo-liberal zealots (Fairclough, 2010). Indeed, as Peck (2010) has pointed out, the neo-liberal project is a continually ‘failing forward programme’ that repeatedly underperforms in relation to both its long-term policy goals and more immediate programme objectives. Professionals are more often than not called upon to paper over the cracks and fill the gaps that these failures leave in their wake (Hood and Dixon, 2015). But, as Peck (2010) also notes, this repeated cycle of policy mistakes and programme failures usually calls for renewed vigour and commitment on the part of those who are charged with turning the neo-liberal vision into an organizational reality. Considered in these terms, public service professionals might be said to be mediating between the theoretical abstractions of a neo-liberal policy regime and the everyday realities of an organizational coal-face that risks significant collateral damage and ‘political fallout’ from ‘system-wide transformations’ of the neo-liberal project. In this sense, professionals may feel that they have been freed from the corporatist bureaucratic cage only to be re-incarcerated in the neo-liberal market order. The escalating series of work-related pressures and occupational stresses which result seem to be exacting a social and psychological toll in relation to burnout, recruitment crises, and successive waves of early retirement (Thomas and Davies,  2005). Nevertheless, professionals remain of ­critical significance insofar as it is their ability to negotiate some sort of meaningful coherence in the face of recurring crises in service funding, staffing, organizing, and managing which ‘keeps the public service show on the road’ and allows policy elites to sustain a change meta-narrative or ‘policy-storyline’ that all will be well (Fischer, 2003). The pattern of recurring crises experienced under austerity-driven, neo-liberal NPM has led some researchers to suggest that a new, hybrid form of public service professionalism

public service professionals and new public management   451 may be emerging that conceptually recombines selected elements of ‘consumerism’ and ‘citizenship’ to create an innovative conception of ‘civic professionalism’ (Clarke et al., 2007). This is seen to dilute the ideological commitment to expert authority ­typical of orthodox, technocratic conceptions of professionalism, with a substantial infusion of ‘civic value’ and ‘citizen accountability’. Here, public service professionals can perform their core role of aligning disparate programmes and practices with the long-term goals embodied in policy strategies. In turn, this embryonic form of ‘civic professionalism’ is also seen to resonate with the call for co-production of public service delivery. Here, service users are given a much more powerful voice in what is delivered, how it is delivered, and the evaluative criteria against which it is assessed (Newman, 2013). This putative shift towards civic professionalism/service co-production dethrones the core legitimating principle of technocratic professionalism—that is, the status and role of the professional as the ‘expert legislator’. Rather, the professional is reimagined as a ‘skilled mediator’, well-versed in the micro-politics of organizational change within a neo-liberal policy and governance regime that oscillates between the theoretical purity of market fundamentalism and the pragmatic reality of managed incrementalism (McDermott et al., 2013). As Newman (2013: 43) also suggests, these developments seem to signal a very d ­ efinite shift away from technocratic NPM, in which the primary analytical and empirical focus is on reconciling professional and managerial logics in the organizational form of ‘professional bureaucracy’. Rather, a neo-liberal NPM calls for a much more complex realignment between market, professional, and managerial logics in the shape of ‘network governance’. Other researchers (e.g. Reed and Wallace, 2015) have tried to tease out the full implications of network governance under neo-liberal NPM for the power, status, and identity of public service professionals by focusing on the ‘sealing-off upwards’ as well as the ‘mediating downwards’ that they have to perform. Here, public service ­professionals not only have an important role to play in mediating and translating macro-level policy into middle-range programmes and micro-level practices, but also in ensuring that political and administrative elites remain insulated or sealed off from the political and media fallout that ensues when things, inevitably, go wrong. Thus, neo-liberal NPM institutionalizes a governance regime within which formal executive and administrative power are sealed off from ‘undue’ political pressure. This is mobilized by interest groups who remain outside the protective shield erected by a ‘shadow elite’ of professional influence brokers (Jessop, 2016; Wedel, 2009). In this way, senior public service professionals spend much of their time ‘looking up’ rather than ‘mediating down’ in that they have to work very hard at ensuing that the political and administrative elites are in a position to defend themselves in the event of abstract theory colliding with recalcitrant reality and coming off the worse. This also creates increased opportunities for conflicts, not to say polarization, between middle-level managers/professionals, who find themselves striving to paper over organizational cracks, and senior-level managers and professionals who are much closer to the policy elites who are nominally driving the ‘neo-liberal juggernaut’.

452   m. reed

Conclusion: Professional Futures Having traced the movement of NPM through its technocratic, managerial, and neo-liberal phases and its implications for the organization and management of public service professionals, this chapter concludes with a summing up and consideration of the future possibilities that are presented to us in relation to how ‘public services’ are defined and what kind of management ideas and ‘delivery system’ they require. Twenty-first century public services are likely to be conceptualized and provided in radically different ways to those which prevailed up until the emergence of ‘first wave’ NPM in the 1980s. Technocratic NPM inherited a conceptualization of what public services are from the neo-corporatist/Fordist welfare state system that preceded it (Burrows and Loader, 1994). This institutionalized public services as financed, largely if not completely, through relatively high levels of public expenditure generated through progressive taxation. Here, professionals are able to exercise a high degree of autonomy in the way they go about their work and the way in which their performance is evaluated. They were subjected to relatively ‘light touch’ central state control and direction. Technocratic NPM also provided a series of ‘technical fixes’—better policy and organizational design, accounting methods, and evaluation techniques—through which public services could be provided. During the course of the 1990s, ‘second wave’ managerial NPM ideas began to ­redefine the ‘public services’ and to offer much more substantial challenges to the terms on which the, always uneasy, concordat between managerialism and professionalism had been fashioned. The market began to make selective and controlled inroads into the institutional domain of public services and the moral foundations on which it rested. In short, ‘internal markets’, ‘performance reviews’, and, more generally, the ‘audit culture’ (Power, 1997) started to make a substantial impact on the way in which public services were imagined and provided. Professionals now found themselves subject to a much more intrusive, intensive, and systematic form of surveillance and control. Target regimes, information technologies, and micro-management techniques were deployed in pursuit of a ‘re-engineered welfare state’ that moved towards an entrepreneurial culture. Here, intra-service competition and individual enterprise were the new touchstones of service organization and governance. Once easy assumptions about the continued viability of universal public services provided free at the point of delivery were now subjected to critique and re-evaluation. This occurred in a political context where there was an incremental ideological/policy shift towards market competition and discipline directed at efficiency and effectiveness through weakening producerdominated cartels and monopolies. By the early 2000s, ‘third wave’ neo-liberal NPM was pushing on an open ideological and organizational door to the extent that it promised a new revolution in public services. They were to be defined and provided through a radical realignment between ‘markets’, ‘metrics’, and ‘management’ in which marketization, rationalization, and bureaucratization were to be selectively recombined to break any remaining ‘restrictive’ professional practices and managerial inertia. But this was a very different change

public service professionals and new public management   453 strategy to that mobilized by managerial NPM previously. Here, limited organizational re-engineering and controlled internal markets were brought in within a governance regime in which professionals still remained the key actors in resource allocation and performance evaluation. With the ascendancy of neo-liberal NPM, the ‘gloves are now well and truly off ’ in relation to: market-driven competitive tendering; large-scale outsourcing to private corporations; performance management systems designed and operated by independent ‘corporate experts’; and the institutional embedding of ‘marketlike structures and pricing for services into the fabric of the public sector’ (Seymour, 2014: 137). Thus, neo-liberal NPM facilitated a process of change in which ‘it is increasingly easy for private interests to privatize ownership and control of [professional] knowledge’ and to mount a concerted ‘attack on the idea of public service professionalism and its associated ethic’ (Crouch, 2016: 65, 68). Once this neo-liberalization of professional expertise gained sufficient political support and organizational traction, it became that much easier to strip away the ethical inhibitions and legal-cum-administrative constraints on professional practice. By prioritizing the search for competitive advantage and increased profitability, neo-liberal NPM entailed the imposition of market values on public life and of market discipline on public service professional work. This occurred through a series of interconnected policy initiatives and organizational mechanisms that eroded the ‘high-trust’ cultures in which professionals once operated, by subjecting them to ‘low-trust’ governance and control regimes (Thomas and Davies, 2005). In the course of putting public service professionals ‘firmly in their place’, neo-liberal NPM offered policy elites a reform narrative and strategy through which a fundamental transformation in the moral order and institutional structure of the public sector could be legitimated and implemented. This was so to the extent that professionals become subject to the same regime of market incentives and organizational controls as all the other occupational groups and were instructed to prioritize the market over any and all other ‘intrinsic incentives and controls’ embodied in their internal disciplinary codes and practices. As Freidson (2001) prophesized, public service professionals were remade as mere technical advisers in the service of a market economy. Neo-liberal NPM enrolled them into a new occupational culture and identity in which market competition and corporate profitability suppressed any challenge from alternative normative systems grounded in collectivist and collaborative values (Leicht, 2016). Yet, this ‘enrolment’ is by no means complete, nor does it amount to a ‘colonizing’ process that goes uncontested and untrammelled by countervailing sources of political power and moral authority. A major focus for future research in this area will be the medium to long-term impact of further institutional and occupational hybridization within public services on the crowded and complex ‘contested terrain’ for professionals, managers, and technocrats. This is not least the case when the underlying structural contradictions—and the surface-level ideological tensions which they generate—offer opportunities for professionals to exploit possibilities for counter-cultural initiatives and alternative ‘discursive imaginaries’ (Fairclough, 2010). Indeed, there are emerging signs of an ideological backlash against the ‘long march of neo-liberalism’ through public services which professionals may be able to leverage to good effect (Hall et al., 2015).

454   m. reed This resistance is sometimes grounded in a communitarian/populist tradition that rejects both managerialism and market fundamentalism, and the destruction they have wrought in collectivist modes of service provision (Judis, 2016; Werner-Muller, 2016). Rather, ‘civic professionalism’ seeks out innovative ways to reconcile consumerism and citizenship in new forms of service organization and delivery. It invites much stronger involvement from those it is meant to serve and would seem to dovetail with broader ideological and political movements extolling the virtues of strengthening communal participation and local engagement (Clarke et al., 2007). But this challenge to neoliberalism, whether from the political right or left, also presents very real dangers to public service professionals as they strive to carve out a new position and role in any post-neo-liberal NPM regime. This is due to the fact that the very strong ‘anti-elitist’ ideological strains contained within it (Werner-Muller,  2016) can be very easily mobilized to attack all forms of ‘expert power and authority’ that draw on claims to specialist knowledge and skill which are seen to undermine the overriding legitimacy of ‘the general good of the people or community’. Overall then, managerial NPM embedded public service professionals in a ‘neoWeberian state’ (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011) that strengthened managerial power over professionals, but still left them in a relatively strong position to retain autonomy within their ‘jurisdictional domains’ (Abbott, 1988). But neo-liberal NPM encased p ­ rofessionals within a ‘neo-liberal state’ which simultaneously subjected them to a twin-track regime of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ controls, severely weakening their capacity to resist. It subjected professionals to an integrated regime of market competition and direct, if remote, hierarchical command and control. This was mediated by cadres of senior managers and professionals who both ‘look up’ and ‘look down’ in their efforts to insulate executive and administrative elites from bottom-up pressure and to placate middle and lower-level personnel increasingly dissatisfied with their lot. Neo-liberal NPM then, facilitated a state based on ‘authoritarian populism’ and the concentration of executive power (Jessop, 2016; Streeck, 2016). It is within this ‘long neoliberal interregnum’ (Streeck, 2016: 34–6) that public service professionals will now have to carve out and sustain whatever institutional niches and organizational spaces they can.

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CHAPTER 25

M a nagem en t Ideas i n Ev ery day Life Philip Hancock and Melissa Tyler

Introduction Management ideas are no longer solely confined to the coordination of complex, often commercial, organizations. Rather, they frequently clamour for our attention across a range of cultural media that champion and celebrate the advantages to be gleaned from the management of our everyday lives (cf. Sagawah, 2017). From how much sleep we should get, to how often we have sex (and for how long and with whom), from what friends we should make to how many steps we should take each day, our lives appear to be evermore subject to ideas and values geared towards rendering us increasingly efficient, competitive, and successful, in an evermore demanding world. As Keenan (2015: 1, emphasis added), somewhat breathlessly states: You are your most valuable asset and it makes sense to take care of this to the best of your ability if you are to get the best return on yourself . . . Managing yourself effectively is a key element in this process.

At the same time, this is a phenomenon that has also received less enthusiastic attention. Management and organization theorists working in a more critical tradition (cf. Hancock and Tyler,  2009), and often influenced by the work of philosophers such as Henri Lefebvre (1992, 2000) and Jürgen Habermas (1984, 1987), amongst others, have noted how an unreflexive adherence to narrowly defined ideas of productivity and efficiency can diminish our capacity for critical and creative thought, not to mention restrict our autonomy though a process of what Habermas, in particular, refers to as colonization. For others, the spatial and temporal barriers between what one might term our working lives and our everyday lives of leisure, relaxation, and relative informality have become increasingly permeable. These changes have resulted in what has been described as a ‘social factory’ (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Tronti, 1962), in which all life is put to the

management ideas in everyday life    459 service of productivity and value creation (Fleming, 2017; Fleming and Spicer, 2004; Marcuse, 1972), pushing us to embrace the promise that by managing our personal performance not only at work, but also at home, we will not only survive, but prosper. This chapter critically examines how modern management ideas—or more accurately the values of rationalization that frequently underpin them (Urwick, 1929)—manifest themselves in and through such incursions into everyday life. It also considers how such ideas have combined with developments surrounding the importance of entrepreneurship (Duobiene and Pundziene, 2007), as an increasingly managerial virtue, in order to help shape an often culturally ubiquitous orientation towards the production of more efficient, competitive, and successful subjects (see also Parker, in this volume). In order to achieve this, the chapter specifically considers the ways in which such ideas can be seen to underpin the ongoing mass appeal of lifestyle magazines and self-help texts that offer their readers what are portrayed as quick fixes to often complex problems—if indeed they are problems. These range from the pursuit of a particular physical appearance, through the need for restful sleep, to the enjoyment of personal relationships—mobilizing the language of self-management and the application of, for example, principles of planning, efficiency, and the expectation of a return on investment, as tools of everyday self-regulation and improvement. Commencing with a brief discussion of management ideas and the everyday, with a particular focus on the importance of rationalization and the contested nature of everyday life in modernity, the chapter then offers an historical consideration of the impact of management ideas on our everyday lives beyond the workplace. Next, through a critical review and discussion of the discourse of lifestyle management, especially as it manifests itself in the popular media of magazines and self-help books (see also Barros and Rüling, in this volume), the chapter explores the ways in which the ideas and principles of quantification, planning, objective setting, and even the deployment of management tools such as mission statements have become translated into viable resources for what is presented as the everyday coordination and improvement of people’s lives. The focus is then narrowed to explore how the body, in particular, has become a prominent site of such discursive interventions that encourage us to extract maximum personal utility from everything from healthy eating to successful sex. In the penultimate section, the topic is brought up to date with a consideration of what is perhaps the most recent expression of this particular logic, referred to as the quantifiable-self movement (Lupton,  2016), before concluding by reflecting on the possible opportunities and threats that such incursions might pose to management itself, as well as the sphere of the everyday and those social relations that constitute it. Finally, it tentatively suggests some possible avenues of ongoing research.

Management and the Everyday First and foremost, to speak or write about the management of everyday life inevitably begs two questions; what is meant by ‘management’ or, more accurately, management ideas, and just what is the ‘everyday’? To start with, what exactly constitutes a management

460    p. hancock and m. tyler idea and why one might adopt such a thing are complex and contested questions in themselves (cf. Örtenblad, 2015; Sturdy, 2004), and will be answered in various ways throughout this handbook. As has already been suggested, however, within the context of a discussion of the management of everyday life our focus is primarily on what might be considered one of the underlying principles of many management ideas—rationalization. While commonly associated with the work of Max Weber, who we shall return to shortly, rationalization refers primarily to what Urwick (1929: 20) describes as a managerial approach that favours the ‘scientific organization of labour’, along with an emphasis on standardization, calculation, and the reduction of both waste and effort in the pursuit of both efficiency and effectiveness. While commonly associated with modern management ideas of the early twentieth century (cf. Fayol, 1949; Taylor, 1911), and reaching its apogee in the practices of the Ford Motor Company during the early decades of the twentieth century, as we shall see, these ideas remain evidently pertinent today (see Seeck and Lamberg, in this volume). As to the ‘everyday’, from a common-sense perspective we take it to refer to that sphere of human activity that is predominantly focused on the production and reproduction of mundane and often trivial social relationships (cf. Buckley and Clark,  2015; KalekinFishman, 2013; Nettleton and Watson, 1998; Scott, 2009). Sociologically, the everyday has tended to provide a backdrop to the study of the mundane and intersubjective, underpinned by meanings and practices that are largely unregulated by formal systems of law and commerce but rather, are based on actions grounded in shared values, affect, or tradition (Weber, 1978). For Felski (1999: 15) everyday life is both ‘everywhere and nowhere’, perhaps lacking analytical specificity but alerting us to those often overlooked and seemingly inconsequential human activities that provide not only the context for human organization, but also those contestations and concomitant outcomes that define it. To talk of contestation also alerts one to the fact, however, that conceptions of the everyday have often carried with them a critical dimension; one that is particularly important to this chapter. One of the most influential critical responses to the everyday is to be found in the work of Henri Lefebvre (1992, 2000). Perhaps better known in management and organization studies for his related work on the social production of space (Lefebvre, 1991), Lefebvre considered the everyday to consist of those times and places when people were able to find ‘friendship, comradeship, love, the need to communicate, play etc.’ (Lefebvre, 1992: 97). Yet he also viewed the everyday as a precarious sphere; one constantly under threat from an increasingly regimented, regulated, and restricted logic of rationalization that sought to reduce people’s lives to that of appendages to a system of industrial production and consumption. In a similar vein, the later ideas of Habermas (1984, 1987) have also pointed to the everyday as a significant if also contested terrain. In his bifurcated model of society, human agency is regulated by two forms of social action that operate within two conceptually distinct but related spheres of life: (i) the system and (ii) the lifeworld. Each sphere, along with its associated form of action, is underpinned by its own logic or organizational rationality. The system depends upon a formal or instrumental notion of reason; one

management ideas in everyday life    461 orientated towards the efficient coordination of complex systems of planning and action as, for example, in the regulation and management of national economies or the manufacturing and distribution of commodities. Alternatively, the lifeworld represents the intersubjective sphere of the everyday, underpinned by a conception of substantive or goal-orientated reason. It is here that individuals, groups, and communities can achieve a critical and often creative consensus around shared goals and values, and carry out everyday activities of life, love, and reproduction. For Habermas, like Lefebvre, it is this latter sphere, this everyday lifeworld, that is threatened by the increasingly prevalent incursions of formal reason that reduce discussions of say value and worth, to those simply of practical accomplishment. What unites both theorists and what informs our conception of management, therefore, is a conception of everyday life as something which is, to use Habermas’ phrase, facing colonization by modes of formal rationality akin to those we have identified as underpinning modern management ideas. Thus, while Habermas, in particular, would not be directly hostile towards the values and practices of modern management per se, recognizing their necessary role in the successful functioning of a complex society, what both theorists question is what they would consider to be the tendency of such ways of thinking, and the ideas they generate, to corrupt or ‘colonize’ the creative and normative processes of the everyday lifeworld. That is, by seeking to reduce all thought and communication to what is permitted by a means-orientated rationality—reduced in this instance to the strictures of purposeful calculation, utilitarian ethics, and the pursuit of quantified targets and objectives—such a process can only, from such a perspective, restrict our capacity for critical and creative thought, limiting, in turn, what Habermas in particular believes to be the basis for a pluralistic and democratic society.

Early Managerial Incursions into the Everyday While the emergence of the formal rationality we are associating here with management ideas can be traced back as far as antiquity (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2016 [1944]), as Lefebvre (2000) notes, a distinct conception of everyday life only really makes sense within the context of the modernization processes that swept Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prior to this, the differentiation of social and economic reproduction was, in particular, far less evident with, as Kriedte et al. (1981: 38) observe, the household providing a ‘unity of production, consumption, and generative reproduction’. As the processes of structural differentiation associated with economic and social modernization took hold (Parsons and Bales, 1956), however, so did an increasing distinction between the obligations and responsibilities placed upon individuals during their hours of contractual employment—enforced by an emerging managerial class

462    p. hancock and m. tyler of employee—and the liberties and spontaneity afforded to them outside of these; a principle encapsulated in Robert Owen’s demand for a worker’s day to consist of ‘eight hours labour, eight hours leisure, eight hours rest’ (Cole, 1930). At the same time that such a distinction between the working and everyday lives of people was starting to emerge, however, so was the notion that ideas associated with managing a business or organization could help people—especially the middle classes— to organize the mundane activities of everyday life more effectively. One of the earliest examples of this can be found in what is considered today to be a classic of both its time and type, Mrs (Isabella) Beeton’s (1861) Book of Household Management. In many respects, this is an unusual book. For despite its title, the majority of its pages are in fact simply given over to recipes. Nevertheless, as Dale (2009) observes, the book’s additional emphasis on the importance of enforcing rational domestic hierarchies, the pursuit of precision in calculation, and the significance placed on the division of labour and the appropriate use of technological innovations in the home, sets it aside as an early incursion into the intricacies of the domestic sphere of what would eventually become mainstream management ideas. Nonetheless, the first genuinely significant example of an attempt to infuse everyday life with ideas associated with the principles of rational management ­discussed above did not arise, however, until the early decades of the twentieth century. Henry Ford is widely credited with a set of manufacturing innovations—such as the moving assembly line—that combined rational management ideas with a belief that his employees must have ‘every second necessary but not a single unnecessary second’ (cited in Beynon,  1984: 33). Perhaps more important, however, were his attempts to export these ideas into the homes and everyday lives of his employees, attempts described by Gramsci (1971) at the time as a wholesale effort to produce a ‘new type of worker’ suited to the demands and rigours of industrial mass production. This dimension of Ford’s approach was spearheaded by John Lee, in what became known as his ‘sociological department’. Lee was charged with monitoring and policing Ford’s workforce outside of the formal space and time of waged labour. This was in order to ensure that non-rational consumption or non-optimal activities such as drinking, smoking, gambling, general extravagance, and even excessive sexual activity (Tyler,  2004), were actively discouraged in order to ‘better the financial and moral standing of each employer and those of his household’ (cited in Snow, 2013: 232). This was not simply a moral project, however. As noted above, it served the dual function of both upholding the health and strength of the employee to undertake the work Ford required of them, as well as ensuring that money earned was money spent on the products of a mass production economy that Ford was pioneering. While Ford’s ideas might have once been considered to represent the pinnacle of a rational approach to industrial management (Beynon, 1984), in retrospect, his colonizing interventions into the everyday lives of employees might appear somewhat clumsy. Nor was this an entirely new phenomenon. As Weber (2002) had observed twenty or so years earlier, organizational management, most notably in the form of the legal-rational bureaucracy, was even then starting to have an observable impact on both the practices and structuring of wider society especially, as Hinings and Greenwood (2002) have argued,

management ideas in everyday life    463 in the form of a distinct, and culturally influential, managerial class. Thus, for Weber, bureaucracy was no longer simply representative of an institutional logic of rationalization but was also achieving the status of a cultural logic. It was not until the middle years of the twentieth century, however, especially as a consequence of the Second World War, that ideas drawn from the corpus of rational management thought started to really have an impact on the values and practices of people’s everyday activities (see also Salles-Djelic, in this volume). Certainly, while all sides in the conflict were forced to adopt conservation and redeployment strategies, perhaps nowhere was the move to standardize, simplify, and, to return to Urwick (1929), reduce both waste and effort, pursued more systematically than in Britain. Statesponsored initiatives such as the ‘Make Do and Mend’ campaign launched by the British Board of Trade in 1943 (Cassidy and Bennett, 2012), for example, widely introduced principles of sound and prudent organizational management into the home, maximizing available resources for the war effort, and minimizing domestic waste. At the same time, women, whom this campaign was predominantly directed at, were encouraged to form self-organizing groups to repair clothing for local war workers and share repair and renovation skills; something that, in many senses, paved the way for a new medium through which management ideas might infuse everyday life.

The Rise of Lifestyle Management While the post-war years were characterized largely by a reaffirmation of the formal boundaries between work and home as trade union power grew and the post-war consensus was at its peak, a new cultural medium was starting to emerge that would have a significant impact on the capacity of management ideas—premised on forms of system rationality—to influence a range of everyday values and practices. The lifestyle magazine and self-help book grew out of a host of titles dating back to the 1930s and 1940s, that were originally geared towards providing advice and information on specialist interests ranging from wartime imperatives such as gardening and sewing, to trout fishing and model building (cf. Braithwaite, 1996; Brewis and Warren, 2011). It was not until the 1980s, however, that the idea of lifestyle as something that could be self-managed came particularly into vogue. Riding on the back of what Giddens (1991) has described as the popularization of the ‘project of the self ’, what distinguished the kinds of self-management to be found in this emergent lifestyle literature was the way in which it combined a discourse of systemic rationality with an increasingly popular interest in the virtues of the entrepreneurial subject, frequently embodied in the often-glamorous lives of figures such as Richard Branson and Anita Roddick. The combination of these ideas—that successful management depends on rational planning and execution, and that if this were combined with hard work and commitment one could not only alter one’s economic destiny but shape one’s physical and intellectual identity—increasingly became the lifeblood of the lifestyle

464    p. hancock and m. tyler movement. And nowhere was this illustrated better than in the pages of a plethora of lifestyle magazines and self-help texts in which rational self-management was combined with an entrepreneurial zeal for self-reinvention and promotion as the key to a successful and happy life. These books and magazines quickly came to represent a multi-million-dollar industry (see Collins, in this volume) with a focus on the self-management of everything from consumption and personal styling, to body maintenance and even our relationships with others. They combine entrepreneurial language with the systemic rationality of the management consultant in order to guide their readers on what they claim is a journey of self-discovery and perfection (Hancock and Tyler, 2004). For example, management ideas such as Drucker’s (1954) ‘management by objectives’, or Herzberg’s (1968) ideas surrounding ‘job enrichment’ clearly underpin the message propagated by these publications; namely, that the objective of life is personal meaning, and that in order to achieve this a managerial-like pursuit of clearly defined goals and objectives is the ‘way forward’. Take for example this extract from the UK version of the magazine Men’s Health: MOT your life: Does your life have purpose and direction? Are you in control of your ideas, feelings and actions? Do you have sufficient personal dynamism? In short, how good are you at managing yourself? (Cited by Hancock and Tyler, 2004: 623)

Furthermore, quantification and the use of management tools such as key performance indicators (KPIs) play a central role in discursively translating management ideas and principles into a host of everyday objectives, offering a series of targets that can be measured and evaluated in the belief that, as Drucker amongst others allegedly observed, what gets measured gets managed. Thus, headings and sub-headings such as ‘7 Steps to Happily Ever After’ (cited by Hancock, 2009: 13) abound throughout the literature, especially during the 1990s and 2000s. Similarly, the fusing of ideas sourced from strains of systems management with the science of neurolinguistics underpins the content found across a range of self-improvement manuals that, despite their age, still continue to be circulated and are popular today. Texts such as McDermott and Shicore’s (1999) Manage Yourself, Manage Your Life, for instance, seek to establish human subjectivity as something that must be internally monitored and regulated in order to ‘maximize life opportunities’, ‘achieve peak performance’, and strive for ‘personal excellence’. The idea that personal excellence has become not only an obtainable, but also a worthy entrepreneurial ambition, also draws heavily in these publications on what might be termed the post-excellence literature in management that followed the release of Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1982) and which focused, in particular, on the idea that the management of organizational cultures and brands had become a key managerial priority. So, while everybody was urged to manage themselves as a brand (Montoya and Vandehey, 2002), managerial tools such as the organizational ­mission statement seeped into the domain of the everyday through the pages of highly popular self-help and life coaching texts such as those by Mulligan (1999) in the UK, or

management ideas in everyday life    465 Covey in the USA, whose influential The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1999) argues that not only individuals, but families, can prosper by adopting their own missions; set down as formal statements that will provide a tool for ‘leading and governing one’s life’ and ‘avoiding distractions’. Today, while as we have noted, many of these texts continue to be bestsellers, and indeed have been joined by a number of similar titles such as Duhigg’s (2016) Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, the favourite medium for the circulation of such ideas and values has largely shifted to the Internet with a host of websites offering everything from personalized self-excellence training programmes (), to personal and family mission statement generators (), encouraging readers to become their own management consultants and trainers. Of course, as critics such as Watson (1994) and Parker (2002) have observed over the years, to be able manage one’s life in what is an ever more complex and demanding world is not necessarily a negative thing. After all, nobody wants to feel that they ‘can’t manage’. Yet the concern remains that integral to these offers of a helping hand is another possible colonizing outcome; namely, the further recasting of the creative, embedded, and even perhaps democratic subject as one that is not only constantly managing, but permanently in need of management. A subject that while highly performative, is restricted not only in its capacity for individual, creative, and heterodoxical thought, but one that eventually comes to view happiness in even the most personal and inmate aspects of life as simply a problem of better (and more effective and efficient) management.

Managing Bodies Perhaps nowhere is this colonization process more evident than in the ways in which the body has increasingly become a site of intervention aimed at organizing, regulating, and managing both its form and functions. As Foucault (1979) observed, the human body has long been the site of a host of disciplinary practices that have endeavoured to tame and manipulate it in order to produce a more docile and productive source of human agency. Yet, as with so many socio-cultural and political practices of the past couple of decades, the shift has been away from docility towards a far more active notion of the performative body; one that much like those of Ford’s aforementioned mass production workers of the twentieth century, is conditioned to endure the rigours of an increasingly demanding global economy. For example, health (Hughes, 2009) and even sexuality (Tyler, 2004) are spheres in which the responsibility to manage one’s embodied performance has shifted onto the self-managing individual. In particular, this has taken place through a discourse of personal performance and healthy living that draws on a number of rational management ideas, particularly the careful regulation of flows of both information and potential contaminants, along with the use of feedback loops (Kelman, 2005) to monitor and adjust relevant change activities. The (un)healthy body,

466    p. hancock and m. tyler for example, is increasingly subject to various home testing kits that can check on a range of possible maladies from high blood pressure to food sensitivities, entreating the individual to modify behaviours and develop personal programmes of monitoring and self-regulation. Even sexuality, and specifically sexual performance, has come under increasing scrutiny especially by lifestyle gurus and their publications. From setting quantified achievable objectives in the bedroom to how to elicit 360 degree feedback on one’s performance, sex, or our sense of fear and inadequacy pertaining to it, is now less a sphere of interpersonal intimacy and increasingly an arena in which problems are solved, obstacles efficiently overcome, and targets achieved; one in which we are offered our ‘15-minute foreplay schedule’ and ‘bedroom short-cuts for the over-worked’ (cited by Tyler, 2004: 94). It is not just that such management ideas have permeated life beyond the workplace, however. At the same time, everyday practices and pleasures—particularly those associated with the body—also seem to be ever more present within our places of employment. While the need to manage not only the formal operations of an organization, but also its informal social relations and solidarities has been recognized since the 1930s (Mayo, 2004) if not earlier, today there appears to be an ever-greater movement towards the rationalization of the subject at work through the incorporation of the everyday needs, values, and desires of employees in ways that clearly exceed a traditional employment relationship (Fleming and Sturdy, 2009). Once again, take the example of the management of health where an emphasis on self-management has shifted from the public to the private sphere, and now increasingly into the corporate sphere; particularly through the pursuit of what is being termed ‘wellness’ (Arloski, 2014). While it can, as an organizational if not management concern, be traced back to the eighteenth century it was once again during the 1980s that wellness became something of a fixation (Cederström and Spicer, 2015; McGillivary, 2005a). From gymnasiums and fitness suites in the workplace, to the appointment of company health consultants and therapists (McGillivary, 2005b), the healthy body and mind has become an object of workplace interventions that continue the Fordist project of ensuring that managers are perceived to have a legitimate interest in all aspects of an employee’s everyday life. In some areas, however, any distinction between the embodied everyday and the managerially ordered world of work and those ideas and modes of rationality that structure it have become so opaque as to be virtually meaningless. A widespread moral panic over both the quantity and quality of people’s sleep that emerged during the early years of the twenty-first century (Leadbeater, 2004; Williams, 2011) has, for example, not only led to a series of largely instrumental workplace interventions such as the provision of workplace napping facilities (Baxter and Kroll-Smith, 2005; Munshi, 2017), but also the growth of a ‘sleep industry’ in its own right. In many respects, this is often simply an extension of the lifestyle project of the self discussed above with, for instance, popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan having run articles on ‘9 Steps to Better Sleep’, and books such as Mednick and Ehrman’s (2006) Take a Nap! Change your Life providing a series of plans, processes, and objectives designed to ensure effective and productive

management ideas in everyday life    467 sleep patterns (Hancock at al.,  2009). At the same time, however, businesses geared towards the rational management of our ‘everynight’ lives through the provision of pharmaceuticals, sleep technologies, and expert services, have become highly lucrative enterprises (Hancock, 2008; Williams, 2005).

Quantify Your Life This ongoing drive towards, to revisit Habermas’ term, a colonization of the lifeworld by the kinds of management ideas and logics discussed here shows little sign of abating. At a time when it has been speculated that the increasingly relentless pressure to work is driving employees to an early grave (Fleming, 2017), even those discursive formations such as ‘work/life balance’, that claim to be centred on alleviating the encroachment of formal modes of rationality into the freedom and spontaneity of the everyday world external to work, inevitably seem to fall back on the proposition that this is, at its heart, simply a problem of inadequate self-management (Haughton and Scott,  2015). Currently, at the forefront of this are those who champion what they consider to be the benefits of becoming a ‘quantified-self ’ (Lupton, 2016); a movement that is not only open to, but welcomes, a life governed by constant measurement, appraisal, and the setting of what seem to be albeit never fully achievable objectives. Harnessing technology beyond the already, some would argue, intrusiveness of the mobile phone and ‘always on’ email, the idea behind the quantified-self movement is that by embracing the monitoring, recording, analysis, and reporting on our everyday activities from how far we walk to what and how much we eat and a host of other bodily activities and ‘functions’, we can become more efficient managers of our time, health, and other resources, resulting in greater personal satisfaction and success. Take, as illustration, an article in The Economist (2012) which reports that: GreenGoose, yet another San Francisco start-up, has devised tiny motion sensors that can be attached to everyday items, sending a wireless signal to a base-station whenever the item is used. A sensor can be attached to a toothbrush, for example, or a watering can, or the collar of a dog, making it possible to measure and track how often you brush your teeth, water your plants or walk your dog.

While the quantified-self movement is part and parcel of an ongoing prioritization of improved individual attentiveness to, and rational self-management of, wellness and health, it is also proving popular back in the world of organizational management wherein the promise of big data in particular is becoming readily apparent. Faragher (2017), writing in the magazine of the UK Chartered Institute for Personnel Development, notes, for instance, how the use of personal tracker devices such as the Fitbit, originally designed for personal exercise and health monitoring is becoming an increasingly

468    p. hancock and m. tyler widespread, and largely welcomed, means by which companies can collect personal data, purportedly to inform their management-led well-being strategies: [The] head of business development at Bupa says data is critical in demonstrating return on investment in wellbeing: ‘When it comes to creating a sustainable wellbeing strategy, it has to deliver value to both the employer and the employee. Data provides a clear sense of what is important to their people and helps them decide where to invest to make a meaningful impact,’ she says.  (Emphasis added)

Of course, while much of this may well be true, it begs several critical questions surrounding not only the actual health and interpersonal consequences of conflating ideas such as wellness with value creation and productivity (Moore, 2018), but also what in one’s everyday life should one jettison in order to make time and space for this this ‘meaningful impact’. For those whose apparent fitness and stamina is monitored as they go about their daily work, the temptation must inevitably be to invest even more time and energy in those activities that will help to ensure the required level of performance at the cost of other everyday responsibilities such as family, friends, and one’s community. A critical concern surrounding the infusion of ideas associated with the management of complex organizational imperatives into the sphere of the everyday does not, therefore, simply revolve around a largely metaphysical concern with, to paraphrase Douglas (2002), ‘ideas out of place’; with the reduction of the spontaneous, the intimate, and the playful to the planned, objectified, and calculated. To return to Habermas (1984, 1987) the system, with its focus on the instrumental pursuit of pre-established ends, is limited in its capacity to generate meaning and direction and the creative resources required to envisage sustainable solutions to what are often pressing questions of human flourishing and, increasingly, survival. As such, it is dependent on the lifeworld as a creative, evaluative space, much as complex organizations are dependent upon the everyday sphere for the reproduction of those more creative forms of subjectivity on which they, in turn, depend for innovation and change. In other words, an increasing emphasis on the management of our everyday lives raises justified concerns about the threat it poses to both the interpersonal and social solidarities on which management, and those forms of organization which it serves, relies.

Concluding Thoughts [A]ll life today tends increasingly to be subjected to rationalization and planning, so the life of each individual, including his [sic] most hidden impulses, which formally constituted his private domain, must now take the demands of rationalization and planning into account. (Horkheimer, 2004: 65)

The above passage, originally written in 1947, reminds us that what we have described here as everyday life—the personal, the spontaneous even the ‘hidden’—has long been

management ideas in everyday life    469 subject to forms of rationality that both underpin, and are frequently most clearly manifest in, the ideas and practices of modern management. Where this ultimately leaves the status of management ideas in everyday life remains an open question, however. From one perspective they could be viewed, in the words of Douglas Adams (1992), as mostly harmless; at best a toolbox from which the instruments of a less wasteful and more productive future might be fabricated and, at worst, an indecorous if comforting prop in what seems to be an unceasingly unforgiving world. From the perspective taken here, however, their colonization of the everyday both outside of and within the workplace raises important questions about their possible threat to the integrity of a uniquely valuable sphere of recuperation, creativity, and the very foundations of human sociality. For this reason, if no other, the relationship between management ideas and the everyday continues to be a topic deserving of continued and serious scrutiny. Certainly, if nothing else, this relationship suggests a number of possible avenues of further research. For instance, while some limited work has been undertaken in this respect (Hancock and Tyler,  2004), perhaps the most obvious need is to more fully understand the extent to which such ideas actually have an impact on the value and practices of those who read and subscribe to such lifestyle media and activities such as pursuing a quantified life. That is, can they be said to have the kind of empirical impact that the ubiquity and popularity of say, lifestyle magazines might suggest. Furthermore, even if this is the case it would direct us to explore just how this might be translated into practice both in everyday life, as we have defined it here, as well as in the more formal environment of the work organization. Also, leading on from this, the management of everyday life raises a question of not only application, but also of understanding. That is, how are such ideas actually made sense of in everyday life? Opening up phenomenological questions in relation to the ways in which such ideas are received and made sense of would provide deeper and more critical insights into the possible extent to which management ideas—especially those of a more instrumental or formal character—have become integral to our cultural lexicon and the realm of common sense-making. A further area that deserves to be followed up on is the extent to which the increasingly pervasive role of technology as a medium of greater self-organization is also an effective medium of managerial colonization, both at home and in the workplace. Here, Böhme’s (2012) description of what he terms the increasing technification of everyday life raises an interesting set of problematics. In particular, it highlights the possible roles technologies such as smart phones and a host of complementary gadgets and software now play as actants (Callon, 1986), or socio-material nodes (Orlikowski, 2007) within a broader network of managerial affordances enabling, or perhaps requiring, us to constantly monitor everything from our level of personal activity to eating habits and quality of sleep. Not only does this raise questions about who has access to such data and to what use it is being put, however. It might also lead us to question just what impact it could have on the production of management ideas themselves. For example, will new forms of data, both big and small, about the mundane activities and lifestyles of employees herald an extended age of management confidence, one in which the idea that the managerial prerogative might (once again) legitimately extend beyond the workplace and into the fabric of how we live our everyday lives?

470    p. hancock and m. tyler

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chapter 26

Ch a ngi ng the Cr itiqu e from critical management studies to activist scholarship Craig Prichard and Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar

Introduction Each year Harvard Business Review produces its ‘must read’ collection of ‘definitive’ management ideas drawn from its own journal. If we look back at five years of these publications, we can see how ‘definitive’ management ideas are largely responses to the same topics. These tend to be: motivating, leading, monitoring and recruiting others, developing new process and products, making decisions, developing and implementing strategies, and dealing with new technologies. However, what we also notice is how the particular balance of these topics seems to change from year to year. The 2017 edition for example included pieces on ‘disruptive innovation’, ‘the management of big data’, and crypto currencies, which suggests that managing technologies is currently a major challenge for managers (Christensen et al., 2017). If we step back further, we would also notice that not only does the balance change but the character of the ideas does as well. Detailed longitudinal academic research (e.g. Abrahamson, 1997; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Bodrožić and Adler, 2017) shows that management ideas tend to alternate in character between rational forms (ideas that emphasize systems, structures, and processes) and normative forms (those that emphasize behaviour, relations, and culture). Such changes in the character of management ideas are represented in various ways. For Barley and Kunda, the shift from rational to normative ideas resembles the rocking of a pendulum; for Bodrožić and Adler (2017), it is like the slow spin of a tennis ball, with rational and normative ‘sides’; and for Abrahamson, the shift is like tea infusing a cup of hot water (Abrahamson, 1997). But what is it that creates such patterns and what produces this effect? In much of this literature it is stressed that the expansion and contraction of capitalist accumulation and

474    c. prichard and o. n. alakavuklar related technological changes power the changes in the character and flows of management ideas. Bodrožić and Adler (2017) argue that as capitalist economies enter expansionary phases, rational management ideas, with their focus on tasks, functions, and structures, are taken up in order to better ‘fit’ people to new technologies and new value realizing processes. Then, as accumulation falters, normative ideas that appeal to sentiment and emotional commitment gain currency in the service of a more efficient use of labour. In both instances of course, the problem and target of management ideas is labour, particularly the attempt to mould it to perform with new technologies or to appeal to it so that it will embrace more modest or chastened circumstances. From a critical perspective, however, the issue is not how to better mould labour or what tools and techniques to use or the patterns that such tools form. Rather, it is the inequalities of power, reward, and control that such ideas and tools produce or confirm. Consequently, the critical tradition begins with a different set of questions. It tends not to ask why do management ideas take particular forms, but who benefits from a management idea, or whose truth does an idea promote, or whose authority does an idea privilege, and to what effect (Mingers, 2000). The answers to such questions don’t reveal a swinging pendulum or a spinning dialectical ball or changes to the hue of a social field. They reveal an often hidden ‘backstage’ to management ideas where relations of domination, subjection, oppression, and exploitation are orchestrated, produced, and stabilized (see also Wharerata Writing Group, 2018). Of course, not only managers, but also customers, workers, citizens, and students do become users of management ideas (see also Bort and Kieser, in this volume)—perhaps in efforts to manage their inequalities with owners, producers, bosses, governments, parents, and teachers. But, for the most part, it is the inequality of power, disproportion of effort and reward, and the disparities of control over meanings exercised by managers, teachers, governments, and parents, that are institutionalized and sanctioned. In order to reveal the particular character of these ‘backstage’ relations, critical analsis of management ideas tends to draw on four key traditions (i.e. Marxism, postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism). Before we turn the critical lens back on critical management studies itself, let us briefly illustrate these four traditions.

Four Traditions of Critique of Management Ideas and Practices The key question of who benefits from management ideas often leads us to the inheritors of Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, and particularly that tradition’s focus on the distribution of value (aka who gets what). Such an entry point can draw us in a number of different directions. In the contemporary period, we might draw out who benefits from the production of management ideas by tracing out their origins in workplace practices, through their transformation into commodified forms as knowledge goods or

from critical management studies to activist scholarship   475 services, to their valorization in exchange practices in, for example, the management consulting, publishing, and higher education ‘industries’ (Alakavuklar et al., 2017; Engwall et al., 2016; Harvie et al., 2012; Pirie, 2009). Such work reveals not just the profits and scale of the returns from knowledge goods to publishing companies, consulting firms, and in some cases universities (particularly those located in digital code contained behind pay walls), but how workers (who are often the originators of such ideas) end up bearing the cost of purchasing such goods back from the companies in consulting firm fees, books, and training courses (e.g. O’Shea and Madigan, 1997). Such an analysis of management ideas would also show how labour comes to bear the inequities produced by the application of management ideas that seek to reshape the nature of work and reduce the cost of labour, by for example forcing it into less secure, more precarious contract-based work in the so-called ‘gig’ economy. For critical scholars, management ideas such as the ‘gig economy’, which suggest flexibility, freedom, and creative work, are simply new ways to mask and obscure the inequities of the wage labour relation. As Marx and his inheritors have argued: the production process is forced upon workers in exchange for a wage, not just the product but also the process of creativity is appropriated and controlled by the owner (capitalist), leading to a growing sense of alienation from the work itself. Overall, from a labour process theory perspective, by degrading and deskilling work, capitalist production relations lead to ‘progressive alienation of the process of production from the worker’.  (Alakavuklar et al., 2017: 458)

So why doesn’t labour produce its own ‘management’ ideas that might, for example, counter the inequitable features of wage labour, challenge the insecurity and uncertainties of, for example, the ‘gig economy’, and return to labour the full value of its efforts (see also Parker, in this volume)? To answer such a question, beyond the simple response that labour has little choice, it is useful to revisit Michael Burawoy’s (1979) critical ethnography of factory life. This offers some clues as to why workers appear to not only comply with the dictates of wage labour, but to actively consent and participate in their own exploitation. Burawoy’s work highlights how participation and progressive enrolment in workplace status and reputational games, e.g. piece-rate regimes in this particular case, have a profound effect on the potential for changing exploitative labour relations. For him, workplace production ‘games’, instituted and orchestrated by management, offer a successful means of controlling production and realizing profits. Burawoy notes that initially he was contemptuous of this game of ‘making out’ (achieving production levels that produced incentive payments) which appeared to advance the company’s profit margins more than operators’ interests. However, he goes on to note that: Once I knew I had a chance of making out, the rewards of participating in a game, in which the outcomes were uncertain absorbed my attention, and I found myself spontaneously cooperating with management in the production of greater surplus value.  (1979: 64)

476    c. prichard and o. n. alakavuklar For Burawoy, seemingly simple piece-rate ‘games’, instituted and controlled by management, allowed workers to build reputations through competitive work practices. Such reputations effectively tied them to such identities and obscured the inequality of their relationship to managers and owners (see also Sturdy, 1992). More recent work that develops Burawoy’s insights shows how management ideas (e.g. those connected to ­performance management, teamwork, and leadership) work to produce consenting, empowered, and exploitable workers, professionals, and (inevitably) managers by making them increasingly responsible for their own performance through multiple forms of self-surveillance and examination (Marsden,  1998,  2003). As Knights and Willmott (1989: 550) note: modern technologies of power subjugate by forcing individuals back in on themselves so that they become tied to their own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge . . . subjects do not so much consent to various technologies of power as enter into practices which are a condition and consequence of their reproduction. Although power has a tendency to provoke resistance . . . most frequently its mechanisms are sufficiently positive and productive of subjective meaning as to undermine and deflect such opposition.

Of course restrictive, controlling, and authoritarian management regimes continue to operate in some locations and industries. But management ideas that circulate in the contemporary workplace are, as Burawoy suggested, mostly successful because their priorities become embedded in forms of self-discipline and self-scrutiny (making out). In other words, management ideas help us to become a particular kind of valuable self with particular goals and priorities which, at the same time, narrow, constrain, and pattern our conduct and reproduce wider political and economic conditions and structures, e.g. the neo-liberal ‘gig economy’. The upshot of this is that the authority of management ideas and practice is not simply located in formal hierarchies and structures, but in the very perceptions, assumptions, and taken-for-granted claims that we take to be the expression of our selves.

Organizing Colonial and Gendered Relations Management Ideas Critical analysis of management ideas and practices (who benefits, whose truth and authority is privileged and to what effect?) reveals their status as commodities that, for example, return surpluses to the owners of key corporations and discipline populations through self-surveillance and internal control. But there are other areas in the ‘backstage’ of management ideas that our critical questions can reveal. One is the contribution that management ideas make to affirming and producing gendered, particularly phallocentric

from critical management studies to activist scholarship   477 orders that reward and privilege men over women, and another is their job as mediums for colonial and imperialist power (see also Salles-Djelic, in this volume). The question of whose ‘truth’ management ideas promote, leads us to consider how certain structures of meanings produce organized relations. In recent times, feminist analysis of management ideas and practices has revealed how they both confirm and promote patriarchal, masculine, or phallocentric symbolic orders (Calás and Smircich, 1991; Fotaki, 2013). Such analyses point particularly to the sexed structure of language and the exclusion of women’s real and imagined bodies. Such exclusions benefit men, promoting particular masculinities to highly rewarded and powerful senior positions in organizations, but also undermine and exclude women, and non-traditional gender and sexual identities from spaces governed by this phallocentric order. Calás and Smircich show for example, in their ground-breaking deconstruction of classic leadership texts, how the very term ‘leadership’ is: only capable of articulating a form of seduction which thrives on sameness. That is, leadership as leadership seduces only those who are of the same kind—masculine or masculine identified—and promotes, as ‘leadership knowledge’ only a homosocial system of organization, i.e. based on the values of masculinity, including masculine definitions of femininity.  (Calás and Smircich, 1991: 571)

As the above example of management issues such as ‘leadership’ indicates, management ideas are coded in such a way that they implicitly promote particular forms of patriarchal performance and homosociability. As well as revealing the patriarchal ‘backstage’ to management ideas, our critical questions also help us to grasp how management ideas operate in the service of colonial and imperialist projects. The commodification and valorization of management ideas around, for example culture, knowledge, and diversity, are dispersed around the globe through international consulting company networks, training programmes, particularly MBA curriculums and classes, airport bookshops, business class lounges, and more recently Internet-based advice and knowledge communities. As such, management ideas, expressed in English, have become the lingua franca of global corporations and trade. But this pattern is hardly a twentieth- or twenty-first century phenomenon. Management ideas on how to target and extract value from labour and natural resources, how to mould it into a productive force, and how to appeal to it in tough times have been central to colonial and imperialist powers going back centuries. As such management ideas not only have a forgotten history of their own production, but a largely forgotten history of their contribution to colonial projects (see Alcadipani et al., 2012; Prasad and Prasad, 2003; Westwood and Jack, 2007). To establish this, it is helpful to offer two very brief illustrations from our own backyard, Aotearoa New Zealand. In the early 2000s, New Zealand accounting professor Keith Hooper and colleagues (Hooper and Pratt,  1993; Hooper and Kearins,  2008; Kearins and Hooper,  2002) undertook a detailed critical analysis of New Zealand’s nineteenth-century accounting

478    c. prichard and o. n. alakavuklar practices. They revealed how the application by Pākehā (white New Zealanders of European descent) of seemingly technical and objective accounting language were deeply implicated in the theft, forced sale, and alienation of Māori land that not only enriched Aotearoa’s Pākehā capitalists, but initiated a tradition of absorbing into the state, losses incurred from capitalist misadventures. Particularly, Hooper’s work exposed how, beyond the state’s military confiscation of land, early Pākehā capitalists used mundane forms of management knowledge and practice in a systematic pattern to subordinate and disenfranchise the original owners of land (through petty debt regimes), and forced increasingly landless people into seasonal wage labour relations with the new owners of the original land. While not dismissing the importance of Hooper’s analysis, we might go further and suggest that this analysis itself also suffers from aspects of the very same colonial oppression which Hooper’s Foucauldian critique of colonial accounting sought to address. Hooper’s work, like all the above traditions of critical analysis, takes its conceptual lead from a French academic authority. As such, it ignores the traditions or modes of critique that already exist ‘here’ among those who were the target of colonial management ideas and practices. The challenge, then, for the critical study of management ideas, is to reveal the political backstage of colonial domination in critical forms of knowledge drawn from these same locations.

Developing a Wider Purpose for the Critical Study of Management Ideas The above are four foundational contributions to the critical analysis of management ideas. What emerges from this ‘backstage’ interpretation is a set of claims that regard management ideas as efforts to extract (‘steal’?) non-necessary labour from workers, to subordinate workers and managers via multiple forms of surveillance, to exclude some workers based on non-conforming sexed, gendered, and aged bodies, and more generally to oppress populations subject to colonial and imperialist rule now and in the past, but also produced by the critical tradition’s theoretical ‘chiefs’ located in homelands of current and former colonial and imperialist powers. What this latter issue reveals is a ‘backstage’ to the critical study of management ideas itself. Questioning the contribution of management knowledge to colonial projects inevitably raises questions about the ambitions of that critical tradition which is itself a form of global knowledge that may come to exclude or subordinate indigenous and local forms of questioning. In what follows, we respond to this criticism of the colonizing aspect of critical study and offer a more practical, localized mode of critical action in relation to the study of management ideas. The Academy of Management is the world’s largest and arguably most powerful academic society of those involved in studying and teaching management knowledge.

from critical management studies to activist scholarship   479 Critical Management Studies is one of the Academy’s twenty-five divisions. The division’s mission statement includes the following: Our premise is that structural features of contemporary society, such as the profit imperative, patriarchy, racial inequality, and ecological irresponsibility often turn organizations into instruments of domination and exploitation. Driven by a shared desire to change this situation, we aim in our research, teaching, and practice to develop critical interpretations of management and society and to generate radical alternatives.

There are two projects here. One is to ‘develop critical interpretations of management’, management ideas in our case here (as outlined above). The other project is to generate radical alternatives to management ideas (see also Parker, in this volume). While the desire to change is evident, it is often difficult to reconcile the actual work of the critical study of management ideas with the effort to ‘generate radical alternatives’ that address, for instance, the domination, subjectification, and exploitation produced by and through management ideas. Take this chapter for example. The labour of writing is given for free by ourselves (and by extension by our employing universities) to a publishing company that sells what we are holding in our hands or reading online (back) to our libraries in forms that realize healthy company profits from library budgets (Engwall et al., 2016; Harvie et al., 2013; Pirie, 2009). At the same time, our critique is written in traditional academic format, in (mostly) the masterly voice of the university, in the form that is indistinguishable from other contributions to this volume and draws on some arcane concepts produced by some, mostly dead, white male European theorists (as noted above). This is not to criticize the editors of this fine collection for their decisions, nor the publishing company itself, which has an obvious and proud tradition of supporting scholarly production. Rather, it is to query whether the critique of management ideas is really a critique at all, given that it is dependent on conventional management ideas for its critique, draws on traditional academic formats and modes of engagement for its expression, and conforms to conventional capitalist wage labour relations and conditions (where firms exploit free labour). Given this dependence, it is difficult then to see how the desire for radical alternatives might be even conceptualized, let alone realized. So what then is the point? Currently, and perhaps charitably, we would argue that the critical study of management ideas acts much like a medieval court jester (Kavanagh, 2009; Prichard, 2011). The jester is a speaker who is encouraged, even required (there is some necessity nowadays that critical management studies have a place in the study of management), to raise doubts, tell stories of consequence, and occasionally rebuke the currently dominant or sovereign knowledge, i.e. management ideas produced by and for the corporation and the market. Of course, rebuking the sovereign does risk retaliation and the critical management studies community can feel like a refugee society from time to time with its tales of failed promotions, forced redundancies, and paper rejections.

480    c. prichard and o. n. alakavuklar But on the flip side there is also the danger of not being critical enough; of not biting hard on the hand that feeds. Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) is said to have rebuked one of her fools for not being severe enough. If we examine closely and critically the placement, character, and content of this chapter it would seem as though the jester has been largely incorporated. As this book’s contents suggest, critical management studies’ questions of  power, exploitation, and domination have become routine, repetitive, and largely anticipated (Parker, 2010) and the possibility of even imagining some radical, alternative management ideas—those that are outside of Barley and Kunda’s pendulum for instance—seems a distant fantasy. What then is the problem and how to change things? The problem is that just as the court jester is a function of the court, the critic of management studies is an employee and product of the discourse of the university, to borrow from Lacan’s Seminar XVII (2007 [1991]). By ‘discourse’, we do not mean a set of statements or bundle of spoken text. We mean a relation between a speaker and an addressee in a structure. In each discourse, the speaker tries (and partly fails and comes back again for more attempts) to establish a relation or bond with an addressee. The university attempts to form a bond with a learner through attempts to close the gap between the known and the unknown. Such a gap is only ever partially bridged, but partial failure is highly productive. It provokes repetition, more effort and more desire for more knowledge and for more management ideas. But the critical study of management does not have to occupy the position of the university. The counter discourse outlined above with its eye on exploitation, domination, and subjection, regards management ideas not as products of an effort to fill the gap of the unknown, but as mostly wrong and divisive efforts to conceal a subterranean or backstage politics. That speaking subject is an agent in what Lacan (and before him Freud) calls the discourse of the hysteric. The hysteric attempts to form a bond with the addressee (the manager or the owner in our case) not through learning, but through antagonism and resistance. But what could possibly be the addressee’s response to this? The owner, the manager, the consultant, and the author of conventional management ideas will most likely ignore or dismiss the hysteric/critical scholar. The experienced manager very well understands already the politics of control, power, and value involved in the production, consumption, and distribution of management ideas. She is not concerned with the critical scholar’s complex, abstract unpacking of such a politics, rather, she and the owner are concerned with the problem of how to mould and use ideas to make their difficult, challenging, and contradictory relationship with labour actually work. They typically ask questions that are grafted on a more rational view (Sturdy, 2004) such as: Is the ‘machine’ working? Is profit being realized? Is surveillance getting the value-producing ‘bodies’ into the labour force to realize value over and above the costs involved? When asked, the manager will likely list efficiency and ethical grounds to justify her focus on her instrumental question of whether a management idea ‘works’. While the manager might admit that such a relation involves politics, the declaration or investigation makes little difference. The critical study of management, as a form of ‘hysterical’ academic inquiry, reached a point somewhere in the late 2000s (Spicer et al., 2009) where its foundational texts

from critical management studies to activist scholarship   481 had been written, its academic authorities had been identified, its publishing outlets organized, and its institutional structures (conferences, divisions, community hierarchies) stabilized. However, despite this effort, the attempt to form a bond based on antagonism outside the university had largely failed, and the production of radical and alternative futures that attempted to reorganize the ‘backstage’ seemed a distant dream. Consequently, questions about whose authority critical knowledge served and to what effect became more pressing. It seemed to many, as Butler and Spoelstra (2012) showed in their paper on the ‘excellent’ critical scholar, that those who talked of confronting and questioning the established power relations had simply become over-achieving servants of the ‘excellent’ university and its paymasters.

From Intellectual Labour to Activist Inquiry What then could be done? What might the critical scholar of management ideas do differently? What forms of critiques are possible beyond the repetitive recitation of the ‘backstage’ narratives as outlined above? Such questions have helped to fuel efforts to develop, renew, or revive activist forms of inquiry (see for example Parker and Parker, 2017; Reedy and King, 2017; Wickert and Schaefer, 2015). Earlier contributions to the study of management ideas have urged scholars to ‘intervene in the fashion-setting process’ (Abrahamson, 1996). But how would an activist orientated critical inquiry into management ideas avoid incorporation as part of the ‘excellent’ university’s ‘impact’ agenda (Cambridge University,  2016: 2)? Superficially, we might see a connection between academic or ‘user’ impact and activist scholarship. However, differences lie in the character of the particular practices. As Rhodes et al. (2018: 139) argue: research impact performs a policing function which, despite its own rhetoric, is arranged as an attempt to ensure that academic work maintains a neoliberal status quo by actually having no real political impact. Academic activism, in contrast, serves to politicize scholarly work by democratically disrupting political consensus in the name of equality.

With that said, we should not assume that there are no constraints or risks for the critical scholar of management ideas in undertaking ‘academic activism’. It is certainly safer and more career confirming to write about the possibilities and potential of contending action, critical performativity, or activist scholarship, than to undertake some. Popular imagination suggests that universities are the breeding ground of activist movements. But for many, undertaking activist politics as part of university employment can be both personally and organizationally troubling. Assuming that the university continues to support the critical scholar of management ideas, what forms of critique make it possible to do something different and to build space for

482    c. prichard and o. n. alakavuklar radical and alternative management ideas? In our view the answer to this question lies in the uncertainty about the emerging dominant sovereign with whom the university is attempting to form a relationship.

Locale of the Activist Inquiry: The University as a Polygamous Host Kavanagh (2009) has argued that we should regard the university as a particular kind of ‘foolish institution’; foolish but not stupid. Rather, it is a shrewd 1,000-year-old historical actor whose intra-institutional work involves acting as storyteller, confidant, occasional critic, and the narrator to the ‘court’, that is, the dominant institution of the time. But the university is not necessarily an ingratiating, sycophant. As noted, the university as fool has a particular job that involves maintaining and extending the dominant institutions’ shared symbolic universe—pushing it out into the unknown—which has the effect of recognizing and affirming the power, position, and wealth of the sovereign institution, e.g. the church, state, or corporation—and to forget perhaps the means as to how the current sovereign institution came to such a position. But which sovereign is dominant? Currently, the university seems to oscillate between various potential sovereigns (Prichard, 2011). In recent years, the state has slowly withdrawn from higher education (at different rates in different locations). At the same time, the capitalist corporation has proven to be a very promiscuous and unreliable emerging sovereign. While the corporation expects to hire the university from time to time for particular projects, it isn’t fond of a long-term funding position (aside from its own ‘universities’ which largely focus on vocational skills). Meanwhile, the family or the student (through debt) has become the default funder of higher education. The family, however, is poorly organized. What seems clear, given this multiplicity, is that the university has had to become more cunning, more promiscuous, and an even more polygamous institutional partner. On any day it could be required to turn in a competent performance as the natural partner to the capitalist corporation, the loyal servant of the public good, and a compelling educator to the family. Not surprisingly, it makes deft regular pronouncements in all these directions, and invests heavily in public relations and reputational protection. It is also no surprise that the critical academic—fashioning an elaborate treatise from the discourse of the hysteric—might find themselves bewildered by their employer’s institutional polygamy. In other words, as the university has broken away from the state, from its long-term monogamous partner, this has added fuel to the demand for more sophisticated ‘impact’ beyond the state’s simplistic and mostly quantitative audit and measurement mechanisms. What might the critical scholar of management ideas actually do in response to the university’s increasingly polygamous inter-sovereign relations? Which sovereign should one serve? Is the best that the critical scholar can do is formulate, polish, and archive her

from critical management studies to activist scholarship   483 labour at the behest of the ‘excellent’ university’s measurement and audit expectations? How might the hysteric work differently? For example, how might the critical scholar of management ideas move from repetitive and alienating efforts to represent the backstage real world, to conduct inquiry as set of actions that perform that backstage world in new ways? What is emerging via debates around ‘critical performativity’ is a strengthening commitment to critical praxis, that is, to various forms of scholarly activism (see King, 2015; Leca et al., 2014; Parker and Parker, 2017; Reedy and King, 2017; Spicer et al., 2009; Strumińska-Kutra, 2016; Wickert and Schaefer, 2015). Such work spans a wide range of actual practices and modes of engagement. Formally, it includes various versions of critical ethnography, action research, and performative engagement. Reedy and King (2017) offer a useful summary of these positions and highlight the contrasting aims, ethical positions, and roles played by the academic-activist in each. In terms of practical engagement, this ranges from an empathetic and participatory engagement with research participants, through collaborative action and co-production, to various forms of militant engagement where the activist scholar is engaged in forms of movement organizing and political action. Reedy and King’s work offers a useful summary of key dilemmas that emerge for the critical ethnographer, but their approach is built from statements from existing methods and is primarily concerned with locating their work within the ethnographic tradition. A particularly engaging example of an activist form of critique of management ideas, one that emphasizes flexibility and multiplicity at its core, is that found in work by Esper et al. (2017). This paper was, however, originally given in a conference symposium on ‘critical performativity’ (Cabantous et al., 2016; Fleming and Banerjee, 2016) in the Critical Management Studies Stream at the 2015 Academy of Management Conference in Vancouver. So as to illustrate the difference between this work and conventional critical presentations, we have included below a description of that conference session. The first presentation to the symposium discussed the theoretical background and implications of ‘critical performativity’ as a concept. The speakers received a polite response. They were followed to the podium by two colleagues who offered two case studies of the work of activist scholars. The first investigated how academics had been involved in setting up and running an extensive network of cooperative incubators as part of university extension in Brazil (Leca et al., 2014). The scholars acted as promoters and resources in the incubation phases of worker cooperatives in deprived communities. The aim was to improve living conditions and support political emancipation. In the second case, the scholars had developed online courses that carried the underlying aim of supporting women as they attempt to challenge or exit violent and oppressive domestic circumstances. When the presenters finished, the conference audience seemed energized and engaged and shared in the enthusiasm for the case presentations. Questions flowed and only ended when the hosts insisted on closing off the event. The response to the two presentations was stark. Running back-to-back they highlighted the theoretical

484    c. prichard and o. n. alakavuklar overproduction around the term performativity. A sense of relief followed when cases of academics actually taking action were presented.

Central to the work outlined in this short description is how activist scholars develop and cultivate multiple facets of critical performativity that support and promote alternative forms of organizing. Esper et al. (2017: 680) highlight how the ‘extensionistas’, as the scholar-activists were called, had to: revise their views about extension programs and their roles in those programs. In contrast with other collaborative research experiences in which scholars are summoned by practitioners to work together in a specific organizational initiative or problem, workers had not approached the university requesting support for their WREs. Extensionistas had to find other ways of collaborating with a population of workers whom they had never engaged with before and who did not necessarily trust them.

In particular, the scholar-activist’s work involved a permanent presence in the worksite, standing with the workers in confronting threats and challenges (police, etc.), designing new knowledge sharing formats, and finding ways to help the workers make sense of the new complex work and organizational setting they found themselves in as co-owners of the enterprise. At the same time, the activist scholar obviously takes a position, as a representative of the ‘university’, in legitimatizing the new cooperative worker organizations, a new sector to the wider hostile world, which had emerged when workers took over abandoned factories during a severe economic crisis in Brazil. Central to this recognition work was connecting the workers and their new organization to the resources of the university and supporting them in relations with the authorities.

Hystericizing Critique and Activism in/with the University Activist scholarship in the performance of radical or alternative management ideas involves multiple areas of tension and uncertainty in relation to the discourse of the university. Common questions include: How can activist scholars’ work be transcribed into auditable publications? How does the work translate into teaching resources? There is also significant uncertainty around the mode of engagement and intervention and questions over the activist scholar’s unspoken desires, wishes, or expectations. Are they angling to become a new master? Do they wish to escape the university? In order to discuss these questions, we conclude this chapter with an outline of an illustrative scholar-activist project of our own. This work is not aimed at supporting labour to form non-exploitative work organizations, but is aimed at performing the development of a new industry sector, one that counters some of the detrimental features of the dominant

from critical management studies to activist scholarship   485 industry segment. In particular, we argue in support of Esper et al.’s (2017) conclusions, that activist scholarly inquiry into management ideas involves five key areas of work. These are, ‘engaging the bizarre’; ‘resignifying the bizarre’; ‘hystericizing or challenging the existing masters’; ‘locating the bizarre with the new consumer master’; and ‘resignifying the new entrant from dropout to entrepreneur’.

Brief Background Despite its size and population, New Zealand is the world’s largest exporter of bovine dairy foods and a significant exporter of sheep meet. Both industries are, however, ‘stuck’ in basic commodity production and have been hit hard recently by dramatic commodity price swings due to changes in political and economic conditions in Europe and the USA. These price changes have had significant social, political, and environment impacts. In economic terms, the sector, or ‘big dairy’, has become highly centralized and concentrated into a shrinking number of large dairy units that demand significant access to capital both on the farm—which offer few options for entry level farmers given the capital requirements—and outside the farm gate. Environmentally, big dairy is fighting a political battle over its record on water quality, the industrialization of landscapes, loss of biodiversity and significant contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, environmental toxicity and energy use. And politically, big dairy is reviled by many for its ability to extract significant political favours and influence from the state. The challenge then, is what can the critical scholar of management ideas and practices do to generate radical alternatives that help move from a (largely) single product ingredient commodity offering (milk powder) towards high value, highly nutritious final products that offer better environment returns from less intensive and more diverse animal and plant farming?

SheepMilkNZ Activism: A Discussion SheepMilkNZ is a scholarly industrial activist project that, like the extensionistas’ activities identified by Esper et al. (2017), involves a wide range of linked activities that produce, promote, support, advise, encourage, and provide information aimed at developing the sheep dairy industry in Aotearoa New Zealand. The project’s goal (modestly expressed) is to change the character of the dairy industry by tackling its key problems through the development of a new alternative industry that offers dramatically different economic, environmental, and political returns. The speaking position of the university (whose desire is to close the gap between the known and the unknown) is important for this work. It makes full use of a coalition of academics from multiple disciplines and areas of the university. But as a project, it is

486    c. prichard and o. n. alakavuklar involved in enacting the speaking position in Lacan’s discourse of the analyst. The Lacanian analyst, working outside the clinic, is involved in efforts to replace dominant signifiers (that are the cause of the ‘illness’) with new signifiers that produce outcomes that are easier for the subject (the dairy industry/economy/society) to bear. There are multiple potential ways to occupy the position of the analyst outside the clinic, but in our case, central to SheepMilkNZ’s efforts was the offering of tastings of sheep milk and its various applications (e.g. cheeses, yoghurts, ice-creams) to potential consumers and new producers. Despite thousands of years of consumption in various locations around the planet, sheep’s milk signifies for the latter group as animal rather than human food. A key feature of SheepMilkNZ’s work—in the discourse of both the analyst and the university—is the performance of its Exploratorium. The Sheep Milk Exploratorium is a specially designed transportable trade show environment that includes a kitchen, an information display space, seating, tasting stations, and milk-able silicon sheep udders. At a food show, an agricultural field day, a young farmers competition, and a community event, the Exploratorium occupies the position of the symptom in the form of seemingly inconsumable sheep milk and strange tasting foods. Asking people to consume the ostensibly inconsumable is an effort to shift how and what such foods signify. By mobilizing the discourse of the university as well, SheepMilkNZ is thus in a position to help shift the meaning of sheep milk and its products and as such to challenge the ‘law’ of the dominant bovine dairy master that regards sheep milk as animal food. We won’t recite the detailed history of SheepMilkNZ, but in short, it began with a visit in late 2013 to New Zealand’s leading sheep milk cheese producer. After a long discussion, and tour of the farm and factory, the farmer and cheese maker told us that he had struggled for years to find farmers to supply him with more sheep milk. He milks 170 ewes on a 30-acre farm and produced about 12 tons of sheep cheese a year. His factory could, however, produce three times that amount if he could find others to supply the factory. In response to this problem, this symptom, if you like, one of us did some background research into this almost invisible industry. He also visited other industry members and with them, developed a set of plans for events that promoted and supported the fledgling industry. Since 2015, SheepMilkNZ has run about twenty tasting sessions using the Exploratorium, four national conferences and multiple workshops, gatherings, events, and visitors programmes (in that time, the industry has grown from four to sixteen producers, doubled its earnings and (significantly) increase the number of dairy sheep that it is milking). Below we have synthesized the activities of this work as an activist project with five key dimensions. 1. Engaging the bizarre through the mouth (critique of knowledge). At the core of SheepMilkNZ’s activism is protest at the current structure of the bio-­psychosociality around milk, that is, a challenge to the industrial structuring of the socialized palate. It is also part of a much broader challenge to bovine milk being played out through the switch to vegetable milks (coconut, etc.). In our case, the taste test and the sheep milk Exploratorium more generally were efforts to try and

from critical management studies to activist scholarship   487 change the structure of the industrialized palate. While we might question the scale of this action, one mouth at a time, this form of activist practice is often reported by local media and becomes a stable story for newspaper, radio, and TV reports of the sheep milk industry. 2. Re-valuing/signifying the bizarre as safe and valuable (critique of value). While it might not report itself as such, the university is a powerful and wealthy institution. It is easy to underestimate its presence, the resources it has available (mostly discretionary time rather than cash), and the discursive ‘weight’ it can lend to seemingly bizarre, new, or strange topics, taste, and experiences. Part of the success of the Exploratorium and the taste test particularly, is the legitimacy that the university lends to such endeavours. Because its core practices of observing, recording, synthesizing, and archiving suggest a degree of control, safety, and objective evaluation, the Exploratorium signifies not as a risky experimental space, but as a learning environment overseen by a pedagogically-orientated guiding authority. This authority is further supported by practices of science and the regular reference to the discourse of the market and national economies. 3 . Hystericizing the existing (agri)masters (critique of the corporation). Directly challenging ‘big cow dairy’ has never been a key feature of the SheepMilkNZ programme. However, it is clear that ‘big dairy’ is keeping a watching brief on SheepMilkNZ’s activities and it would respond to direct criticism if challenged. Thus, the hystericization of ‘big cow dairy’ proceeds indirectly via events, interactions, and questions that promote non-bovine dairy foods and farming practices. Questions about, for example, nutritional content, environment loading, value returned per kilogram of milk solids, the scale of economic sheep dairy operations, and the animal welfare regimes all compare sheep dairying positively on all counts against bovine dairying. In other words, hystericizing the existing agribusiness masters, ‘big dairy’, in our case, proceeds not by shouting, but by quiet, detailed comparison. The ultimate aim, of course, is to question ‘big dairy’ to a point where milking 6 million cows, and turning out 60 million bags of cow milk powder (the size of New Zealand’s herd and the volume of its main export product) at a current price of just over NZ$6 a kilogram comes to be regarded as ‘bizarre’ and an enormous waste of value. At the same time, producing high value, nutritious, and environmentally sustainable foods from sheep milk comes to be normalized. 4 . Locating the bizarre within the new (consumer) master (critique of productionism). At the core of the challenge of activist scholarship through food is engaging with the consumer master. Whether the consumer is ever really a master is another question, but the signifier ‘consumer’ or ‘customer’ is a powerful figure in the discourse of the master and the university. The focus of New Zealand’s bovine dairy production and scale makes it particularly poor at matching what it sells to the intricate, detailed, and shifting character of consumer preference and taste. A key feature of SheepMilkNZ’s activist repertoire then, has been to engage directly with consumers (at food shows and other events) and not only to report this back to producers, but to show a detailed and elaborate theorization of the

488    c. prichard and o. n. alakavuklar connection between consumers and sheep dairy foods. Such accounts explain not only the diversification of milk consumption (away from cows’ milk and towards vegetable milk for example), but how alternative milks act to confirm symbolic structures and fundamental relationships. Such work is concerned with changing the discourse of the market, away from the preferences of the individual consumer to the family symbolic structures built through food. 5. Making the bizarre safe for capital in the bazaar (critique of capital). As well as making the product ‘safe’ for the consumer, SheepMilkNZ has also been involved in attempts to make sheep milk ‘safe’ for capital. This might seem bizarre given a commitment to activist practice. It is certainly something of a compromise. The investment of significant amounts of capital in new sheep milk production or the purchase of sheep milk product manufacturing assets is a powerful signal to governments, universities, and families more generally that diversification of dairying away from cows is possible. While there are some risks, the transition from small, fringe, and seemingly bizarre producer to mainstream, large, and intensively commercial operations is a powerful signifier in favour of the broader objective. This is not at the expense of small producers. Much of SheepMilkNZ’s activities are directly involved in supporting the small-scale operator, but it does provide a level of backing that would not be possible without significant capital flows into the industry. This early rush of capital into an emerging industry has helped to convince more risk-averse entities, family farmers and Māori trusts particularly (in the New Zealand context), to move into the industry. 6 . Re-signifiying the new entrant from dropout/hippy to enterprising entrepreneur (critique of the entrepreneur). Our last form of activist scholarship follows directly from the last point. The bulk of the activist practice involved promoting, supporting, and connecting the small to medium-sized sheep milk producers in ways that helped others recognize them as ‘business people’, as ‘enterprising’, and as ‘entrepreneurs’. Early adopters and first movers are often criticized by others as bizarre dropouts and cranks. Part of the leverage the university offered as a symbolic operator was recognizing new industry pioneers who might previously have been regarded as fringe dwellers.

Conclusion In recent years, the critical study of management has become institutionalized and formalized. As this chapter’s inclusion in a handbook of management ideas suggests, such work has been largely incorporated by the discourse of the university. Its key traditions are widely distributed, and its claims regarding the political structure of the ‘backstage’ of management ideas have been well rehearsed. Given this, it is perhaps inevitable that the very questions and analytical approaches that the critical study of management, and

from critical management studies to activist scholarship   489 of management ideas in particular has levelled at its target of study would be turned back on itself—and it would be found wanting in some areas. Such challenges reveal weaknesses in the contribution of critical study to alleviating the problems that its analysis has revealed, and challenges to the dominance of Western forms of critical knowledge and their seeming subordination of localized and indigenous forms of knowledge and critique. In response, various forms of performative and activist inquiry are emerging. In the final sections of this chapter we sketched out one such line of work and how this could further the scholarship around the study of management ideas. This involved detailed, critical, and flexible forms of practical scholarly activism in support of the  management ideas that prioritize non-exploitative wage-labour relations (Esper et al., 2017) and, in the second case, a form of therapeutically orientated scholarly activism that supported the development of alternative industrial sectors. It challenged the practice and returns of dominant industry sectors by offering wider economic, environmental, and political benefits. In conclusion, we would argue that the critical study of management ideas and practices has reached something of a crisis point where two different paths have emerged. One path leads to the continued repetition and formalization of the critical studies field as an auditable contribution to the ‘excellent’ university with the occasional performance of critical knowledge by a courtly jester. The second path places the critical scholar in the role of the extensionistas, who are dragging the university into the confusion, mess, and political stew of everyday managerial relations. Such a path involves using and/or developing whatever resources, skills, abilities, and knowledge sources are available to promote develop and support new, progressive, environmentally benign and human-centric industries. Such a path also involves actually applying alternative organizational ideas and practices that aim to reshape the 'backstage' that critical know­ ledge has so successfully revealed. We hope it is clear which path we are on and we hope through this chapter we have encouraged others to consider taking this same route.

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chapter 27

A lter nati v e s to M a nagem en t Ideas Martin Parker

Introduction: What’s Wrong with This Book? This is a difficult chapter to position within a handbook of management ideas, because I want to suggest that ‘management ideas’ are a problem. This is because I think that they assume that some version of ‘management’ is the one best way to organize, and hence frame alternatives to ‘management’ as inefficient, nostalgic, or idealistic. As this handbook shows, there are lots of different ideas about management, and they can be classified in various ways depending on where they originate, who they are targeted at, what words they use, and what problem they claim to solve. However, I contend that they mostly assume ‘management’, as occupational group, practice, and form of knowledge (Parker, 2002). A managed organization is one with a distinct cadre of individuals with higher levels of reward and status who do ‘management’. These are people who wield power through their hierarchical position within the organization, and who legitimate that power by claiming that they possess a distinct form of expertise that other members of the organization don’t have. The diffusion of management ideas in the Global North provides legitimacy for their generalized adoption in organizations (Sturdy, 2004). My move in this chapter is to suggest that ‘organization’ is not the same as ‘management’. Management, I contend, is just one version of the general process of organizing, and this much wider term is evidenced in worker co-operatives, partnerships, communes and intentional communities, clubs and social movements. It seems to me important to insist that organizing—a patterning of humans and materials—can happen without management, and hence that ‘management ideas’ are often variations on a theme that assumes hierarchical relations of authority and knowledge, rather than an exploration of the huge variety of different forms of organizing (e.g. Jacques, 1996).

alternatives to management ideas    493 In that sense I’m not at all convinced that the beauty parade of distinctions between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ management add up to very much. Whether the ‘management idea’ is empowerment, collaboration, followership, or whatever, the distinction between the organizers and the organized is maintained. The very idea of management, and all the management ideas that assume and legitimate it, produces hierarchical organization and inequalities of knowledge and reward (see also Salles-Djelic, in this volume). Of course, there are management ideas which support management practices which are less oppressive, and which solicit assent rather than demanding obedience (Grey, 1999). I think that this is undoubtedly to the good, but to consider such forms of enlightened managerialism to be the only credible response to criticisms of management is to restrict the field of inquiry and practice markedly, preventing us from even ‘seeing’ alternatives to managerialism which can address the problems of inequality, democracy, and sustainability. I think that ‘management ideas’ are different from ideas about organization more generally. Indeed, the reduction of the latter to the former is an ideological move that encourages us to believe that there are no alternatives to management, as if all forms of organization were necessarily managerial. They are not. In this chapter, I will explore and illustrate this idea, insisting that organization is a far more generous term than management. We are all organizers, because organizing is itself a form of ‘politics made durable’ (Latour, 1991). The aim of this chapter is to reclaim organizing from those who claim expertise in management (e.g. Engwall et al., 2016; Shenhav, 1999) and allow us to see it as politics. Using a case study of Suma, an English worker’s co-operative, as an exemplar, I will argue that the politics of organizing means that questions of collectivism and the common good need to be balanced against ideas about autonomy and difference. The resulting forms of organization then need to be aimed at the service of the future, always in the knowledge that any form of organizing is itself a form of politics.

The Management of Everything Ever since the rise of the bureaucratic state, the political party, the large corporation, and then the university business school, we have been told that there are a cadre of people who have a particular expertise in managing other people (e.g. Grey, 1999). These might be ‘practical’ experts, such as private and public sector managers, civil servants, politicians, corporate professionals such as those involved in project management, management information, or HR, executive search agents, consultants or management gurus; or ‘academic’ experts, such as business school professors (Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002; Thrift, 2001; see Pope and Bromley, in this volume). Over the last century a chorus of business magazines, consultancy products, business textbooks, and government reports have encouraged us to believe (at least) three things. First, that efficiency, productivity, accounting, marketing, decision-making, and so on should be understood as

494   m. parker the most important measures to the functioning of organizations (Shenhav,  1999). Second, that only certain kinds of people understand these measures (Grey, 1999). And third, that others do not, because they are merely employees (Jacques, 1996). In other words that ordinary people, the 99 per cent, do not have the knowledge, understanding, or skill to manage themselves. If they don’t have management experts to guide them, they will blunder around, stumble and fight, like the idiots that they are. As a result, most people are not understood to be active organizers, but rather as deficient and in need of guidance. And very often, because of the deafening effect of that chorus, they imagine themselves to be like that too, insufficient, and in need of leadership. In general terms, what has happened here is that the everyday creativity of organizing has been condensed down into the idea of management. In other words, the industry of people generating ‘management ideas’ has encouraged the citizens of modern states to think that organization equals management, when in fact management is a very specific form of organization, one that relies on hierarchy, pay and status differences, claims to expertise, and that assumes the need for leaders and hence followers. The slippage which encourages us to believe that all organization is unavoidably managed is one that benefits those who have interests in the maintenance of the status, power, and reward of the manager (Grey, 1999). Further, those who are invested in ‘management’ tend not to see things that aren’t managed, and if they do, they interpret them as insufficient or deviant examples of managerialism. As if other forms of coordination were somehow less impressive, less natural, less modern than command and control by a class of managers. The single largest subject studied at universities in the Global North is business and management and the number of business schools continues to expand. It’s a market worth at least $400 billion per year (Parker, 2018). The management consulting industry extracts fees from the public and private sector which, as of 2016, were estimated to be worth $250 billion (Consultancy UK, 2017). If we add the management books, texts, journals and magazines, training companies, professional associations, publishers of management information and rankings we have a trillion-dollar industry which legitimates and profits from selling the idea that ‘management’ is needed. It is, I believe, the largest sustained public relations campaign for any occupation, and one that is now so normalized that (apart from in a few parts of the academy, and in radical social movements) its ideological status is largely unquestioned.

The (Ideo)logic of ‘Management’ in Management Ideas In English, the word management has an interesting history, and some rather suggestive differences of meaning that allow us to understand the shaping of later management ideas. It is commonly assumed to be derived from the Latin manus, hand, and its expansion into the Italian maneggiarre, the activity of handling and training a horse carried

alternatives to management ideas    495 out by maneggio. From this form of manual control, the word gets expanded into a ­general activity of training and handling people too. The later development of the word is also claimed to be influenced by the French mener (to lead) and its development into ménage—household, or housekeeping—and the verb ménager—to economize. But the later imperialism of this word for handling beasts in menageries also follows from its subsequent division into three related meanings—a noun, a verb, and an academic discipline (see also Salles-Djelic, in this volume). First then, the word used as a verb. This is a word that can be applied to the need to deal with complex or adverse matters, and it is the oldest way in which the horse handling word was used in English. In Richard II of 1595, Shakespeare has Green tell us ‘Now for the rebels which stand out in Ireland, Expedient manage must be made, my liege’. To arrange matters, to handle them, is a skill which requires coping with the future in order to produce a desirable outcome. Several centuries later, the London Encyclopaedia of 1829 has an entry for ‘Manage’ which suggests that it is ‘an obsolete synonyme of management, which signifies, guidance; administration; and particularly able or prudent administration of affairs: managery is another (deservedly obsolete) synonyme of this signification: manageable is tractable; easy to be managed’ (498). This sense of managing as coping, as dealing with a state of affairs is still common enough in everyday talk, though it has to a large extent been supplanted by an understanding that this is something which is specifically done by people called managers within a formal organization. When used in this latter way, it implies a separation between the actual doing of whatever is being managed and the higher-level function of controlling these processes. In other words, management as a practice is not intricately involved with any particular form of labour or state of affairs, but is a claim to coordinate the doing of all things. During the twentieth century, it has become understood as a higher order of human activity which requires an elevation from the mundane to gain a better overall perspective. Though management may be etymologically linked with the hand, it is no longer a practice which is ‘hands-on’ or a word used to describe the element of ‘managery’ necessary to all human endeavours. Instead it is a practice which is firmly attached to an occupation, implicitly denying that others have that capacity, and justified with reference to certificates from business schools (see Engwall and Wedlin, in this volume). The idea of an everyday activity of practical coping has been relabelled, colonized as a talent or skill exclusive to some and not others. The second sense of management is as a plural noun for ‘manager’. The management. This meaning is found in English from the early eighteenth century, initially with respect to the people who ran a theatre. From the nineteenth century onwards, the word begins to be used with greater frequency, referring to an occupational group who have engaged in a very successful strategy of collective social mobility over the two centuries since (Engwall et al.,  2016). From a disparate collection of occupational nouns—owner, supervisor, superintendent, administrator, overman, foreman, clerk—one word now represents anyone engaged in the coordination of people and things. Nowadays, we find managers everywhere—in hospitals, universities, and trains, and they are deemed

496   m. parker to be universally essential. In 2013, it was claimed that five million members of the UK workforce had the title ‘manager’, and that this was a tenfold increase over a millennium (BBC, 2013). So perhaps the most imperial management idea is that managers are always functionally required in all organizations. In that sense, all management ideas are subordinate to this general assumption which, once accepted, leaves merely the details of what these managers will do. Once assumed, the number of people engaged in management increases, as does the number of people called managers, as the term comes attached to a wider and wider range of jobs. A new class of people has been created. Perhaps not a class in the socio-economic sense, though that might not be too wide of the mark, but certainly a class in the sense of a concept which collects and re-presents a diverse set of occupations and provides them with an elevated social status (Grey, 1999). Finally ‘Management’ is often the name of university departments that signifies engagement in reading, writing, and talking about what managers do and what management is. It’s how I, and all the other authors in this collection, earn a living. This is certainly not a practice that can be separated from the other two, simply because much of the output of this domain is shaped by and in turn shapes contemporary practices in both of the other areas. Schools of Management and Business have become a ubiquitous part of higher education across the globe over the last fifty years or so (see the chapters by Engwall and Wedlin, and Salles-Djelic, in this volume). From origins in France two centuries ago, and rapid expansion in the USA a century ago, elements of commerce, economics, psychology, and sociology have congealed into the B-School, the cash-cow for cash-strapped university managers. Nowadays, Management claims to be a coherent discipline and its schools employ specialists to teach and research in human resource management, accounting and finance, marketing, strategy, operations and production management, business ethics, and information systems as well as a dizzying variety of specialist topics. The vast majority of the output from this global network of hundreds of thousands of texts, professors, journals, PhDs, and conferences is largely supportive of the growth of all three of these meanings of management. This isn’t to say that there is no criticism, such as that voiced by Critical Management Studies (CMS) over the past twenty-five years (see Alvesson and Willmott, 1992, 2003; see also Prichard and Alakavuklar, in this volume). This chapter grows from that tradition, but any brief overview of CMS would show that its arguments have tended to stop with a critical diagnosis of the implications of a particular management idea—culture, total quality, new public, consultancy, Lean or whatever (De Cock and Hipkin, 1997; McCann et al., 2015; Willmott, 1993). Often enough, this means that the conclusions have gestured towards a better form of management, one that doesn’t produce whatever problem has been identified by the person doing the criticism, but that rarely questions the absolute necessity of management itself, or suggests alternative forms of organization which do not assume permanent hierarchies with managers at the top. In summary, over the last century, the citizens of the Global North have been collectively persuaded that you need to be an expert to organize, and that the manager is more important than the worker, or indeed anyone else. That’s why managers, leaders,

alternatives to management ideas    497 executives are now paid such outrageous sums, because they are now imagined to be the most important part of any organization. Selling this idea has been a well-paid job too. The experts have texts, courses, or consultancy to take to market, even Oxford University Press handbooks, but in order to make money they have to construct the idea of a certain lack in the target market. If you want to get someone to buy something, you need to persuade them that it is fashionable. That is to say, that they need it, and that you have it (Jackson,  1996; Kieser,  1997; ten Bos and Heusinkveld,  2007). Hence, when it comes to matters of management, it is assumed that we need someone who has management ideas to help us do it, because management has to be done, and we can’t do it ourselves.

Organizing But if we ask, ‘How are things organized?’, we assume very little about what that arrangement, pattern, or device looks like. The etymology gives us the Latin organa, as an instrument or tool for a particular purpose, which in turn comes from organon, a Greek word which means something like ‘that with which one works’. In English, the musical instrument and part of a body sense of organ are both fifteenth century, as is the sense of organization (organizationem) as an action, as something that is done. It is not until the nineteenth century that the word solidifies into a thing, into an institution which is the precondition and/or consequence of a form of labour. The root of the word is some sort of device which effects a transformation, an arrangement which causes one thing to become something else. This is a productive notion and it implies a way of intervening in the world, of making the world different through the use of tools, of organs which produce a world which we can understand and work with. To organize implies no particular authority, no assumption of hierarchy and reward, no necessity of expertise or qualification. Organizing is a general capacity for human beings, smart chimps who enjoy putting one thing on top of another. Asking about the ways in which human beings organize their worlds is a general question, one that might be answered in different ways by any of the human sciences. It is a question that certainly might be answered by pointing to management, because that is a form of organization too, but it’s not the only one. I suppose the general shape of the question we are then asking has both a factual and an exploratory element to it, ‘How do people and things come together to do stuff?’ That’s an inquiry which would produce descriptions of the shapes of the worlds that human beings make here and now, and that could be enlarged by adding descriptions from other times and places. History, politics, geography, design, and anthropology would be just as relevant as sociology and economics. The point of collecting such descriptions then also might become a kind of catalogue of possibilities, a list which answers the question, ‘How can people and things come together to do stuff?’ Rather like a recipe book or toolbox, the catalogue doesn’t tell us what we should do, but what humans can do, what we are capable of.

498   m. parker If we break the question down a little, we can put forward a thought experiment which suggests two different ways to understand it. First, if we ask about the organization of people then the sorts of answers we get might be classified as technical matters pertaining to descriptions of the specific form of organizing. This might involve size, structure, division of labour and specialization, tenure of position, tenure of employment, decision-making structure, physical location of members, what can be expected for and from the employee, employee ownership and raising of finance, nature of rules (informal or formal), assumptions about growth, assumptions about core business, distribution of financial surplus or deficit, accountability to who, relation to customers or clients, forms of coordination, extent of flexibility and so on. There are a lot of different variables here, because there are lots of different ways of being organized. ‘Management ideas’ tend to answer these questions in ways that support the necessity of the status quo of market managerialism, suggesting that, for example, bigger is better; hierarchies are always needed; decisions are taken at the top; information should be held centrally, and so on. Secondly, we can add something else to this set of descriptions because most forms of organization also come with a set of prescriptions (Benders and Van Veen, 2001) which regulate the exchange of things within and between organizations. So, we might then get answers about the organization of exchange which would describe who gets paid and how much, who sells, who buys, who competes, what can be bought, sold, or exchanged, when and where, for how much or how little, subjected to what rules, financed by who, using what medium of exchange, with what information, derived from where and audited by who, and to what end. Again, ‘management ideas’ tend to answer these questions in a narrow manner, insisting that money is the only medium of exchange; the aim of organizing is to generate profits; other organizations in the same business are competitors; rent on capital is legitimate and so on (e.g. Kieser, 1997). Now, in a combinatorial spirit, imagine putting these variables to work in order to complete the imaginary equation ‘Organization + Exchange = X’, and our list of possibilities immediately becomes huge. We might imagine a list (which could be expanded into a very large dictionary or handbook, Parker et al., 2007, 2014a) with descriptions of actual institutions such as families, stewarding, retail co-operatives, markets, kinship systems, groups, networks, communes, tribes, partnerships, local exchange trading systems, hierarchies, polyarchies, democracies, city-states, councils, teams, B-corps, bureaucracies, corporations, trusts, Stiftung, co-producers, monopolies, communities, autocracies, franchises, patriarchies, collectives, enterprises, sociocracies, NGOs, professions, family businesses, lineages, monopsonies, institutions, trade unions, states, companies, councils, governments, clubs, cultures, worker co-operatives, totalitarian regimes, occupations, societies, foundations, social enterprises, holarchies, matriarchies, solidarities, associations, Waqf, charities, non-profits, villages, sects, phalanxes, credit unions, provident or mutual societies and hybrids of all the above. This is not an infinite list, because it is limited by what humans have done so far and what we can find out about it, but just imagining it gives us an idea of the variability of ways in which us clever chimps have organized our worlds.

alternatives to management ideas    499 ‘Management ideas’ generally cannot describe, or perhaps even see, this diversity, because they are already committed to the narrow idea of management, both as a ­practice and a field of study, which is generally characterized by hierarchy and unequal sharing of surplus. Management is a colonial word, a word which has grown from everyday managery to become an ideology which now dominates our understanding of organizing (e.g. Engwall et al., 2016).

Suma Let’s just take one example to show an organization that illustrates this diversity, rather than simply asserting it. Suma Foods is a worker co-operative incorporated as an industrial and provident society, an organization owned and run by its members (Suma, 2017; see also Cannell, 2015; Jones, 2000; Ridley-Duff, 2009; Roper, 2016). It was founded in the northern English city of Leeds in 1977 and is the largest independent wholefood wholesaler in the UK. In 2016, this co-operative was one of 6,797 co-ops in the UK, employing 222,785 people, and with a turnover of £34.1 billion (Co-ops UK,  2017). Co-ops are a substantial part of the UK economy, not a marginal decoration. Suma is the UK’s largest independent wholefood wholesaler and distributor, specializing in vegetarian, organic, ethical, and natural products. Suma was started in 1975 by Reg Tayler. Tayler had already gained some experience of working in wholefoods in London, and when he moved to Leeds he opened a retail shop, Plain Grain. In August 1975, at a meeting attended by other wholefood shops in the north of England, he proposed they set up a wholesaling co-operative in order to supply each other. Reg and friends set up in the back kitchen of a house in Leeds from where they sold cereal flakes, dried fruits, and brown rice. They soon needed more room, and so rented a lock-up garage nearby—this is where the name ‘Suma’ was first used for the business. In 1977, Tayler sold the Suma business to the then seven employees, who became the founder members of the ‘Triangle Wholefoods Collective’, trading as Suma. Expansion of the wholefood market meant that by 1986 Suma moved to a larger warehouse in Halifax, fourteen miles away. Alongside the growth in size there was a ­corresponding increase in the complexity of the business, and the structure of the co-op went through many modifications to manage this change. In 2001, Suma moved to ­purpose-built premises in nearby Elland. By the 1980s, Suma had become the hub of a cluster of spin-off co-operatives in the food sector including ‘Beano Wholefoods’ (a retailer which lasted from 1978 to 2007), ‘Hebden Water Milling Collective’ (which mixed and packaged food and produced nut butters, but was deregistered in 1999), and ‘Cena’ (a research co-op). It was also a major customer of the Wharf Street Café and collaborated with Leeds Beer Co-operative. For a period of several years in the 1980s, each time members decided to increase the pay rate, the same amount was put into the co-operative development fund. This method of expansion was based on the creation of independent co-operative businesses, not

500   m. parker growth of the core organization. Indeed, Suma deliberately devolved several of its regional markets such as Scotland and the East Midlands to other co-ops. All the products are vegetarian, from sweets to toothbrushes. That means no meat, no fish, and no animal derived products like gelatine or rennet. Where eggs are an ingredient, they are free-range. Suma stock organic versions of everything they can, support fair trade as a licensee of the Fairtrade Foundation and all their body care, cosmetic, and household products are cruelty-free. Suma’s commitment to fair trade is not a marketing device, it is one based on a belief in a universal right to economic justice, self-empowerment, and freedom from exploitation. They are also acutely aware of the impact that business has on the environment at local and global levels and hence try to keep carbon emissions to a minimum. Suma use100 per cent renewable electricity and motion sensors to switch the lights off when there is no activity. Sales representatives share a hybrid car, and their trucks use vehicle tracking to reduce mileage. They take back plastic and cardboard packaging from customers and what they are unable to reuse, they recycle. Food waste is composted, they plant enough trees to get carbon neutral status, and have appointed a carbon champion to monitor the organization’s footprint. So far so good, but most importantly for my purposes here, Suma is owned by the people who work in it. Everyone is paid the same—in 2016 that was £40,000 a year for the 161 permanent members and over £11 an hour for temporary workers. Job rotation is simply assumed, with everyone collectively doing all the jobs that need doing, whatever they happen to be and regardless of status. Jenny Carlyle, Suma member and personnel officer says that: very few people do the same job five days a week and most will also do some warehouse jobs in the week, so something like picking, or loading trucks, or working in the fridges or freezers. You can imagine what a nightmare it would be to say ‘you’re on one rate for picking in the warehouse, you’re on another for being a member of  the sales team’. Working out how to pay people for a week’s work would be impossible. (Roper, 2016)

This sort of multi-skilling also enables collaborative democratic decision-making, as all members have at least some experience of every area, and therefore practical knowledge on which to base discussion and decisions. Underpinning all this is the expectation that members will ‘self-manage’, as Carlyle says. Self-management is written into our job descriptions and how we train new members. We encourage everybody to ask questions, whether they’re here as a shortterm worker, whether they have a lot of experience or are fresh out of university . . . and people are pretty good at finding the information they need to inform themselves. (Roper, 2016)

The insistence on equal pay is the most obvious way of showing that all work in the organization is valuable, with workers never having to wonder how their pay compares with that of someone else. Jenny Carlyle again:

alternatives to management ideas    501 Picking the orders would be the lowest-paid job in a similar company but actually that’s our core business: if we didn’t have that we wouldn’t have the rest, so it shows we value all of the inputs to the business equally. Pay is only ever on the table when we’re discussing whether or not to give ourselves a pay rise, so it takes away that hassle—everyone knows where they stand.  (Roper, 2016)

In some ways, Suma is an unremarkable company. It buys, sells, and moves a set of products that customers want. There is nothing particularly innovative about the core aspects of their business model, involving trucks and a warehouse. However, as is clear from the above, the way that they run the business denies hierarchical organization, and refuses a permanent division of labour, asymmetries of knowledge and reward, the externalization of costs, and even assumptions about growth. Members of Suma assume that the organizing principle is ‘self-management’ (Vanek, 1975), not management by managers. This is a company which is clearly driven by idealism, with a vision of a different world, but which also deals with practical questions in ways that have been making its members a living for over forty years.

Three Principles for Non-Managerial Alternatives I want to use the above example to show that there are viable alternatives to management as a general form of organizing. Suma is just a small company, but it is an example that can be used to question many of the core assumptions of contemporary management ideas. It shows that a different combination of organization plus exchange can function and survive, can combine idealism with practicality. And if I had space, I could add to this catalogue, this bestiary of organizations, by describing other arrangements that challenge the conventions of managerialism in the name of autonomy, equality, sustainability, or whatever. Because the point is not that all organizations should be like Suma. The idea of generalized models that can be transferred regardless of local circumstances is one that management ideas often sell (Benders and Van Veen, 2001). Instead, it seems to me that the point of exploring alternatives is to open up diversity, to encourage reflection on the sheer variety of ways in which human beings can come together and solve the collective problems that they face. Because the most important issue to address does not concern models and the choices between them, but a recognition that organizing is a political and ethical matter. This means that management ideas, or rather, ideas about organization, embed assumptions about the relationship between human beings and things— they are politics made durable, and I want to say a little more about this now. There are many ‘alternatives’ to the present, including fascism, feudalism, and slavery, but I am not advocating any of these here. Instead I’m going to suggest three broad principles— autonomy, collectivity, and responsibility—which might help us think about how what sorts of alternatives to management ideas we might consider (Parker et al., 2014b).

502   m. parker First, I think that any alternative form of organizing should be able to protect some fairly conventional notions of individual autonomy, that is to say, to respect personal distinctiveness and choice. This is not a controversial or novel idea, but one that underpins most conservative, liberal, and libertarian political philosophy. Words like liberty, diversity, and difference are more often honoured in the breach rather than the observance, but still gesture towards the radical proposal that individual freedoms really do matter. When we feel that we have been forced to do something that we don’t want to do, we are diminished in an important way. Any social arrangement which relies on coercion, whether economic, ideological, or physical, should be treated with suspicion. Individuals should have choices about some of the most important ways in which they live their lives. If there is no autonomy within a given social system, only rules, then we are justified in calling it totalitarian, uniform, and intolerant of difference. For most this will be an easy principle to establish, because it underlies so much of the ideology which supports neo-liberal capitalism, and yet it contains a radical core which should lie at the heart of any robust ‘alternative’. The second principle reverses the assumptions of the first, and begins with the ­collective, and our duties to others. This could be underpinned with forms of communist, socialist, and communitarian thought and insists that we are social creatures who are necessarily reliant on others. This means that words like solidarity, cooperation, and community become both descriptions of the way that human beings are, and prescriptions for the way that they should be. On their own, human beings are vulnerable and powerless, victims of nature and circumstance. Collectively bound together by language, culture, and organization—they become powerful, and capable of turning the world to their purposes. Perhaps even more important than this is the way in which we humans make each other, providing the meanings and care which allow us to recognize ourselves as ourselves through others. We are made through and with other humans in such a way that it is impossible to imagine even being human without some conception of a society to be oriented to. Principles one and two are at best in tension with one another, at worst contradictory. How can we be both true to ourselves, and at the same time orient ourselves to the collective? How can we value freedom, but then give it up to the group? The answer is that these aren’t contradictions. For example, when we speak of being free, we usually mean ‘free to’, in the sense of being free to be able to exercise choices about who to vote for, what to buy and so on. This is precisely the idea of liberty that we are very often encouraged to imagine as being the pre-eminent principle around which our lives should be organized within a consumer society. But a moment’s thought also allows us to see that ‘freedom to’ is only possible if we also experience ‘freedom from’. As the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin put it, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ liberty are not the same things, even if they appear to be aimed at the same goals (Berlin, 1969). The individual freedom to be who we want to be rests on our freedoms from hunger, dislocation, violence and so on, which can only be pursued collectively. We can only exercise our autonomy within some sort of collective agreement which provides us with a shelter against events. So ‘freedom’ is an entirely abstract concept unless it is embedded within some sort of institutions.

alternatives to management ideas    503 Otherwise, we might as well talk about being free to starve or pay fees to a management consultant, or at liberty to become an employee or a political prisoner. The reverse is also true of course. As the history of the twentieth century showed very clearly, just because a social system claims to be collective (whether communist, nationalist, capitalist, or national socialist) it doesn’t mean that it is. Even if a majority supports it, there might be compelling reasons not to support certain dominant norms, to stand out against the mass. Strident claims to be representing others might provide a warrant for the powerful to do what they want. The suggestion that individual preferences should always be dissolved in the collective, and that any dissent from the dominant line is heretical, is one that we find in a wide variety of flavours. Liberty is usually suppressed in the name of a greater good—‘the corporation’, ‘the people’, ‘the management’, ‘the nation’—but what is common is that it requires conformity, fear, exile, or even death to enforce it. There is not such a merit in being collective that the destruction of all liberties is necessary to achieve it. The idea of creating the ideal human within the ideal city is one that requires that people and things which don’t fit are discarded, and that all the contradictions and politics of real people in real places are reduced to a ‘year zero’ from which we can begin again. It is because of such assumptions that assertions of individual ­liberty matter. The third principle is a little easier, in the sense that it presents a more direct challenge to the externalizing tendencies of capitalism. Any alternative worth the name must have a responsibility to the future, which is to say, to the conditions for our individual and collective flourishing. This will involve words which are used often nowadays, sometimes as part of ideas from ‘corporate social responsibility’, but not always taken very seriously as practices, such as sustainability, accountability, and duty. The managerial economic and organizational structures of the present tend not to encourage such responsibilities, instead treating people and planet as resources which can be used for short-term gain by those who have the power to make decisions about such things. In large part, these are matters which bear upon questions of climate change, environmental degradation, and loss of biodiversity. The conditions for our individual and collective flourishing are also institutional and cultural, and hence any responsibility to the future must also have regard to the sorts of people and things we design, and the sort of organizational arrangements that they make, and that make them. This means, for example, being attentive to what technologies do to us and for us; what sort of assumptions about democracy and hierarchy we embed into our workplaces; or how we think about economic growth and localization. Responsibility is a term which presses us to think about all sorts of consequences, which encourages us to respond to the future and not insulate ourselves with the usual arguments which merely end up displacing problems to some other place, and some other time. What we have here then are three principles (autonomy, collectivity, and responsibility) which seem to me to be reasonable to require of any form of organization, and which must be negotiated and understood by ourselves, with others, and to our future. It seems to me that all three are elements of what it might mean to be alternative and any one in isolation is insufficient. An organization which only defends individual liberty

504   m. parker will not be able to coordinate very much, but an organization which only demands ­collective loyalty must necessarily expel disagreement. And, since we don’t know and probably won’t agree on what the future should look like then the balance between individualism and collectivism will also be written across our futures. ‘Management’ ideas tend to assume autonomy for managers, collectivity for employees, and only allow responsibilities to bear if they don’t hurt the bottom line. Suma, on the other hand, is continually asking these questions in terms of its commitment to self-management, equality, and sustainability. The three concerns cannot be treated as matters that can ever be solved, but rather must continually be raised in the certain knowledge that there will always be disagreements, and that organizing never ends.

Schools for Organizing Within the business school people are teaching ideas about management, a practice conducted by the powerful and their many minions. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, a great deal of organizing is going on—in places like Suma, and all the many other organizations that have decided to question management ideas. Managing is one form of organizing, and I don’t want to overdraw the distinctions between the specific assumptions of managerialism and the general problems of organizing. They are not always in opposition to one another. It would better to say that management ideas promulgate particular arrangements as if they were the only solutions. They assume a ‘false necessity’ (Unger, 2004), a foreclosure of questions that should be left open and discussed as part of the political constitution of the social world that we collectively construct. Management ideas are often aimed at solving the problems of organizing too, but the difference is that they tend to assume the necessity of hierarchical status and reward, asymmetric information sharing and decision-making, a credentialized expertise, and a capitalist economy with the private company as the default business form (see SallesDjelic, in this volume). That being said, management ideas can be more or less authoritarian, and alternatives can become more managerial over time. The language and ideas used by alternative organizers, including Suma of course, often contain echoes of management ideas. Concepts such as job rotation, coordination, organizational democracy, self-management and so on have also been used in ‘soft’ management theory too (ten Bos and Heusinkveld, 2008). As I have said, management is one form of organizing, but it’s not the only one. Human beings have organized themselves in a vast variety of patterns. These patterns vary historically, geographically, culturally, politically and so on. In fact, the multiplicity of differences seems to far exceed any similarities, unless we remain at the highest level of generality. Faced with such a dizzying range of specific procedures, we might first stop for a moment, and enjoy the view, and then start to begin to learn from this multiplicity. If we want to learn how to produce forms of organizing that provide us all with nice things to eat and do, interesting people to talk to, and beautiful works of art and design,

alternatives to management ideas    505 then we have a rich range of successes and failures to look at. It would be sensible to learn from everything that other people have already tried, of which ‘management’ is one small part, unless we really think that management ideas are the end of history, the one best way to organize. So, I would like to imagine a new and emerging school for organizing, and for organizers. It will be a much more generous place than the university busy-ness school, for that is a place which only teaches management ideas, but would instead teach everything from Associations to the Zapatista, with Suma along the way, and would certainly not restrict itself to interbreeding varieties of market managerialism (Parker,  2018). This will be a school for people who want to learn from other places, other times, other politics, and to consider the relevance of these lessons for their own attempts to create organizations (Atzeni,  2012; Erdal,  2011; Gibson-Graham et al.,  2013; Maeckelbergh, 2009; Novkovic and Webb, 2014; Rogers, 2014). It will not be a finishing school for g­ lobal managerialism, or an extended exercise in legitimating inequality. It will be a place which teaches about ideas of organization, not just restricting itself to management ideas.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Stefan Heusinkveld and David Strang for their comments. Parts of this chapter grew from my ‘The Architect and the Bee Revisited: Managing, Organizing and Agency’ (2015).

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chapter 28

N ew Dir ections for R esea rch on M a nagem en t Ideas Andrew Sturdy, Stefan Heusinkveld, Trish Reay, and David Strang

Introduction This chapter concludes the handbook by looking forward to the possibilities for further research in the field of management ideas. While each of the previous chapters identified specific topics for future research by engaging with the relevant literature, here, we identify five broader, emergent themes from these discussions in order to provide an overview. This is distinct from our organization of the chapters into the themes which structured the handbook—understanding management ideas, actors, processes, and contexts—and which were discussed in the introductory chapter. However, we do return to some of the issues raised there, such as the fragmentary nature of the field and its future prospects and composition. The chapter is organized as follows. First, we discuss the call to make interconnections and to engage with classic and emerging conceptual dilemmas before discussing more familiar concerns to identify the effects of management ideas more precisely and to engage better with diverse practitioners and practice. The final theme is less structured and relates to the need to step outside the familiar, either empirically or theoretically, in order to advance understanding—that is, to encourage conceptual innovation. Finally, we briefly conclude by considering those fields and areas of research that have not been as well represented and what this suggests for future research.

Making Connections Perhaps unsurprisingly for a field of literature that is relatively fragmented and weakly institutionalized (compared say, to innovation in general), a common theme to emerge from

new directions for research on management ideas    509 contributors was the need to make further connections or establish new dialogues. However, it also reflects the outward-looking nature of the contributors and the potential value of achieving new insights through engaging with different traditions and domains. This call for new connections to be made was evident across a range of different dimensions—actors, processes, levels of analysis, research methods, disciplines, and perspectives. So, for example we see calls both to investigate and make connections between different actors: business media and organizations/managers (Barros and Rüling); professions (Whittington and Anderson); business studies and managers/practice (Engwall and Wedlin); gurus, standard setters, and other networked actors (Collins; Rasche and Seidl). Likewise, others identify a need to connect different levels of a­ nalysis—individual, organizational, ecological, and global (Werr and Walgenbach; Rasche and Seidl; Pope and Bromley; Sharma and Sharma; Seeck and Lamberg)—and to combine what are often isolated research methods and theoretical traditions (O’Mahoney; Strang and Wittrock; McCabe, Ciuk, and Russell). More specific conceptual and theoretical links are identified such as connecting the study of diffusion and implementation processes, or fashion and innovation (Mol, Foss, and Birkinshaw). Strang and Wittrock for instance call for connections ‘with disciplines at the forefront of the cultural, cognitive, and computational turns’ while Sharma and Sharma identify the need ‘to use the temporal lens to link the sustainability concept to the family firm context with a potential to bridge the gap between global level multilateral agreements on sustainability challenges and organizational level implementation’. Others highlight the value of combining perspectives and languages in general or within management subfields (O’Mahoney; Reinmoeller, Ansari, and Mehta; McCabe, Ciuk, and Russell; Werr and Walgenbach) or emphasize the value of integrating specific new approaches. For instance, Kern, Almond, Edwards, and Tregaskis seek to go beyond the familiar and popular neo-institutionalist frame; Barros and Rüling identify the potential of drawing on media and communication studies; Whittington and Anderson highlight a need for cross-national comparisons; and McCabe, Ciuk, and Russell identify studies of subjectivity as a resource to help make sense of why some managers are more inclined than others to adopt new ideas.

Familiar Distinctions and Dilemmas: A Third Way? Closely linked to the above concern to make new connections was a theme evident in some of the contributions that suggested transcending familiar relationships and ­conceptual distinctions. This was evident in the main content of chapters that identified dominant oppositions such as those between the rational/functional versus symbolic/ critical perspectives and then outlined a ‘third way’ through practice or translation perspectives (e.g. Røvik; Werr and Walgenbach). It was also clear from accounts of future research directions which sought to engage with or reinvigorate the tensions between: production and consumption (Bort and Kieser; Engwall and Wedlin); ideas and  practices or materiality (Werr and Walgenbach; Seeck and Lamberg; Kern, Almond, Edwards, and Tregaskis); stability and change such as institutions and fashions

510    a. sturdy, s. heusinkveld, t. reay, and d. strang (Whittington and Anderson; Abrahamson and Piazza; Seeck and Lamberg; Benders, van Grinsven, and Ingvaldsen; Reinmoeller, Ansari, and Mehta) and make and buy (Mol, Foss, and Birkinshaw).

The Impacts of Ideas and Emerging Contexts A persistent theme in the study of management ideas, as with innovation in general, is their potential impact. The reasons behind this are twofold. Firstly, the impact, effects, or outcomes of management ideas and practices are central to the preoccupations of both management and its critics. They help define the significance and scope of management. Secondly, although some view identifying outcomes as a technical, but achievable aim, most recognize the difficulties of doing so (Reinmoeller, Ansari, and Mehta; Benders, van Grinsven, and Ingvaldsen), but this does not always deter their efforts (Wickert, Sieweke, and Ruotsalainen). Most contributors to this volume view the impact of management ideas and of associated intermediaries as growing (e.g. Engwall and Wedlin), although this is questioned by Bort and Kieser. Others too, have doubts over the continuing impact of particular actors such as consultants and book publishers (Wright; Barros and Rüling). Many ask for more to be done to identify the nature and range, if not scale, of the different effects of ideas and different actors such as gurus (Collins). Seeck and Lamberg for example ask whether ideas can be shown to act as a ‘catalyst for strategic and industrial change’ while Wickert, Sieweke, and Ruotsalainen raise questions about unintended and sustainable effects. Various theorists call for impact to be unpacked so that we can better identify the outcomes of different types of ideas and contexts, even beyond management (Werr and Walgenbach; Salles-Djelic). This includes a concern with power and politics such as effects on gender and racial inequality or on the silencing of particular groups (McCabe, Ciuk, and Russell; Hancock and Tyler) and, more broadly, examining management ideas and the diffusion of a neo-liberal model of global capitalism (Wright). Even those studies that recognize the difficulties of identifying precise impacts, especially as ideas are translated (Benders, van Grinsven, and Ingvaldsen; Reinmoeller, Ansari, and Mehta), call for research on how managers try and assess impact, if at all— the familiar concern with how rational or purposeful decisions are (e.g. Bort and Kieser). Finally, some point to the need for a longer term or dynamic view in assessing impact. Here, future research might look more to longitudinal methods to identify whether high profile ideas really did have a lasting impact (Seeck and Lamberg). Alternatively, the shifting conditions for the production and spread of management ideas (whereby they become less elite-controlled, more dynamic and interactive) is seen to pose new challenges to revealing the scope of impact (Barros and Rüling). These changes do, however, also open up methodological opportunities, through social media for example, for measuring the supply and demand sides of diffusion (Giroux).

new directions for research on management ideas    511

Engaging with Diverse Actors Aside from a concern with charting the impact of management ideas, one of the most persistent areas of debate lies in the extent to which scholars seek to engage with practitioners or potential users of their research on management ideas. This applies to management and organization studies more generally, but takes a particular form in this field of research. Note for example, ongoing calls for academics to influence (temper) the way in which ideas are subject to the whims of fashion (Abrahamson,  1996; Baskerville and Meyers, 2009; Kieser, 1997; Sorge and van Witteloostuijn, 2004). Such appeals to greater rationality are less evident now, but some of the preceding chapters highlight their own relevance to practice or call for more applied research. Røvik for instance, asks how translation capacity or competencies in managers can be created and organized to use management ideas for desired ends. Likewise, Werr and Walgenbach call for research that examines how the form of management ideas shapes the way in which they are applied as techniques. Others extend their relevance to different groups such as business schools (Engwall and Wedlin). Those adopting a more critical or inclusive perspective, seek to change rather than inform management practice and engage with a more diverse group of users. Indeed, here, the focus on management ideas is seen to have the ideological effect of de-legitimizing other groups such as other employees, unions, civil servants, citizens, etc. (Hancock and Tyler; Reed). This is reflected most clearly in Parker’s call for university schools of organizing—‘for people who want to learn from other places, other times, other politics, and to consider the relevance of these lessons for their own attempts to create organizations’.

Value at the Margins: Empirical, Disciplinary, and Theoretical Opportunities We have seen how the calls for further and future research have not only been concerned with impact and engagement, but with making connections and addressing familiar dilemmas. The final theme extends this connective route to new insights in that it identifies different options to move beyond the familiar or obvious, including outside of management and organization. This includes the following: • Failed, dormant, or unpopular management ideas that do not diffuse or become institutions (Abrahamson and Piazza; Seeck and Lamberg; Salles-Djelic); ideas for organizing or nurturing beyond those in management (Parker; Hancock and Tyler). • Less obvious intermediaries and contexts such as: novel (social) media (Barros and Rüling; Giroux) and performance settings (Collins); training institutions

512    a. sturdy, s. heusinkveld, t. reay, and d. strang (Engwall and Wedlin); citizens (Bort and Kieser) and professions (Whittington and Anderson); less traditional and more dispersed employment settings, including the ‘gig’ economy (McCabe, Ciuk, and Russell) and beyond the Global North (Kern, Almond, Edwards, and Tregaskis). • Theories from disciplines new to management ideas research such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, and media studies (Strang and Wittrock; Barros and Rüling) or neglected processes such as idea abandonment (Reinmoeller, Ansari, and Mehta), power (Salles-Djelic), or gender discrimination (McCabe, Ciuk, and Russell). In each case, the call is intended to extend insight and debate, either because the issues or approaches have been neglected or because empirical changes have led to new approaches and methods becoming more relevant.

Conclusion In this short chapter, we have sought to draw out themes from the areas identified in the preceding chapters for further research to be carried out in the field of management ideas. In particular, we identified five interconnected themes as generic approaches or mechanisms through which new insights could or should be achieved: (1) connections, (2) distinctions, (3) impacts, (4) engagement, and (5) the novel or marginal. This provides a wealth of research opportunities for us to explore, but it is also important to point to further opportunities and wider developments in the realm of management ideas and research. For example, although we included research from a wide range of topics and perspectives from within management and organization studies, we have already seen that other disciplines and perspectives hold potential too. This is perhaps most apparent close to home, in that there remains considerable scope for interaction between the established and economics-oriented field of innovation and management-based studies such as those represented here. This also colours methodological preferences in that the latter tends to be more open to qualitative research while innovation has a mostly quantitative tradition. A similar observation of separation could be made for example about geography (González, 2011), communication (Cornelissen and Lock, 2000), operations management (Naveh and Marcus,  2005), accounting research (Ax and Bjørnenak, 2005; Malmi, 2001), and information systems (Baskerville and Myers, 2009; Gill and Bhattacherjee, 2009), although here, there is, particularly for the latter, a shared conceptual focus with management studies on translation. Such disciplinary fragmentation is common in academia and reflected in journal ‘silos’. It is also evident in persistent, but often unheeded exhortations for interdisciplinary research. Nevertheless, the potential for dialogue and combination remains and is evident in practice in some journals that publish research from diverse traditions (e.g. Research Policy). If there are some, albeit modest, opportunities for interdisciplinarity or greater diversity in management ideas research, what are the prospects empirically? As one might

new directions for research on management ideas    513 expect, most, but not all (Bort and Kieser), contributors to this volume see the ­importance and scope of management ideas as continuing to grow (e.g. Pope and Bromley), even if the core actors may change. However, as Grey (1999) pointed out the huge success of management as a set of ideas, practices, and actors which colonize seemingly all social spaces had unanticipated consequences. In particular, its pervasiveness and power rendered it less elite and special, not just as an occupational or hierarchical group, but as a set of ideas and practices. We have also seen this intensify in recent years with the opening up of new and social media, making management more accessible or diffuse, although not necessarily more inclusive politically. While large parts of the world, especially outside of the Global North, have yet to be fully colonized by different versions of management ideas, we do still need to ask the question of how distinctive management ideas are in their form, movement, context, and the actors involved.

References Abrahamson, E. (1996). ‘Management Fashion’, Academy of Management Review, 21: 254–85. Ax, C. and Bjørnenak, T. (2005). ‘Bundling and Diffusion of Management Accounting Innovations: The Case of the Balanced Scorecard in Sweden’, Management Accounting Research, 16: 1–20. Baskerville, R. L. and Myers, M. D. (2009). ‘Fashion Waves in Information Systems Research and Practice’, MIS Quarterly, 33: 647–62. Conrnelissen, J.  P. and Lock, A.  R. (2000). ‘Theoretical Concept or Management Fashion? Examining the Significance of IMC’, Journal of Advertising Research, 40: 7–15. Gill, G. and Bhattacherjee, A. (2009). ‘Fashion Waves versus Informing: Response to Baskerville and Myers’, MIS Quarterly, 33: 667–71. González, S. (2011). ‘Bilbao and Barcelona “in Motion”: How Urban Regeneration “Models” Travel and Mutate in the Global Flows of Policy Tourism’, Urban Studies, 48: 1397–418. Grey, C. (1999). ‘ “We Are All Managers Now”; “We Always Were”: On the Development and Demise of Management’, Journal of Management Studies, 36: 561–85. Kieser, A. (1997). ‘Rhetoric and Myth in Management Fashion’, Organization, 4: 49–74. Malmi, T. (2001). ‘Balanced Scorecards in Finnish Companies: A Research Note’, Management Accounting Research, 12: 207–20. Naveh, E. and Marcus, A. (2005). ‘Achieving Competitive Advantage through Implementing a Replicable Management Standard: Installing and Using ISO 9000’, Journal of Operations Management, 24: 1–26. Sorge, A. and van Witteloostuijn, A. (2004). ‘The (Non)Sense of Organizational Change: An Essai About Universal Management Hypes, Sick Consultancy Metaphors, and Healthy Organization Theories’, Organization Studies, 25: 1205–31.

Index

An italic t following a page number denotes a table. AA1000 standard  337 3M 432 abandonment of practices  90, 257, 263t, 512 Abbe, E.  296 Abbott, A.  87, 443, 454 Abercrombie, N.  3 ABI/Inform Global  95 Abrahamson, E.  5, 25, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 44, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 88, 95, 96, 109, 121, 123, 124, 126, 141, 145, 199, 251, 252, 253, 271, 273, 288t, 289, 290, 293, 297, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 314, 321, 323, 328, 343, 385, 411, 473, 481, 511 abstract management ideas  42, 47, 48, 49–53, 55, 60, 61, 62 dormancy and rebirth of  52–3 innovation and diffusion stage in  50–1 institutionalization of  52 academic gurus  221, 236 Academy of Management  6, 165, 478–9 Critical Management Studies Division  479 Organizations and Natural Environment (ONE) Division  429 Academy of Management Review 6 Accenture  144, 330 accounting  143, 145 institutionalization of management ideas in  320, 321, 324, 325–6, 327–8, 329–31 standards in  344 Accounting, Organizations and Society 162 accreditations  166–7, 172 Achieving Competitive Excellence (ACE)  312 Achmea 280 Ackroyd, S.  355, 360, 443 activist inquiry  481–8, 489

SheepMilkNZ activist project  485–8 university as locale for  482–5 Activity Based Costing (ABC)  2 actor-based system of management ideas  27 Actor-Network Theory (ANT)  70t, 74–5, 77, 82, 367 actualism  69, 70t, 74–5, 76, 77, 78t, 81 Adams, C. A.  97 Adams, D.  469 adaptation  34, 170, 177, 186, 252, 254, 264, 309 addition of local elements to ideas  131, 132 Adler, P.  2, 29, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 94, 278, 289, 291, 473, 474 Adler, R. W.  256, 257 adoption of management ideas  252–5, 262, 264, 308–9 fashion perspective  252, 253, 262, 263t functional perspective  252, 253–4, 262, 263t process perspective  252, 254–5, 262, 263t symbolic adoption  186, 187, 309 see also re-adoption Adorno, T.  461 advertising  320, 322 affordances, management techniques  113–14, 116 agency  252, 254 and structure  77, 80, 81 agency theory  380, 404 agile methods  258, 309 Aharoni, Y.  328 Aharonson, B. S.  239 Ailon-Souday, G.  47, 48, 49, 51, 288t, 289, 290 Ainamo, A.  196–7, 199 Ajzen, I.  3 Alaatta, T.  397

516   index Alajoutsijärvi, K.  166 Alakavuklar, O. N.  475 Al-Amoudi, I.  82 Alänge, S.  34 Albertini, E.  107, 108 Alcadipani, R.  477 Alderson, W.  161 Aldrich, H.  188 Allen, A.  327 Allen, V. L.  357 Almond, P.  178, 187 alteration of management ideas  132 alternatives to management ideas  492–507 Altheide, D. L.  195, 200, 201 Altinkemer, K.  377, 378 Alvarez, J. L.  4, 143, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 240, 294, 397 Alvesson, M.  97, 142, 240, 355, 362, 496 ambiguity of ideas  312–13 Amdam, R. P.  294, 396 American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA)  325 Americanization  146, 167, 294 American Management Association  401 Amis, J. M.  273 amoeba management  258 Andersen, H.  130 Andersen, N. Å.  97 Anderson, M.  326 Anderson, P.  3 Anderson, R.  431, 433, 434, 437 Anderson Consulting  144 Anderson-Gough, F.  329 Anderssen, L. M.  431 Andreotti, A.  182 Ansari, S.  4, 9, 26, 34, 49, 54, 122, 169, 186, 199, 234, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 264, 272, 309, 312, 321, 428, 431, 432, 434 antitrust regulation  396–7 Antony, J.  126 Appelo, J.  258 Apple 170 appropriateness, logic of  235 approval 307–8 Aral, S.  209 Aravind, D.  251, 254, 321 Archer, M. S.  80, 82

archival data  90–1 Argyris, C.  3 Arkes, H.  400 Arloski, M.  466 Armbrüster, T.  113, 146, 148, 153 Armytage, W. H. G.  233 Arthur D. Little  171, 329 Arthur, J. B.  381, 382 Ashford, S. J.  188 Ashforth, B. E.  363 Ashny, R. W.  258 Ashridge Business School  171 Ashridge Consulting  171 Ashworth, R.  445 Asian countries  293 Asmussen, C. G.  179, 180 AT&T 327 Athos, A. G.  31, 221, 222 Atzeni, M.  505 audit culture  452 auditing, and codified management standards 348 Augier, M.  236 Austin, N.  220 Australia  147, 150, 357 autonomy  501, 502, 503, 504 Avadikyan, A.  341 Ayres, I.  345 Badham, R.  189 Badian, E.  393 Bain & Co  330 Bain, B.  328 Bain, P.  361, 365 Baker, J. K.  150 Bakker, A. B.  260 balanced scorecard  26, 106, 204, 240, 264 balance theory  58–9 Bales, R. F.  461 Bamanpour, F.  321 bandwagon effect  56, 306–7, 308, 309, 384 Banerjee, S. B.  295, 384, 483 Banner, D. K.  256 Bansal, P.  151, 237, 431, 439 Banuelas, R.  126 Barad, K.  69 Bardoel, J.  208

index   517 Bardon, T.  362, 367 Barker, J. R.  259 Barley, S.  2, 4, 29–30, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 88t, 94, 96, 187, 196, 223, 253, 287, 288t, 289, 356, 473 Barnett, W. P.  376, 384 Barney, J.  36, 377, 381, 385 Baron, J. N.  51, 91, 321 Bartlett, C. A.  179, 181 Barton, D.  151 Barzelay, M.  443, 445 Base of the Pyramid (BoP) network  429 Baskerville, R. L.  511, 512 Bateman, T. S.  431 Bates, B.  121, 123 Baxter, V.  466 BBC  144, 496 Beale, D.  357, 359 Beaverstock, J. V.  181, 182–3 Bechky, B. A.  72 Becker, B. E.  379 Becker, H. S.  88 Beck, N.  95, 96 Bedaux, C.  144 Beer, M.  4 Beeton, Mrs  462 Behnam, M.  348 Beirne, M.  357 Bélanger, J.  186 Bell, S. T.  107 benchmarking  94, 95, 104, 420 Benders, J.  2, 6, 10, 36, 48, 49, 54, 55, 58, 60, 71, 88t, 91–2, 95, 97, 121, 124, 125, 131, 143, 145, 233–4, 235, 236, 252, 255, 257, 271, 273, 274, 277, 279, 280, 281, 289, 290, 294, 297, 305, 312, 313, 339, 347, 348, 445, 498, 501 Bendix, R.  2, 5, 7, 46–7, 295, 394 Bennett, H. R.  463 Bensman, J.  355 Benson, J. K.  58 Benziger Family Winery  432–3, 435–6, 437 Berger, P. L.  123 Berggren, C.  278, 279 Bergh, D. D.  107, 198 Berglund, J.  114, 236 Bergquist, M.  208

Berle, A.  397, 398 Berlin, I.  502 Berners-Lee, T.  219 Bernstein, E.  258 Berrone, P.  438 Bessant, J.  144 Best, J.  201 best practices  106–8, 123, 147, 311, 346, 347 Bettis, R. A.  29 Beynon, H.  462 Bhaskar, R.  71, 76, 82 Bhattacherjee, A.  512 bibliometric research  87, 94–6 BIDS 95 Bidwell, M. J.  37 Bilodeau, B.  104, 330 Bingham, A.  310 Birken, S. A.  127 Birkinshaw, J. M.  2 4, 5, 9, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 54, 59, 61, 68, 126, 198, 251, 252, 254, 258 Björnberg, A.  428 Blackler, F.  4, 7 Blass, E.  170 Blau, P. M.  86 Blei, D. M.  96 Block, J.  435 Blockmans, W.  168 Bloom, N.  33 Bloomberg Businessweek 203 Bluedorn, A. C.  436 Blumer, H.  73 Blyth, M.  447 Bock, S.  147, 152 Bodrŏzić, Z.  2, 29, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 94, 289, 291, 473, 474 body, as site of management intervention  459, 465–7 Bogardus, E. S.  43, 44, 45, 46, 55, 58 Bogdanov, P.  96 Böhm, S.  394 Böhme, G.  469 Bohn, S.  309 Boiral, O.  309, 343, 345, 346, 348 Boltanski, L.  96, 197, 220, 403 Bommer, W. H.  128 Bonabeau, E.  256

518   index books  164, 165, 197, 199, 203, 204, 205, 206t, 208, 209 Bort, S.  2, 9, 88t, 92, 235, 239, 312, 427 Boston Consulting Group (BCG)  144, 147, 327, 328, 329 Boström, M.  344 Botzem, S.  327 Bouckaert, G.  443, 445, 454 boundary objects  73, 241 boundary spanners  187–8 consultants as  141, 152 Boussebaa, M.  184, 404 Bowman, A.  448 Boxenbaum, E.  110, 126 Bradburn, E. M.  90 Braithwaite, B.  463 Braithwaite, J.  345 Brammer, S.  239 branding, organizational  418 brand management  32 Braverman, H.  224–5, 360, 394, 398 Brès, L.  151, 152 Brewis, J.  463 Brewster, C.  178 Bridgman, T.  286 Brigham, K. H.  430 Brindle, M.  217, 224, 225 Briscoe, J. A.  346 Britain see United Kingdom British Steel  144 British Tube Industries  144 broadcast models  56–7 Brocklehurst, M.  238, 239 Bromley, P.  412, 413, 414, 419 Brown, A.  404 Browne, R. B.  312, 313 Brundtland Commission  428 Brunsson, N.  10, 124, 126, 130, 338, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 412, 419 Bryans, S.  404 Bryson, B. E.  233 Buchanan, D.  189, 444, 447, 450 Buckley, C.  460 Buddhism 293 Buenstorf, G.  296 Bukowski, W. M.  303, 304, 307 Bullock, P.  377

Bunch, J.  258 Burawoy, M.  355, 362, 365, 398, 475–6 Burbridge, J. L.  271 bureaucracy 462–3 Burns, L. R.  56, 90, 257, 411 Burns, T.  376 Burrows, R.  452 Burt, R. S.  436 business media  10, 53, 163, 164–5, 172, 195–215 as carriers and co-producers of management ideas  198–9 future research  210–11 gatekeeping role  195, 205 historical development of  196–8 impact on organizations  198 business media logics  195, 202–10 cultural-normative aspect  201, 202–5, 206t economic aspect  201–2, 204–5, 207t legitimacy of knowledge claims  202–5 media versus author-based legitimacy 203–4 objectivity and distance versus proximity 204–5 technological aspect  201, 202, 204–5, 206t and technological convergence  208–10 business news  204, 206t, 208, 209 Business Periodicals Index  95 business process management  59 business process re-engineering (BPR)  2, 80–1, 95, 114, 143, 145, 204, 236, 253, 271, 272, 312 and performance  377, 378–9 business schools  6, 10, 29, 76, 146, 238, 239, 404, 417, 494, 496 European  160, 402, 403 rankings  167–8, 172 United Kingdom  161 United States  160, 161, 168, 295, 397, 399 business studies  159–76 alternatives to academic business studies 169–71 and consultancies  163, 164–5, 172 content of  161–2 future research  172 institutions of academic business studies  159–61, 172 and media  163, 164–5, 172

index   519 and practice, link between  163, 164–5, 172 as providers of ideas  162–5 scrutiny of accreditation  166–7, 172 internationalization 165–6 rankings  167–8, 172 research evaluations  168 student exchanges  166 see also business schools business sustainability  151 Business Week 167 Büthe, T.  327 Butler, N.  130, 481 Bylund, P. L.  287 Byrne, J. A.  146, 197, 221 Cabantous, L.  483 ‘caffeine dose’ theory  253 Cahill, D.  444, 447 Calás, M. B.  477 Calhoun, M. A.  95 California Management Review 203 Callon, M.  129, 199, 254, 469 Calvinism 293 Campbell, D. T.  26, 31 Campbell, W. F.  232 Canato, A.  4 Cannell, B.  499 capitalism 146 corporate (American)  394, 396–7, 399, 400 crisis of  142, 151 financialization of  404, 406 populist 233 Carew, A.  394, 400, 401 Carlyle, J.  500–1 Carnegie Corporation  161 Carrillo, J. E.  382 Carroll, C. E.  240 Carroll, D. T.  220 Carroll, W. K.  182 Carson, P. P.  57, 95, 290, 357, 411, 420 Carstensen, M. B.  3 Carter, B.  281 Carter, P.  220 Cascio, W. F.  121 Case, P.  3, 8, 81, 143 case studies  87, 88t, 93–4, 164

Casper, S.  10 Cassidy, T. D.  463 Cassis, Y.  403 Casula Vifell, A.  344 Catholicism 293 causal mechanisms  80–1 Ceci, F.  72 Cederström, C.  466 CEOs (chief executive officers) business school backgrounds  162 memoirs  165, 197 Çetin, D.  294 Chadwick, A.  205 Champy, J.  25, 145, 204 Chandler, A.  160, 397, 398 Chandler, R. A.  326 change culture  357, 446 and identity of practices  264 management techniques and process of 114 organizational  4, 9 resistance to  128 see also technological change change agents  30, 32, 327–8 change mechanisms  325–7 Chanlat, J.-F.  7 Chen, C. C.  198, 204 Chenhall, R. H.  104 Chen, M.  293 Chen, W. R.  258 Chhokar, J. S.  178 Chiapello, E.  96, 97, 197, 220 Child, J.  323 China 149 Choi, S. Y.  382 Chrisman, J. J.  437 Christensen, C.  150, 473 Christensen, T.  393, 404 Christian values  293 Chua, J. H.  430 Cillessen, A. H. N.  307 Cirnut, F.  310 citations  71, 95, 290 citizens, as consumers and co-producers of management ideas  239–40 civic professionalism  451, 454

520   index civil service reform  89 clarity 68 Clark, H.  460 Clark, P.  287, 290 Clark, T.  10, 53, 54, 57, 71, 88t, 92, 93, 95, 141, 142, 162, 197, 203, 226, 227, 228, 238, 240, 290, 298, 304, 305, 311, 312, 323, 354 Clarke, J.  443, 444, 445, 446, 448, 449, 451, 454 Clegg, S.  122, 363, 403 climate change  152, 428–9 closed professions, institutionalization of management ideas in  320–1, 322, 323, 324, 325–6, 327–8, 329–30, 331 Coase, R. H.  232 Coburn, C. E.  127 codification of management knowledge  143–5, 165 coevolution model of innovation diffusion 56–8 cognitive challenges, re-adoption of management ideas  261 Cohen, A. R.  428, 435 Cohen, M. D.  54 Cohen, S. R.  257 Cohen, W. M.  381 Cole, G. D. H.  462 Coleman, J. S.  30, 439 Cole, R. E.  10, 57, 58, 59, 88t, 92–3, 224, 253, 255, 278 collectivism  293, 421, 504 collectivity  501, 502–3, 504 Collings, D. G.  178, 181, 189 Collins, C.  224 Collins, D.  216, 217, 218, 219, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 367, 368 Collins, J. C.  25 Collinson, D. L.  355, 361, 362, 365 Collinson, M.  71 colonialism  294, 477–8 colonization  458, 461 of the lifeworld  461 of management ideas  143–5, 165, 234 Colyvas, J. A.  44, 45, 46, 53, 54, 55, 58, 61, 413 Combs, J.  374, 379 Commissariat Général à la Productivité  402

Commisso, G.  405 commodification  143–5, 165, 234, 235–6 communism  400, 402, 405 communities of practice  72–3, 258 competence 122 translation  111, 131–2, 133 competency trap  237 competition, Red Queen Theory of  384–5 competitive intelligence  264 Conboy, M.  310 Confucianism 293 Conrad, P.  414 Conroy, K. M.  189 consequences, logic of  235 consultant gurus  221 consultant managers  92 consultants  6, 10, 29, 53, 76, 141–58, 235–6, 240–1, 313, 397, 494 boundary-spanning role  141, 152 and business studies, link between  163, 164–5, 172 codification and colonization of management knowledge  143–5, 165 and codified standards  346 environmental challenges  151, 152, 153 as fashion setters  141, 145–6, 236, 253, 385 global uptake  149 impact on policy and political economy  146–7, 153 as intermediaries in diffusion of management ideas  144–5 internal  150, 153 and management scepticism and resistance  148–9, 153 and managerial careers and work  146 new models of consultancy  149–50 outsider status  148 socio-political challenges  150–2 sustainability  151, 152 use of management techniques  112–13, 114 Consultative Committee of Accountancy Bodies (CCAB)  325 consumers and co-producers of management ideas 232–48 citizens 239–40 consultants  235–6, 240–1 managers  234–5, 240–1

index   521 researchers 236–7 students 238–9 contagion models  56, 57 content analysis  96–7 content of ideas  81 context  3, 10, 291–4 contextualization 130 control 4–5 and ownership, separation of  397, 430 Contu, A.  363 co-operatives  492, 493, 499–501 copying/imitation  30, 131, 132, 347–8 Corbett-Etchevers, I.  234 Cordano, M.  431 Cornelissen, J. P.  253, 512 corporate citizenship  151 corporate culture  5, 420 corporate social responsibility (CSR)  2, 151, 239, 295, 309, 338, 340, 341–2, 421, 438 and performance  377, 380–1, 383, 384, 386 spread across organizational forms  418–19 corporate sustainability  427, 428–30 see also family firms and corporate sustainability corporate universities  170–1, 172 Couldry, N.  200, 201 Courpasson, D.  354, 355–6, 364, 365, 367, 368 Coutu, D.  237 Covey, S.  464–5 Cox, R.  161 Craig, J. B.  432 Crainer, S.  123, 165, 170, 218, 225 Cram, W. A.  309 Crane, A.  151, 380 Creating Shared Value  342 critical approaches to research  7–8 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)  97 critical management studies  473–91, 496 activist inquiry  481–8, 489 SheepMilkNZ activist project  485–8 university as locale for  482–5 feminist tradition  474, 476–7 Marxist tradition  474–6 postcolonial tradition  474, 477–8 postmodern tradition  474, 475–6 Critical Path Method  59 critical performativity  481, 483–4

critical realism (CR)  69, 76–82 Crouch, C.  447, 449, 453 crowdsourcing 35 Cruickshank, J.  82 Crumley, E. T.  323 cultural perspective  9 cultural rationalization  413–18 culture  72, 96 corporate  5, 420 organizational  48, 289 culture change management  357, 446 Cummings, S.  286 Currie, G.  404, 450 customer relationship management (CRM) 254 Czarniawska, B.  4, 6, 49, 53, 57, 72, 75, 76, 106, 111, 129, 130, 170, 199, 234, 241, 252, 254, 288t, 291, 292, 411 Czarniawska-Joerges, B.  97 Dacin, M. T. and Dacin, P. A.  46, 52 Daft, R. L.  124, 256 Dahlgaard, J. J.  170 Dahlgaard-Park, S.  170 Dahlgren, P.  200, 201, 205, 208 Dale, K.  462 D’Alvano, L.  104 Damanpour, F.  5, 251, 254 D’Andreta, D.  98 Danell, R.  161 Danford, A.  359 Dardot, P.  449 Darwin, G. H.  46 Dauber, K.  327 Dautwiz, J. M.  233, 290, 309 Dauvergne, P.  151 Davenport, T. H.  32, 126, 144, 146, 252 David, R. J.  47, 59, 143, 144, 145, 236, 242, 252, 253, 274, 289, 290, 297, 307, 323, 412 Davies, A.  354, 355, 363, 368, 450, 453 Davies, L.  405 Davies, W.  447, 449 Davis, G. F.  56, 88t, 89–90, 412 Dean, J.  161 de Bakker, F. G. A.  383, 387 De Cock, C.  496 decontextualization 130–1

522   index decoupling and management ideas as codified standards 348 of management techniques from work processes 109–10 Deephouse, D. L.  198 Deetz, S.  354 De Grazia, V.  394 de-industrialization 356 de-institutionalization  46, 58, 59, 62, 330 de-instrumentalization  129, 130 Dekon, A.  150 delayering 277 Delbridge, R.  7, 355, 360–1, 365 Delmestri, G.  419 Deloitte  144, 145, 328 De Massis, A.  430 Demerouti, E.  260 Deming, W. E.  143, 224, 340 Denrell, J.  237 Derfus, P. J.  384 DeRuissea, D.  347 DesJardine, M. R.  439 Deuze, M.  201, 208 Devinat, P.  399 Dewey, J.  125 differentiation 307 diffusion  30, 31, 34, 42, 43, 50–1, 55–8, 61, 71, 72, 89, 109 broadcast models  56–7 of codified management standards  345–7 codified standards as aid to  343 coevolution model  56–7 contagion models  56, 57 hybrid contagion-broadcast coevolutionary model 57–8 international 144 intra-organizational 90 DiMaggio, P. J.  52, 56, 98, 123, 124, 185, 186, 321, 323, 412 discourse analysis  87, 96–7 discourses  75–6, 77, 80, 253, 480 discrimination  365, 368, 416, 512 Discursive Devices  97 Disney 170 diversity management  377, 379

Dixon, R.  446, 450 Djelic, M.-L.  286, 294, 394, 396, 397, 400, 401, 403 Dobbin, F.  91 Documentation Française  402 Dokshin, F.  96 domain-level theory  77, 80 Donaldson, L.  7, 122, 123, 216, 217, 225 Donati, P.  82 Doolin, B.  357 dormancy  42, 43, 46–7, 52–3, 59, 61, 128–9 Dörrenbacher, C.  186 Dot Foods Inc.  435 Douglas, M.  468 Dow 432 Dow, D.  108 downsizing  277, 357, 412, 447 Draulans, J.  104 Drori, G. S.  111, 123, 413, 419 Drori, I.  255 Drucker, P.  220, 221, 337, 464 Du Gay, P. D.  356, 357, 362, 446 Duhigg, C.  465 Duncan, R.  237 Dunford, R.  144 Dunleavy, P.  445 Duobiene, J.  459 Duran, P.  435 Durkheim, E.  414 Dutton, J. E.  188, 189, 260 Duxbury, L.  179 Dyer, J. H.  381, 382 Dyer, W. G. Jr  438 Easton, G. S.  91, 283 Ebner, A.  342 Echevarria, A. J.  296 eco-efficiency  386, 432 École des hautes études commerciales 160 e-commerce  254, 315 Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA)  400, 401–2 economic impact of consultancy  146–7, 153 economics, as theoretical basis for business studies 161 Economist, The  196, 203, 216, 218, 467

index   523 Eddleston, K.  439 Edelman, L. B.  126, 127, 348, 417 Edström, A.  180 education, societal expansion of  414, 417, 421 Edwards, P.  186, 364, 368 Edwards, R.  4, 360 Edwards, T.  177, 178, 179 Egan, D.  190 Ehrman, M.  466–7 Eisenman, M.  48, 49, 57, 59, 62, 95, 253, 290 Elder-Vass, D.  74, 75, 81 Eldridge, J. E. T.  225 Elkington, J.  429 Elliott, M. A.  414 embedding/embeddedness  130, 170, 252, 254, 291–4, 297 Emery, F.  281 Emiliani, B.  278 emotion, and (re)adoption of management ideas 261–2 empiricism  71, 78t employees experience, and re-adoption of management ideas  260–2 involvement/engagement  93, 104 lean impact on  278–9 Empson, L.  10 Engwall, L.  2, 10, 53, 76, 97, 106, 115, 116, 143, 146, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 203, 216, 226, 234, 235, 393, 397, 398, 403, 405, 417, 475, 479, 493, 495, 499 Enkvist, P.-A.  152 Enron  145, 330 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems  253, 412 entrepreneurship  459, 463, 464 environmental issues  151, 152, 153 see also business sustainability; corporate social responsibility (CSR) epistemic arbitrage  184 epistemic fallacy  71 epistemology  68, 71 Epstein, L. D.  25, 33, 49, 104, 108, 110, 252, 384, 412

Epstein, S.  343, 345 Equator Principles  342, 343–4 Erçek, M.  111 Erdal, D.  505 Ernst & Young  145, 151 Ernst, B.  240 Erturk, I.  404 Espeland, W. N.  167 Esser, F.  200, 201, 483–4, 485, 489 Ethiraj, S. K.  123 ethnomethodology 73 Eurofound 91 European Group on Organization Studies (EGOS) 6 European Management Review 6 European Productivity Agency  402 European Recovery Programme (Marshall Plan) 400–2 event history analysis (EHA)  89, 98 everyday life  458–72 body as site of management intervention  459, 465–7 conceptions of the everyday  460–1 early managerial incursions into  461–3 lifestyle management  459, 463–5 quantified-self movement  459, 467–8 rationalization of  459, 460, 468–9 technology and management of  469 Evetts, J.  322, 325 evidence-based practice  123 evolutionary model of system of management ideas 31–3 evolution of management ideas  286–302 critical alternatives approach  288t, 294–6, 297, 298 embedded approach  288t, 291–4, 297 future research  297–8 mainstream approach  287–91, 296–7 fashion perspective  289, 290 ‘old wine in new bottles’ view  289, 290 pendulum perspective  289 performance-gap thesis  289 and religion  293 Ewing, D. W.  398 executive search  320, 322 expatriates  180–1, 182–3

524   index external conditions, and (re)adoption of management ideas  258, 262 Ezzamel, M.  362 Facebook 95 fads  25, 30, 224 Fairchild, G.  29, 33, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 88, 96, 289, 290, 293, 297, 411 Fairclough, N.  97, 450, 453 Fairtrade International  344 family firms and corporate sustainability 427–42 and active role in institutional environment 436–7 and effective organizational control  434–6 future research  438–9 negative and positive aspects  438–9 role of organizational context  430–1 temporal dimension  432–4 timing in family business lifecycle  437–8 transgenerational continuity  427, 430 Fantasy Theme Analysis  97 Faragher, J.  467 fashion(s)  25, 26, 34, 44, 95, 109, 145–6, 242, 252, 253, 262, 263t, 298, 305–6, 342–3, 411, 511 as cultural phenomenon  29 cycles approach to  290 and evolution of management ideas  289, 290 and innovation  35–7 and institutionalization of management ideas  321, 323, 324, 328, 330, 331, 332 performance dilemmas  375, 384–5 political dimension of  29 and popular management ideas  310–11, 314, 315 fashion-setters  34, 141, 145–6, 236, 253, 305–6, 314, 323, 342–3, 385 Faulconbridge, J. R.  184 Fayol, H.  415, 460 Felin, T.  30, 31 Felski, R.  460 feminist perspectives  368, 474, 476–7 Ferlie, E.  257, 446, 448 Fernández-Aráoz, C.  428 Ferner, A.  10, 178, 185, 186, 187

Fernler, K.  127 Ferran, C.  167 Ferraro, F.  27 Festinger, L.  3 Files, R.  326 Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)  326, 327 financialization  404, 406, 443 Financial Reporting Council  327 Financial Times  167, 196, 203 Fincham, R.  141, 142, 149, 162 Fineman, S.  240, 431 Finnemore, M.  190 Fischer, F.  450 Fishbein, M.  3 Fisher, I.  161 Fiss, P. C.  49, 90, 251, 252, 254, 255, 404 Fitzgerald, I.  359–60 Fitzsimmons, S. R.  180 Fleetwood, S.  72, 76, 81 Fleming, P.  2, 87, 297, 354, 355, 362, 363, 459, 466, 467, 483 Flesher, D. L.  325 flexible working  359 Fligstein, N.  162, 327 Foerstl, K.  107 Foltz, K.  216 Forbes magazine  203 Ford, H.  462 Ford, J. D.  128, 364 Ford, L. W.  364 Ford Foundation  161, 402 Ford Motor Company  460 Forest Stewardship Council  344 Forrester, D.  161 Forster, N.  180, 181 Foss, N. J.  31, 32, 179, 258 Fotaki, M.  477 Foucault, M.  75, 362, 393, 405 Fox, A.  359 framing and reframing  274, 387 lean  275–9, 283 framing work  324 France  149, 291 franchising  443, 448 Frandsen, A.-C.  76 Franks, Lord  161

index   525 Fredericks, C. M.  239 Fredriksson, M.  197, 198, 200 Freedman, D.  87 freedom 502–3 Freeman, E. R.  416 Freeman, F. H.  197, 199, 239 Freidson, E.  453 Frenkel, M.  147, 199, 239, 291, 292, 294, 295 Friedman, A. L.  360 Frieze, I. H.  431 Frow, J.  310 Fugate, B. S.  382 Fujimoto, F.  276 Fuller, J.  330 functionalist perspective on management techniques  105, 106–8, 116 on (re)adoption of management ideas  252, 253–4, 256–7, 262, 263t Furusten, S.  97, 112, 151, 195, 196, 197, 199, 203, 216, 304, 311, 340 Gabriel, Y.  166, 232, 238, 239, 403 Gaimon, C.  382 Galal, K.  150 Galbraith, J. R.  180 Gans, J. S.  232 Gantt Charts  59 Garbage Can theory  54 Garcia-Castro, R.  380 Garsten, C.  152, 357, 393 Garton, E.  258, 260 Garud, R.  321, 323 GE/McKinsey Screen  327 Gemelli, G.  403 Gemini Consulting  328, 331 gendered nature of management ideas  8, 476–7 gender and resistance  368 General Electric  170, 327, 328 generic strategies  339 genres  305, 310–13, 314, 315 (geo-)politics of management ideas  394, 399–406 institutionalization and naturalization after 1989 403–5 post-war diffusion from USA  399–402, 405–6 Geppert, M.  186

Gerlach, N.  310 Germany  93, 291, 293 business studies  161 consultancy 149 Nazi management ideas  295, 296 Gerrish, E.  107 Gersick, K. E.  437, 439 Gerver, I.  355 Geyskens, I.  35 Ghemawat, P.  323 Ghoshal, S.  27, 179, 181, 239 Gibbons, M.  27 Gibbons, P.  198 Gibson-Graham, J. K.  505 Giddens, A.  122, 123, 463 ‘gig’ economy  366, 367, 475, 476, 512 Gilbert, D. U.  342, 344 Gilbreth, F. and L.  144 Gill, G.  512 Gill, J.  7, 197, 290, 308, 310, 311 Gill, R.  458 Giraudeau, M.  114 Giroux, H.  49, 74, 96, 224, 257, 290, 312 GitHub 260 Gläser, J.  168 global elites  182–3 globalization  146, 394 globalizing actors  178, 179, 183, 188, 189, 190 Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)  342, 419 glocalization 282 Gluck, F. W.  328 Glynn, M. A.  342 Goddard, J.  28 Goel, S.  428 golden parachutes  89–90, 252 Golicic, S. L.  105 Gomez-Mejia, L. R.  430 Gond, J.-P.  151, 152 Gondo, M. B.  273 Gong, Y.  181 González, S.  512 Gonzalez Menendez, M. C.  187 Google Inc.  416 Google Trends  95 Gopinath, C.  237 Gordon, K.  153 Gordon, R. A.  161

526   index Gore and Buurtzorg  256 Gorski, P. S.  293 Gouldner, A. W.  355 governance, network  446–7, 449, 451 Govindarajan, V.  179–80 Graen, G. B.  256 Grafström, M.  196, 197, 205 Grameen Bank  429 Grameen Phone  429 Gramsci, A.  462 Grant, R. M.  381 Graves, S. B.  374, 380 Gray, G.  91 Gray, P. H.  381 Greatbatch, D.  54, 88t, 92, 93, 197, 203, 226, 227, 228, 304, 311, 312 Green, S. D.  312 Green, S. E. J.  55, 253 greening 240 Greening of Industry Network (GIN)  429 Greenpeace 147 greenwashing 309 Greenwood, R.  4, 6, 10, 26, 28, 29, 31, 45, 53, 143, 145, 150, 162, 164, 165, 221, 234, 235, 236, 321, 323, 324, 327–8, 329, 330, 331, 462–3 Greiner, L.  237 Greve, H. R.  56, 88t, 89–90, 412 Grey, C.  6, 393, 404, 493, 494, 496, 513 Griesemer, J. R.  72, 73, 241 Gries, S. T.  96 Griffith, E. E.  326, 330 Grinsven, M.  49 Grint, K.  8, 81, 143, 217, 218, 223, 311, 312 Groß, C.  92, 186, 227, 235 Gross, N. C.  432, 436 Grote, J.  439 Group of Researchers on Organizations and the Natural Environment (GRONEN) 429 Grover, V.  378 Gruber, W. H.  27 Guest, D.  220 Guillén, M.  2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 48, 88t, 93, 104, 122, 130, 187, 189, 239, 253, 288t, 289, 290, 291–2, 293, 294, 398, 399, 421 Guilloux, V.  75

Gulati, R.  125 Gulbrandsen, L. H.  344, 346 Guler, I.  29 Gunnarsson, E.  160 Gupta, A. K.  179–80 guru industry  217, 224–6, 227 gurus  6, 10, 26, 29, 76, 92, 145, 186, 197, 203, 216–31, 236–7, 253, 304 guru-shops 53 guru speak  227–8 guru theory  217, 221–4, 227, 228 externalist account  217, 223, 224 internalist account  217, 223–4 Gustavsen, B.  281 Haack, P.  242, 342, 381 Haas, M. R.  381, 382, 383 Haas School of Business (Berkeley)  397 Habermas, J.  458, 460–1, 468 Hacking, I.  445 Hackman, J. R.  48, 49, 257, 377 Haenlein, M.  209 Hales, C. P.  2 Hall, D.  443, 445, 453 Hall, J.  202 Hall, S.  320 Hambrick, D. C.  415 Hamel, G.  227, 237, 260, 328 Hammer, M.  25, 44, 145, 204, 222 Hammer, N.  177 Hancké, B.  10 Hancock, P.  2, 239, 393, 403, 458, 464, 467, 469 Hanson, S.  399 Harding, N. H.  362, 363, 367 Harley, B.  148 Harman, G.  74 Harness, A.  287, 288t Harrisson, D.  74, 75 Hart, S. L.  429, 432, 438 Harvard Business Review  199, 203, 219, 326, 329, 330, 473 Harvard Business School  397, 402 Harvard III Psychological Dictionary  96 Harvie, D.  475, 479 Harzing, A.-W. K.  177, 180 Hasle, P.  279 Haspeslagh, P.  327

index   527 Hassard, J.  357 Hasselbladh, H.  340 Haughton, J.  467 Hawken, P.  429 Hawley, J.  399 Hawthorne Studies  416 Hay, A.  238 H. B. Maynard & Co.  145 Heal, G.  309 health  465–6, 467–8 healthcare  144, 147, 240, 279–80 Hedmo, T.  166 Helfat, C. E.  261 Hellgren, B.  196 Hellström, A.  127 Helper, S.  256 Henderson, B.  328 Hendricks, K. B.  374, 377 Henning, R.  345 Henriksen, L. F.  185 Hepp, A.  201 Heras-Saizarbitoria, I.  309, 343 herd behaviour  56, 308–9 Herker, D.  188 hero-managers  221, 313 Herring, H.  386 Herzberg, F.  464 Hesketh, A.  72 Heugens, P. M. A. R.  198 heuristics 28 Heusinkveld, S.  2, 54, 59, 88t, 91–2, 234, 235, 236, 238, 253, 255, 274, 290, 294, 297, 305, 404, 412, 428, 430, 431, 436, 497 Hibou, B.  448 Hidalgo, A.  104 hierarchy, in systems of management ideas  27 Higdon, H.  146 Highfield, T.  211 High Performance Work Systems (HPWSs)  359, 377, 379, 380 Hilary, G.  331 Hilmer, F.  7, 216, 217, 225 Hindle, T.  2, 218–19, 221–2, 225 Hinings, C. R.  462–3 Hipkin, I.  496 Hiromoto, T.  256, 257 Hirsch, P. M.  56, 96, 253

Hitler, A.  296 Hjarvard, S.  200 Hodgkinson, G. P.  162 Hodgkinson, M.  238 Hodgson, D.  149, 354, 363 Hoffman, A. J.  151, 323, 431 Hoffman, P.  394 Hoffman, R. C.  237 Hofstadter, R.  160 Hoggett, P.  448 holacracy  251, 258, 259, 260 Holmeno, M. D. Q.  281, 282 Holweg, M.  277 Homze, E. L.  296 Honig, B.  255 Hood, C.  357, 443, 445, 446, 450 Hooper, K.  477–8 Höpfl, H.  217 Horkheimer, M.  461, 468 Horvers, M.  355, 364, 368 hostile takeovers  89–90, 96 Hounshell, D.  398 Howard, P. N.  211 Howarth, D.  97 Howell, J. E.  161 Huczynski, A. A.  5, 28, 105, 106–7, 114, 115, 163, 197, 216, 217, 221, 222–3, 225, 228, 235, 290, 304, 311 Hughes, B.  465 Huising, R.  10 Hult International Business School  171 human relations  93, 287, 293, 295, 400–1, 402, 406, 416 human resource management (HRM)  2, 4, 9, 33, 177, 178, 379–80, 404 human resources-focused management ideas and performance  377, 378t, 379–80, 382 Humphrey, A.  314 Hung, A. A.  308 Hung, S. C.  323 Huntley, C. L.  381, 382 Huselid, M. A.  379, 412 Hutchings, K.  293 Hwang, H.  413, 419 hybrid models  294 Hyman, R.  355

528   index Iaccoca, L.  165, 197, 221 Iansiti, M.  241 identity  264, 361, 362, 365 identity-seekers 232 identity switching  184 ideologies  3–4, 5, 104, 295 Ihlen, Ø.  196, 198, 200 IKEA 349 imitation see copying impact of management ideas  510 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI)  144 imperialism  394, 403, 477–8 neo- 7 implementation  125, 129–31, 133, 252 instant 126 management techniques  108, 110–12, 116 Inamdar, N.  240 incubation 127–8 individualism  362, 363, 421, 504 industrial relations  357, 358t, 359–60, 366, 367 industry associations  53, 436 inequality  362, 367–8, 474 infomediaries 198 information cascades  308 Ingenta 95 Ingvaldsen, J. A.  282 Inman, J.  261 innovation  4, 5, 26, 31, 34, 61, 311–12 and fashion  35–7 interpretive viability  36, 49, 54, 60 in lifecycle of management ideas  42, 43, 44–5, 47, 50–1, 54, 55 perceived 49 proto-innovations  54, 55 rhythm of  328 substantive 49 symbolic 49 INSEAD  146, 402 Institute of Chartered Accounts in England and Wales (ICAEW)  325 Institute for Social and Ethical Accountability 337 institutional context of MNCs  184–5 institutional entrepreneurship  321, 323, 324, 328, 330, 331–2 institutional factors, and evolution of management ideas  291, 292

institutionalization of management ideas  30, 31, 42, 43, 44, 46, 52, 58–9, 61, 62, 69, 292–3, 308, 393, 394, 397, 403–5, 406 and professional structures  320–36 closed professions  320–1, 322, 323, 324, 325–6, 327–8, 329–30, 331 institutional entrepreneurship perspective  321, 323, 324, 328, 330, 331–2 institutional work perspective  292–3, 321, 324, 329–30, 331 management fashion perspective  321, 323, 324, 328, 330, 331, 332 open professions  320–1, 322–3, 324, 326–7, 328, 329, 330, 331 institutional perspective  9, 253 on management techniques  105, 108–10, 110–11, 116 institutional theory  69, 321, 323–4, 412 neo-  123, 185, 292–3 Scandinavian  75, 186, 292 institutional work  292–3, 321, 324, 329–30, 331 instrumental understanding of management ideas 121–37 future research  133 modernistic—rationalistic perspective  122–3, 124, 130 pragmatic perspective  125, 129, 130, 133 social constructionist—symbolic perspective  123–5, 130 translation approach  129–32, 133 interactionism  69, 70t, 72–3, 76, 78t, 81, 82 interdisciplinarity 68–9 interest 306–7 Interface  431–2, 433, 434, 437 internal conditions, and (re)adoption of management ideas  259, 262 internal markets  452, 453 International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC)  344 international assignments  180–1, 182–3 internationalization and business studies  165–6 see also globalization; multinational corporations International Journal of Management Reviews 111

index   529 International Organization for Standardization (ISO)  338, 339, 344, 345 Internet  195, 197–8, 199, 205, 208, 465 interpretative viability  36, 49, 54, 60, 131, 233–4, 272–3, 290, 313, 445 interpretive space  272–3 interviews 91–2 investor newsletters  204, 206t Isaacson, W.  221 ISO 14001 standard  343 ISO 26000 standards  338, 340, 381 ISO 9000 standards  110, 112, 273, 309, 340, 341, 343, 412, 420 isolation 126–7 isomorphism  33, 186, 321, 323, 325, 330 Israel 291 issue professionals  185 issue selling  188–9, 387 Iubatti, D.  72 Jack, G.  477 Jackson, B. G.  53, 97, 197, 220, 235, 304, 311, 497 Jackson, N.  220 Jacobides, M. G.  36 Jacobsson, B.  337, 343, 344, 346, 348 Jacques, R.  2 5, 10, 59, 290, 394, 492, 494 Jakobi, A.  414 James, W.  125 Japan  97, 276–7, 291, 357, 403 consultancy 149 MNCs 181 quality circles  59, 92, 93, 97 Taylorism 97 Japanization 7 Jarratt, D.  106, 115, 116 Jarrell, S. L.  91, 283 Jarzabkowski, P.  104, 112, 113, 116, 297, 331 Jelasity, M.  255 Jenkins, H.  209 Jennings, P. D.  431 Jensen, J. M.  380 Jepperson, R. L.  414 Jermier, J. M.  354, 355, 362, 365 Jessop, B.  449, 451, 454 Jewitt, C.  211 job enrichment  48, 464

Jobs, S.  221 Jockers, M. L.  96 Joerges, B.  111, 129, 130 Johnson, K. L.  179 Johnson, P. E.  237 Johnston, A.  362 Joint Shop Stewards Committees (JSSCs)  359 joint stock companies  397 Jones, D.  499 Jones, D. T. Lean Thinking  278, 280 Machine That Changed the World, The 271, 275, 277 Jones, O.  188 Jones, R.  281 Jones, R. J.  428 Jonsson, S.  44, 45, 46, 58, 61, 110, 126 journalism/press  196–7, 199, 203, 240, 320, 322 journals  162, 164, 165, 166, 168 Judis, J.  454 Julian, S. D.  167 Jung, D.-I.  90, 412 Jung, N.  141, 145, 235 Juran, J.  143, 224 just-in-time (JIT)  107, 276 Juusola, K.  294 Kalekin-Fishman, D.  460 Kallinikos, J.  340 Kammerlander, N.  437 Kano, C.  149 Kanter, R. M.  221, 227 Kaplan, A. M.  209 Kaplan, R. S.  106, 112, 116, 204, 264 Kaplan, S.  252 Karreman, D.  97, 355, 362 Kassinis, G.  431 Katz, R.  121 Kaul, M.  124 Kavanagh, D.  479, 482 Kearins, K.  477 Keenan, K.  458 Keleman, M.  75, 169, 234, 237 Kellermanns, F. W.  439 Kellogg Business School, Northwestern University 146 Kelman, S.  465

530   index Kennedy, C.  218, 225, 251, 254 Kerfoot, D.  368 key performance indicators (KPIs)  464 Khalifa, R.  330 Khurana, R.  6, 239, 397 Kiechel, W.  328, 329, 394 Kieser, A.  3, 25, 29, 49, 56, 95, 109, 123, 130, 141, 145, 162, 223, 233, 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 273, 290, 304, 311, 341, 347, 411, 497, 498, 511 Kimberly, J. R.  30, 49, 54, 61 Kim, W. C.  25, 337 Kim, Y.-M.  97 King, A. A.  346 King, B. G.  412 King, D. R.  481, 483 Kipping, M.  10, 53, 57, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 153, 166, 239, 288t, 291, 295, 296, 403 Kirkpatrick, I.  404, 445 Kitay, J.  92, 141, 142, 147, 149, 153 Kjær, P.  196, 199, 203, 204, 205, 397 Kjeldsen, A. K.  127, 128 Klein, N.  151 Kleiner, M. M.  322 Kleinfield, S.  221 Klinenberg, E.  202 Kneale, K.  237 Knights, D.  7, 75, 92, 354, 355, 360, 362, 363, 365, 367, 368, 476 knowledge  4, 6–7, 28–9, 123 codification of  143–5 colonization of  143–5 commodification of  143–5 explicit  105, 106, 113 implicit (tacit)  105, 106, 179 Mode I/II models of production  27 sociology of  26, 27 systems of  27 knowledge creation and sharing, and management techniques  112–14, 116 knowledge goods  474–5 knowledge management  95, 96–7, 145, 254, 312, 412 and performance  377, 381–2 knowledge resources—focused management ideas and performance  377, 378t, 381–2

knowledge transfer, in MNCs  179–80, 181, 183 Kochan, T.  398 Kodak  37, 144 Kondratieff waves  30 Korea 149 Kossek, E. E.  33 Kostera, M.  403 Kostova, T.  4, 90, 127, 179, 185, 186–7, 188, 255 Kotler, P.  166, 237 Kotter, J. P.  364 KPMG  145, 328 Krafcik, J. F.  271, 275, 282 Kramer, H.  337 Kramer, M. R.  151, 342 Kriedte, P.  461 Krippner, G.  404 Kroll-Smith, B.  466 Krugman, P.  237 Krumbholz, M.  412 Kuhn, T. S.  26, 27, 237 Kuisel, R. F.  400, 401 Kumarika Perera, H.  180 Kunda, G.  2, 4, 29, 30, 47, 48, 49, 51, 88t, 94, 187, 196, 223, 287, 288t, 289, 290, 356, 473 Kunreuther, H.  309 Kuokkanen, A.  288t, 293 Kwon, S.-H.  149 Kyocera  256, 258 Kyoto Protocol (1997)  428–9 Laakso, A.  291 Laberge, L.  74, 75 labour  398, 474, 475 Labour Process Theory (LPT)  358t, 359, 360–2, 365, 366 labour unions see trade unions Lacan, J.  480 Laclau, E.  69 Laegreid, P.  393, 404 Laehy, T.  221 Lafaye, M.  395 Lakatos, I.  27, 28 Laloux, F.  256 Lam, A.  312 Lamb, P.  404 Lamberg, J. A.  287 Lammers, C.  2, 5

index   531 Lamont, M.  168 Lancaster, Z.  76, 288t, 292 Landerer, N.  200, 201, 202 Lang, T.  232, 238, 239 Langer, R.  196, 199, 203, 204, 205 Langfield-Smith, K.  104 Langfred, C. W.  257, 259 Lansberg, I.  430 LaNuez, D.  355 Lapinski, M. K.  338 La Porta, R.  428 Lapré, M. A.  382 Lapsley, I.  257 Large N studies  87, 88t, 89–91, 98 Larson, G. S.  354 Larsson, E.  47, 61 Latour, B.  74, 129, 220, 226, 228, 254, 493 Laval, C.  449 Law, J.  74 Lawler, E. E.  91 law profession  320, 322 Lawrence, P.  1 Lawrence, T. B.  53, 54, 55, 61, 292, 321, 324, 329, 330 Leadbeater, C.  466 leadership  476, 477 transformational  446, 449 lean  32, 107, 236, 251, 271–2, 282–3, 312, 339, 404, 412 in Dutch healthcare  279–80 framing and reframing  275–9, 283 ‘the Norwegian Way’  280–2 Lean Forum Norway (LFN)  281, 282 learning  4, 7, 8 organizational 381 learning organizations  96 Le Breton-Miller, I.  385, 430, 435, 437 Leca, B.  483 Ledford Jr, G. E.  257 Lee, C. K.  412 LEED programme  419 Lee, J.  462 Lee, S. H.  179 Leeson, P. T.  287, 288t Lefebvre, H.  458, 460, 461 Legge, K.  171 legitimacy  9, 30, 199, 235, 337, 396–9, 405

and codified management standards  341–2, 349 MNC subsidiaries  189 organizational  36–7, 109, 116, 124, 126, 186, 189, 235, 308, 309 see also business media logics, legitimacy of knowledge claims Leibenstein, H.  306–7 Leicht, K.  449, 453 Leiner, L.  162, 237 Lejeune, C.  167 Lemann, N.  146, 148 Lennox, C.  331 Leonard, P.  405 Lernak, D. J.  239 Letch, N.  75 Le Texier, T.  394 Letscher, M. G.  290 Levinthal, D. A.  123, 294, 381 Levy, D. L.  190 Lewin, A. Y.  256 Lewis, C. T.  304 Lewis, S. C.  320, 322 liberty 502–3 lifecycle of management ideas  42–67, 95 abstract management ideas  42, 47, 49–53, 61, 62 dormancy and rebirth  52–3 innovation and diffusion stage  50–1 institutionalization 52 diffusion stage  42, 43, 71 mid-life co-occurrence of necessary force (CNF) causing transitions to  45 dormancy stage  42, 43, 46–7, 52–3 innovation stage  42, 43, 47, 49, 50–1, 54, 55 early-life co-occurrence of necessary forces (CNFs) causing transitions to  44–5 institution stage  42, 43, 44 late-life co-occurrence of necessary force (CNF) causing transitions to  46 rebirth stage  42, 43, 46–7, 52–3, 59–61 specific management ideas  42–3, 47, 53–61, 62 early-life co-occurrence of necessary force (CNF) causing transitions to innovation stage  53–5, 57

532   index lifecycle of management ideas (cont.) late-life co-occurrence of necessary force (CNF) causing transitions to institution stage  58–9 mid-life co-occurrence of necessary force (CNF) causing transitions to diffusion stage  55–8 rebirth co-occurrence of necessary force (CNF) causing transitions to rebirth stage 59–61 lifestyle management  459, 463–5 lifeworld  460, 461, 468 Lilja, K.  240 Lilley, S.  242 Lillrank, P.  132, 254, 312 Lim, A.  415, 418 Lindqvist, K.  404 Ling, Y.  189 LinkedIn  95, 208 Lischinsky, A.  196 Lister, J.  151 Loader, D.  452 Lock, A. R.  253, 512 logic of appropriateness  235 logic of consequences  235 Loh, L.  37 Löhlein, L.  331 Lorsch, J.  1 Lounsbury, M.  254, 323 Lozeau, D.  111, 309 Luhmann, N.  237, 240, 255 Luoma-aho, V.  74 Lupton, D.  459, 467 Maastro 279 McAndrew, E. B.  71 McCabe, D.  7, 75, 92, 169, 354, 355, 362, 363, 367, 368 McCann, L.  309, 496 MacCarron, P.  261 McCartney, G.  224 McCloskey, D. N.  233 McCombs, M.  240 McDermott, A. M.  355, 364, 367, 451 McDermott, I.  464 McDonald’s 170

McDougald, M. S.  145 McGillivray, D.  466 McGill, M. E.  7, 304, 310 McGivern, G.  257 McGrath, J.  121, 123 McGregor, D. M.  416 McKee, M.  165 Mackelprang, A. W.  107, 108 McKelvey, B.  256 McKendrick, D. G.  376, 384 McKenna, C. D.  142, 146, 163, 327, 397, 403 McKenzie, C. J.  237 McKibbin, L. E.  162 McKinley, W.  68, 340 McKinsey & Co  143, 144, 327, 328, 329 McKinsey Global Institute  147 McKinsey Quarterly 164 McLaughlin, K.  443, 445 Maclean, T. L.  348 McLuhan, H. M.  217–18 McNulty, T.  448 McPhail, K.  97 McQuail, D.  200 McWilliams, A.  380 Macy, M. W.  30, 33, 57, 107, 126, 242, 308, 412 Madigan, C.  142, 146, 147, 148, 475 Madsen, D. Ø.  95, 199, 205, 208, 280, 305, 306, 314 Maeckelbergh, M.  505 Mael, F. A.  363 magazines  196–7, 206t, 209 Maiden, N.  412 make-or-buy decisions  34, 36–7 Malhotra, N.  320, 322 Malone, T. W.  259 management (ideo)logic of, in management ideas  494–7 roots of  394–6, 494–5 management by objectives (MBO)  2, 128, 464 Management Communication Quarterly 354 management consultants see consultants Management Learning 6 management models  47, 48 normative  51, 60, 473, 474 rational  51, 60, 473, 474 and revolutionary technologies  49–53, 60

index   533 management problems  54–5 management rhetorics  47, 48, 96, 253, 341 normative  48, 51, 60 rational  48, 50–1, 60 management science  161 management techniques  104–20 affordances  113–14, 116 as best practices  106–8, 123 and change processes  114 decoupling of, from work processes 109–10 and firm performance  105, 107–8 functionalist perspective on  105, 106–8, 116 future research  116–17 implementation process  108, 110–12, 116 individual managers use of  114–16 institutional perspective on  105, 108–10, 110–11, 116 and knowledge creation and sharing  112–14, 116 and management ideologies  104 organizations and role of  112–14 practice—based perspective on  106, 110–16 as symbols of rationality  108–10, 116 translation studies  106, 110–12, 116 managers as consumers and co—producers of management ideas  234–5, 240–1 use of management techniques  114–16 Mankins, M.  258, 260 Mantel, P.  288t, 296 Mantere, S.  297 Manz, C. C.  256 Marchington, M.  93 March, J. G.  114, 123, 235, 236, 237, 273, 294, 376 Marcus, A.  512 Marcuse, H.  459 Margolis, J. D.  418 market for ideas  232–3 marketing  2, 4, 9 marketization and codified management standards  342 and New Public Management (NPM)  443, 448 market rationalism  290

Markham, C.  141 Marks, P. E. L.  307 Maroulis, S.  44, 45, 53, 54, 55, 61 Marriage, M.  328 Mars, G.  355, 360 Marsden, P. V.  91 Marsden, R.  476 Marshall Plan  400–2 Martinez-Lucio, M.  445 Martin, R.  330, 331 Marx, K.  360, 474, 475 Marxism 474–6 Maslach, D.  237 Massey, A. P.  382 matrix management  411 Matten, D.  421 Mattli, W.  327 Mauborgne, R.  25 Maurice, M.  9 Mayo, E.  466 May, S. C.  312 Mazza, C.  196, 197, 199, 240, 241 Mazzoleno, G.  200 MBA degrees  162, 167, 238, 239, 397, 399, 404 Sustainable Innovation  429 Mead Corporation  329 Means, G.  397, 398 media see business media; social media media logic  195, 200–2, 210 see also business media logics media presence  305 mediatization  196, 200 medicalization 414 medicine  320, 322 Mednick, S.  466–7 Meindl, J. R.  198, 204 Meister, D. B.  381 Mélandri, P.  394 Melville, G.  233 Men’s Health 464 mergers and acquisitions  145 Meriläinen, S.  355, 362 merit plan  61 Merkle, J. A.  291, 394, 399 metaphor theory  97

534   index methods for study of management ideas 86–103 bibliometric research  87, 94–6 case studies  87, 88t, 93–4 discourse analysis  87, 96–7 Large N studies  87, 88t, 89–91, 98 Moderate N studies  87, 88t, 91–2 Small N studies  87, 88t, 92–3, 98 Methods-Time-Measurement (MTM) system 145 Meyer, J. W.  6, 44, 53, 109, 123, 124, 126, 160, 236, 239, 242, 290, 293, 412, 413, 414, 416, 419, 420 Meyerson, D. E.  32 M-form model of corporate restructuring  143 Michailova, S.  293 Micklethwait, J.  142, 146, 148, 164, 217, 220, 225 Middleton, R.  312 Miethe, T. D.  355 Milakovich, M. E.  254 Miles, R. E.  256 Miller, D.  385, 430, 435, 437, 448 Miller, K. D.  258 Miller, P.  328 Mills, C. W.  399 Mills, J. H.  167 Mingers, J.  474 Mintzberg, H.  25, 163, 330 mission statements, personal  464–5 MIT Sloan Management Review 203 MNCs see multinational corporations Moderate N studies  87, 88t, 91–2 modernistic–rationalistic perspective  122–3, 124, 130 modernization 461 Mohe, M.  241 Mohr, J. W.  96 Mohr, L. B.  43, 53 Mohr, R. A.  240 Mol, A.  74 Mol, M. J.  2, 5, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 37, 47, 59, 61, 251, 252, 254, 255 Molloy, E.  112 Monin, B.  261 Monitor (consulting firm)  327 Montoya, P.  464

Montoya-Weiss, M. M.  382 Moon, J.  341, 421 Moore, P.  468 Moores, K.  432 Moran, M.  443 Moran, P.  239 Morgan, G.  146, 157 Morgeson, F. P.  259, 260 Morning Star  258 Morris, T.  76, 288t, 292, 320, 322 Mouffe, C.  69 Mounoud, E.  234 Moynihan, D. P.  254 Mroczek, K.  211 Mueller, F.  97, 169 Mulholland, K.  355 Mulligan, E.  464 multimodality  195, 209–10, 211 multinational corporations (MNCs)  10, 177–94 boundary spanners in  187–8 future research  190 international assignments  180–1, 182–3 intra-organizational dynamics of idea and norm adoption  185–8 issue selling in  189 knowledge transfer in  179–80, 181, 183 in professional and institutional context 184–5 role of individuals in corporate decision-making 188–9 Mumby, D. K.  354, 355, 368 Munshi, N.  466 Murmann, J. P.  296 Murray, F.  354 Muzio, D.  184, 322, 332 Myers, M. D.  511, 512 Nair, A.  105, 107, 108, 377–8 naïve realism  71, 72 narratives of success  311 National Health Service (NHS), UK  144 National Management Council, US  401, 402 naturalization 403–5 Naumovska, I.  45, 46, 58 Naveh, E.  512 Navin, T. R.  397

index   535 Navis, C.  342 Nazi management ideas  295, 296 Nelson, A.  309 Nelson, D.  356, 359, 398 Nelson, R. R.  33 neo-imperialism 7 neo-institutionalism  123, 185, 292–3 neo-liberalism  6, 146, 147, 151, 153, 356, 404–5, 406, 419 and New Public Management (NPM)  443, 444, 447–9, 450–1, 452–3, 454 Netherlands, healthcare  279–80 Nettleton, S.  460 network ethnography  211 network governance  446–7, 449, 451 Neubaum, D. O.  439 neutrality  394, 405 Newell, S.  55, 253, 309 Newman, J.  443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 449, 451 New Public Management (NPM)  362–3, 404, 443–57 culture change management  357, 446 managerial  446–7, 452, 453, 454 and neo-liberalism  443, 444, 447–9, 450–1, 452–3, 454 network governance  446–7, 449, 451 technocratic  450, 451, 452 transformational leadership  446, 449 as a unit-idea  444–7 newspapers 196–7 New Zealand  357, 477–8 SheepMilkNZ activist project  485–8 Nicholson, N.  430, 434 Nicolai, A. T.  23, 199, 273, 290, 309, 404 Nida, E. A.  132 Nijholt, J. J.  48, 53, 58, 91, 93, 195, 197, 198, 199, 202, 255, 257, 289, 290, 297, 314 Nikolova, N.  240 Niles, J. S.  27 Nisbet, R.  444, 445 Nobeoka, K.  381, 382 Noble, D.  398 Nohria, N.  4 non-academic training  169–70, 172 Nonaka, I.  256, 381 non-profits 419 Noon, M.  255, 257

Noordegraaf, M.  324 norm adoption  185–8 normative management models  51, 60, 473, 474 normative rhetorics  48, 51, 60 Norton, D. P.  106, 204, 264 Norton, M. I.  261 Novak, W.  197, 221 Novkovic, S.  505 Nyberg, D.  151, 152, 153 O’Dohert, D.  362 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development)  443 Ofek, E.  382, 383 Ofori-Dankwa, J. C.  167 Ohmae, K.  221 Ohno, T.  276 Oldham, G. R.  48 Oliver, C.  431 Olsen, J. P.  123 O’Mahoney, J.  69, 75, 81, 141, 146, 147, 150, 234, 355 omission  131, 132 O’Neill, H. M.  252 O’Neill, P.  378 Online Contents  95 ontology  68, 71 open professions, institutionalization of management ideas in  320–1, 322–3, 324, 326–7, 328, 329, 330, 331 operations  2, 4 operations management  376, 382 operations research  161 Orchard, C. D.  419 Oreg, S.  128 O’Reilly, C. A.  237 O’Reilly, D.  4, 443, 446 Organization 6 organizational branding  418 organizational change  4, 9 organizational culture  48, 289 organizational forms, spread of management ideas across  418–19, 420 organizational learning  381 organizational problems  291–2

536   index organizations as actors  412–13, 419–20, 422 business media impact on  198 learning 96 and management techniques  112–14 mediatization of  200 social construction of  412–23 and system of management of ideas  26, 34–7 theorizing (supply-side and demandside)  53, 54, 55 Organization Studies  6, 354 organization theory  412 organizing  492, 493, 494, 497–9, 501, 504–5 organizing work  324 Orléan, A.  307 Orlikowski, W. J.  255, 469 Orlitsky, M.  107, 380 Örtenblad, A.  305, 460 Ortiz, C. A.  128 Ortmann, G.  233, 272, 278, 346, 347 Osayawe Ehigie, B.  71 O’Shea, J.  142, 146, 147, 148, 475 Osterman, P.  91 Oswick, C.  291 Oticon  32, 258 outsourcing  37, 251, 447 Owen, R.  462 ownership and control, separation of  397, 430 professionalization/managerialization of 399 PA (consultancy firm)  144 Paes de Paula, A. P.  196, 311 Pagel, S.  216 Pahlberg, C.  97 Pallas, J.  196, 197, 198, 200 Palmer, G.  403 Paloviita, A.  74 Palpacuer, F.  404 Pan, R. K.  306, 315 Pankrutskaya, H.  384 Panozzo, F.  49 Paris Climate Accord (2015)  419 Parker, M.  226, 242, 355, 361, 406, 465, 480, 481, 483, 492, 494, 498, 501, 505

Parker, S.  481, 483 Parkin, F.  320, 322 Paroutis, S.  106, 113–14 Parsons, T.  124, 461 Pascale, R. T.  6, 31, 95, 221, 222 Patel, P. C.  437 patriarchy 477 Pattison, S.  220 Pawlowski, S. D.  73 pay for performance  61 Pearce, J. A.  257, 326 Pearson, A. W.  437, 439 Peck, J.  447, 450 Peirce, C. S.  73, 125 pendulum perspective, on evolution of management ideas  289 Pepsico 256 Perez, C.  50 performance-gap thesis, and evolution of management ideas  289 performance management  452, 453, 476 performance and management ideas  33, 105, 107–8, 251, 253–4, 273, 283, 374–90, 411, 412 complexity dilemma  385 fashion-addict dilemma  375, 384–5 future research  386–8 human resources-focused approach  377, 378t, 379–80, 382 knowledge resources-focused approach  377, 378t, 381–2 relational resources-focused approach  377, 378t, 380–1, 382, 386 and sustainability paradox  375, 384, 386 technological resources-focused approach  376–7, 377–9, 382 performance-related pay  61 performative theory of resistance  367 Perkmann, M.  44, 45, 46, 58, 61, 292, 293, 308, 329 persistence of management ideas  272–85 PERT methods  59 Peteraf, M. A.  261 Peterson, R. A.  53, 56 Peters, P.  412 Peters, T. J.  5, 25, 164, 197, 218, 219–20, 221, 222, 223, 227, 340

index   537 Petriglieri, G.  259 Pfeffer, J.  82, 123 phenomenology 123 Philips, Å.  255, 257 Phillips, J. J.  242, 252 Phillips, N.  291 philosophy of management ideas  68–85 actualism (Actor-Network Theory)  69, 70t, 74–5, 76, 77, 78t, 79t, 81, 82 critical realism (CR)  69, 76–82 future research  82 interactionism  69, 70t, 72–3, 76, 78t, 796t, 81, 82 positivism (scientism)  65, 69, 70t, 70, 71–2, 77, 78t, 81, 82 social constructivism  69, 70t, 75–6, 77, 78t, 79t, 81, 82 Piderit, S. K.  364 piece rates  61, 398, 475–6 Pierson, F. C.  161 Pinault, L.  142 Pirie, I.  475, 479 Pisano, G. P.  241 Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) model  340 Plato  232, 233 Platonism 71 Plott, C. R.  308 pluralism 321 plurality of terms/perspectives  8–10 Poell, T.  201, 205, 208 poison pills  89–90, 411–12 political economy, consultants impact on  146–7, 153 political perspective  9 see also (geo-)politics of management ideas Pollitt, C.  443, 445, 446, 454 Pollock, T. G.  198 Pólos, L.  264 Poole, M. S.  31 Pope, S.  415, 419 popularization media  199, 203, 206t, 208, 209 popular management ideas  2, 216–17, 226, 303–19 popularity as emergence from collective choice  304, 305–9, 314, 315 popularity as a genre  305, 310–13, 314, 315

popularity as ownership  305, 313–14, 315 see also fashion(s); gurus populist capitalism  233 Porpora, D. V.  73, 77 Porter, L. W.  162 Porter, M.  151, 221, 237, 326–7, 339, 342 portfolio management  327 portfolio matrices  329 positivism (scientism)  69, 70t, 71–2, 76, 77, 78t, 79, 81, 82, 124 postcolonialism  474, 477–8 Posthuma, R. A.  379 postmodernism  474, 475–6 post-structuralism, resistance theorizing 358t, 361, 362–4, 365, 366, 367 Poulfelt, F.  240 Powell, T. C.  49, 108, 374, 377, 385 Powell, W. W.  45, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 61, 123, 124, 185, 186, 321, 323, 393, 412, 419 power  3, 4, 362, 365, 367, 394, 398, 406, 474 Power, M.  328, 348, 422, 452 practice-based perspective on management techniques  106, 110–16 Practice-Driven Institutionalism  332 practice(s)  2, 3, 80 abandonment of  57, 90, 263t, 512 and business studies, link between  163, 164–5, 172 isomorphism in  33, 186, 321, 323, 325, 330 strategy as  112, 113–14, 297 variation 90 pragmatism  73, 125, 129, 130, 133 Prahalad, C. K.  29, 236–7 Prasad, P. and Prasad, A.  355, 477 Pratt, A. C.  458 Pratt, G.  399 Pratt, M.  477 press/journalism  196–7, 199, 203, 240, 320, 322 Previts, G. J.  325 PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC)  145, 328 Prichard, C.  479, 482 print media indicators (PMI)  305, 306 privatization  443, 447 probabilistic topic modelling  96 Probst, G.  256

538   index process mapping  59, 60–1 process perspective on (re)adoption of ideas  252, 254–5, 262, 263t Procter and Gamble  32 productivity, post-war  400–1 professional associations  165–6, 323, 325–6, 327–8, 329–30, 397, 436 professionalization  6, 417, 418 professional service firms  184 professional structures, and institutionalization of management ideas  320–36 progress 122–3 project management (PM)  2, 115, 320, 363 and performance  377, 381, 382 Protestantism 293 proto-innovations  54, 55 prototyping 241 Prusak, L.  144, 146 psychodynamic perspectives  9, 253 publication counts  94, 95 Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB)  326, 329–30, 330 public service professionals see New Public Management (NPM) Pudelko, M.  177 Pundziene, A.  459 Pun, N.  75 Putnam, R. D.  418 quality circles (QCs)  59, 92–3, 95, 96, 97, 253, 289, 420, 421 quality of life programmes  420 quality management  48, 59, 86, 108, 110, 143, 145 see also ISO 9000 standards; total quality management (TQM) Quality of Working Life movement  356 quantified-self movement  459, 467–8 Quist, J.  127 Raco, M.  443, 444, 447, 448 Radaelli, G.  309 Ragin, C. C.  88 Rahman, S.-U.  377 Rahmandad, H.  72 Ramanna, K.  327 Ramiller, N. C.  253

Ramsay, H.  5, 356 rankings, business school  167–8, 172 Rasche, A.  338, 339, 341, 342, 344, 346, 347, 348 rationality  122–3, 124, 130 management techniques as symbols of  108–10, 116 rationalization  459, 460, 468–9 cultural 413–18 rational management models  51, 60, 462–3, 473, 474 rational rhetorics  48, 50–1, 60 Ravlin, E. C.  257 Ray, C. A.  4 re-adoption of management ideas  251–70 process factors driving  263t self-management case study  255–62 employee experience  260–2 external conditions  258, 262 fashion and functionality  256–7 internal conditions  259, 262 technology  259–60, 262 Reagan, R.  356 Reay, T.  4, 7, 186, 255, 428, 431, 434, 436 rebirth of management ideas  42, 43, 46–7, 52–3, 59–61 rebound effect  386 Red Queen theory of competition  384–5 Reed, M.  4, 443, 446, 447, 451 Reedy, P. C.  481, 483 Regini, M.  404 regression analysis  72, 87 regulation/regulatory bodies  323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 329–30, 331, 332 Reinecke, J.  345 Reingold, J.  259 Reinmoller, P.  255, 264 rejection of management ideas  128 relational resources-focused management ideas and performance  377, 378t, 380–1, 382, 386 religion, and evolution of management ideas 293 reputation, media  198 researchers, as consumers and co-producers of management ideas  236–7 research evaluations  168 Research Excellence Framework (REF)  168

index   539 research on management ideas  4–8 critical approaches  7–8 plurality and fragmentation  8–10 Reserner, M.  216 resistance  128, 354–73 in context  356–7 industrial relations perspective on  357, 358t, 359–60, 366, 367 Labour Process Theory (LPT) perspective on 358t, 359, 360–2, 365, 366 performative theory of  367 post-structural theorizing on  358t, 361, 362–4, 365, 366, 367 productive/facilitative  356, 361, 364–6, 367 and subjectivity  359–60, 361, 362, 365, 366 through distance  361 resource-based view  377, 380, 381, 385 resource planning systems  283 responsibility diffusion of, and codified standards  348–9 to the future  501, 503, 504 see also corporate social responsibility Reuben, A. K.  57 revolutionary technologies lifecycle of  50–3 and management models  49–53, 60 reward systems  61 Rhee, E.  404 rhetorics see management rhetorics Rhoades, D. L.  107 Rhodes, C.  481 Ricoeur, P.  97 Ridley-Duff, R. J.  499 Rigby, D. K.  1, 2, 104, 219, 225, 254, 330 rights and capacities  414, 416–17 rigor—relevance gap  237 Riisgaard, L.  177 Rimal, R. N.  338 Rindfleisch, A.  261 Rindova, V. P.  198 Robertson, B. J.  260 Robertson, M.  142 Robey, D.  73 Robinson, S.  74 Roelofsen, E.  256, 260 Roe, M. J.  398, 399 Rogers, C.  505

Rogers, E.  49, 251, 253, 264, 431, 434, 436 Roome, N.  432 Roper, J.  499, 500, 501 Rose, N.  4, 295 Rosenkopf, L.  30, 56, 305, 308 Rost, K.  287 Roth, K.  4, 90, 127, 186–7, 188, 255 Rothschild, J.  355 Rouleau, L.  127 Roulet, T. J.  309 Rouppe van der Voort, M.  279, 280 Rousseau, D. M.  7, 121, 162 Røvik, K. A.  47, 59, 61, 96, 111, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 199, 234, 235, 252, 254, 255, 297 Rowan, B.  6, 110, 123, 124, 126, 236, 239, 290, 412 Rowlinson, M.  287 Roy, D.  360, 394, 397 Royal Mail  359 Royal Society of London  233 Ruef, M.  287, 288t rules, translation  131, 132, 133 Rüling, C.-C.  199, 306 Rush, H.  144 Russell, S.  362, 368 Ryan, B.  432, 436 Ryan, M. L.  211 Rynes, S. L.  237 Sagawah 458 Sahlin, K.  288t, 291, 292, 294 Sahlin-Andersson, K.  10, 49, 54, 76, 129, 196, 412, 417, 493 Saks, M.  320, 322 Salaman, G.  197, 238, 240, 354, 356, 357, 362 Salem, M. A.  256 Salvato, C.  436 Sampere, J. P. V.  258 Samson, D.  108 Sandberg, Å.  281 Sanders, W. M. G.  255 Sandhu, R.  74 Sapinski, J. P.  182 Sapsford, D.  357 Sarvary, M.  382, 383 Sauder, M.  167

540   index Savage, M.  182 Sayer, A.  72, 82 Scandinavian institutionalism  75, 186, 292 Scanlan, T. J.  188 Scarbrough, H.  29, 96–7, 242, 253, 273, 274, 283, 312, 412 scenario planning  331 Schaefer, S. M.  481, 483 Schaffer, R. H.  150 Schein, E. H.  240 Schlender, B.  149 Schlesinger, L. A.  364 Schmalenbach, E.  161 Schmickl, C.  241 Schmidt, V. A.  3 Schneider, A.  385 Schoenbaum, D.  296 Schofer, E.  414 Schonberger, R.  277 Schön, D. A.  3, 105 Schulz, A.-C.  199 Schulz, M.  341 Schumpeter, J.  50 Schütz, A.  123 science 123 scientific management  48, 59, 61, 93, 144, 239, 287, 289, 293, 296, 356, 398, 399, 400–2, 405, 406, 415 scientism see positivism scientization  413–14, 415–16, 418, 420–1 SC Johnson  435, 437, 438 Scott, M.  467 Scott, R.  323, 325 Scott, W.  124 Sculley, J.  197 Seabrooke, L.  184, 185 Sears, M. V.  397 Sederblad, P.  272, 282 Seeck, H.  288t, 291, 293 Seidl, D.  240, 241, 342, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348 self-management  255–62, 459, 463–9, 504 self-organization  255, 256, 262 self-surveillance 476 Semco 258 Semler, R.  219 Senge, P.  227 sensitivity training  418, 420

Serres, M.  129 Servan-Schreiber, J. J.  403 Sevón, G.  4, 6, 49, 53, 56, 57, 75, 76, 106, 129, 170, 199, 252, 254, 288t, 291, 292 sexuality  465, 466 Seymour, R.  449, 453 Shaffer, M. A.  181 Shapiro, C.  345 Shapiro, E.  142, 150 shareholder models of management  27–8 shareholders  397, 398, 399 shareholder value maximization  404, 406 Sharkey, A.  413 Sharma, P.  428, 435 Sharma, S.  429, 431, 435, 436, 438, 439 SheepMilkNZ activist project  485–8 Shell 331 Shenhav, Y.  4, 7, 48, 94, 147, 287, 294, 295, 356, 394, 398, 415, 493, 494 Shicore, I.  464 Shin, D.  378 Short, C.  304 Showail, S.  97 Sidani, Y.  97 Siegel, D.  380 signalling 198 Sikkink, K.  190 Siler, K.  89 Simon, H. A.  26, 27, 28 Simons, P.  279, 280 Sims Jr, H. P.  256 simulation models  30 Singhal, V. R.  374, 377 Sinha, S.  306, 315 Sitton-Kent, L.  309 six sigma  145, 412 Sklair, L.  182 Sklar, M.  394, 397 Slåtten, K.  199, 205, 208 Slaughter, J.  361 sleep 466–7 Slomp, J.  277 Small N studies  87, 88t, 92–3, 98 Smets, M.  185, 321, 332 Smircich, L.  477 Smith, C.  75, 105, 360 Snow, R.  195, 200, 201, 462

index   541 Social Accountability (SA) 8000 standard  340, 341, 347 social capital  187 social codes  264 social construction of organizations  412–23 social constructivism  69, 70t, 75–6, 77, 78t, 81, 82, 123–5, 130 social learning model  240 social media  195, 199, 200, 205, 206t, 208, 210, 211, 240, 305, 314, 315 Society for the Advancement of Management 401 sociology of knowledge  26, 27 Sohal, A. S.  364, 378 Sörbom, A.  152 Sorenson, R. L.  439 Sorge, A.  253, 258, 313, 511 Sorrell, S.  386 Soule, S. A.  43, 56, 253 Sousa, R.  108 Soviet Union  399, 400, 402, 405 spaghetti organization  32, 258 Spain  93, 293 specific management ideas  42–3, 47, 48, 49, 53–61, 62 late-life co-occurence of necessary force (CNF) causing transitions to institution stage  58–9 mid-life co-occurrence of necessary force (CNF) causing transitions to diffusion stage 55–8 rebirth co-occurrence of necessary force (CNF) causing transitions to rebirth stage 59–61 Spee, A. P.  297 Spell, C. S.  199, 290, 308 Spence, A. M.  198 Spicer, A.  44, 45, 46, 58, 61, 292, 293, 308, 329, 354, 355, 362, 363, 394, 459, 466, 480, 483 Splitter, V.  238 Spoelstra, S.  481 Spofify 258 Spyridonidis, D.  7, 199, 234, 252, 254 Sriram, R.  436, 437 Sriram, S.  433–4, 437 stakeholder empowerment  416

stakeholder engagement  337 stakeholder models of management  27, 28, 295 stakeholder theory  380, 404 Stalker, G. M.  376 standardization  167, 170, 177, 178, 199 standard operating procedures (SOPs)  276 standards 337–53 codified  339, 340–50 competing 344–5 compliance with  347 consequences of  347–9 development of  343–5 and diffusion of ideas  343 diffusion of  345–7 durability 342–3 legitimacy reasons for  341–2 marketization reasons for  342 and organization of ideas  342 standard wars  345 third parties’ interest in  346 definition 338 future research  349–50 non-codified 339–40 as rules  338 as rules for common use  338 as voluntary  338 Stanley, D. J.  128 Star, S. L.  72, 73, 241 Ståtten, K.  306, 314 Staw, B. M.  25, 33, 49, 104, 108, 110, 252, 376, 384, 412 Stearns, P.  217, 224, 225 Stefanowitsch, A.  96 Steinberg, R.  393 Stenheim, T.  305 Sterman, J.  72 Stern, S.  232 Stiles, D.  106, 115, 116 Stirling, J.  359–60 Stjernberg, T.  113, 255, 257 Stöckl, H.  209 Strandgaard Pedersen, J.  197, 199 Strang, D.  6, 7, 30, 33, 43, 44, 47, 56, 57–8, 59, 71, 88t, 89, 94, 95, 96, 97, 107, 109, 126, 143, 145, 236, 242, 252, 253, 274, 289, 290, 297, 307, 308, 314–15, 323, 406, 412, 420

542   index Strategic Leadership Forum  325 strategic management  328, 331, 377 strategic planning  25, 104, 330, 331 Strategos 328 strategy  2, 404 institutionalization of management ideas in  320, 321, 324, 326–7, 328, 329, 330, 331 and management fashions  323 and management techniques  112, 113–14, 115 strategy maps  113 strategy as practice  112, 113–14, 297 Strategy and Structure model  59, 61 Strauss, A.  73 Streeck, W.  454 Strong, M.  75 structure and agency  77, 80, 81 Strumińska-Kutra, M.  483 students, as consumers of management ideas 238–9 Sturdy, A.  2, 7, 9, 32, 49, 68, 87, 92, 121, 141, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 161, 166, 169, 188, 234, 239, 252, 253, 294, 297, 308, 354, 357, 363, 365, 384, 403, 411, 466, 476, 480, 492 Styhre, A.  444, 446, 447 Suárez, D.  414 subjectivity and resistance  359–60, 361, 362, 365, 366 Subramony, M.  107, 379 substantive innovations  49 success stories  311 Suchman, M. C.  198 Suddaby, R.  4, 6, 10, 26, 28, 29, 143, 145, 162, 164–5, 221, 234, 235, 236, 292, 293, 321, 322, 324, 329, 330, 331, 421 Sugimori, Y.  278 Suma Foods  493, 499–501, 504 Sunday Times, The 218 Supreme Creations  431, 433, 435, 436–7 surveys  71, 91, 93 sustainability, corporate see corporate sustainability sustainability consultants  151, 152 sustainability paradox  375, 384, 386 sustainable development  428–9

Sustainable Forestry Initiative  344 Sutter, M.  241 Sutton, R. I.  123, 273, 376 Swan, J.  73, 96–7, 98, 312, 412 Sweden 357 quality circles  59, 92, 93 Swidler, A.  3 Swink, M.  376, 382, 383 symbolic adoption  186, 187, 309 symbolic innovation  49 symbolic interactionism  73, 78t, 79t symbolist approaches  123–5, 130 system, notion of  26, 27 system and lifeworld  460–1 system of management ideas  25–41 dynamics and consequences at organizational level  34–7 evolutionary model of  31–3 hierarchical relations in  27 in the literature  28–9 managerial perspective of  29 micro-foundations of  26, 29–31, 37 political dimension of  29 variation-selection-retention (VSR) processes  26, 31–2, 34–7, 38 systems rationalism  287, 289 tacit (implicit) knowledge  105, 106, 179 Takeuchi, H.  256, 381 talent management  377, 379 Tamm Hallström, K.  340, 344 Tannock, J.  58, 95 Tapia, M.  357, 366 Tatikonda, M. V.  382 Tayler, R.  499 Taylor, F. W.  144, 161, 197, 356, 398, 415, 460 Taylor, J. R.  49, 96 Taylor, P.  361, 365, 394 Taylorism  97, 296, 359 teamworking  92, 359, 476 technocracy  398, 450, 451, 452 technological change  29, 30, 473, 474 see also revolutionary technologies technological convergence  195, 208–10 technological resources-focused management ideas and performance  376–7, 377–9

index   543 technology and management of everyday life  469 and (re)adoption of management ideas  259–60, 262 Teece, D. J.  33, 34, 179, 296, 376 Temin, P.  296 Tempel, A.  179, 185 ten Bos, R.  2, 4, 253, 497 Terlaak, A.  341 Terziovski, M.  71, 108 textbooks  164, 165, 197 Thatcher, M.  356 Thawesaengskulthai, N.  58, 95 Thedvall, R.  344 Thomas, L.  167, 403, 405 Thomas, P.  97, 311 Thomas, R.  354, 355, 363, 364, 365, 367, 368, 450, 453 Thomke, S. H.  241 Thompson, E. P.  356, 359 Thompson, P.  355, 360, 362 Thon, J. N.  211 Thorsrud, E.  281 Thrift, N.  142, 146, 493 Thurlow, C.  211 Thursfield, D.  355 time and motion studies  48, 398 Timmermans, S.  343, 345 Tims, M.  260 Tiratsoo, N.  294 Tkachenko, O.  123 Tobias-Miersch, Y.  355 Tolbert, P. S.  52, 54, 89, 108, 254 Tompkins, P. K.  354 Tomson, K.  127 topical network analysis  211 total quality management (TQM)  2, 4, 8–9, 93, 95, 239, 271, 340, 343, 412, 420 ambiguity of meaning  313 critical realist view  80 and performance  107, 251, 254, 377–8, 386 practice variation  90 and self-management  258 translation studies  111 Touboul, S.  309 Toyota 32 Toyota Production System (TPS)  276–7

Tracy, R. and D.  435 trade schools  160 trade unions  281, 292 resistance to management  357, 359–60, 361, 366, 367 training  169–70, 172, 329 Training Registry  170 transaction costs  36, 404 transformational leadership  446, 449 translation  169–70, 199, 209, 217, 224, 233–4, 252, 254, 292, 294 translation competence  111, 131–2, 133 translation modes  131, 132 translation rules  131, 132, 133 translation studies  106, 110–12, 116 translation theory  129–32, 133 transmediality  195, 209, 210, 211 Tregaskis, O.  178 triple bottom line  429 Tronti, M.  458 Truman, H.  402 Trump, D.  151 Tsutsui, K.  418 Tsutsui, W. M.  293 Tuck School, Dartmouth College  397 Tuma, N. B.  89 Turkey  111, 291 Turnbull, P.  357 Tuschke, A.  255 Tushman, M. L.  188, 237 Twitter  95, 208 Tyler, M.  2, 239, 393, 403, 458, 462, 464, 465, 466, 469 Uhl, K.  239 Uhl-Bien, M.  256 Ulrich, H.  256 Unger, R.  504 Union Carbide  329 United Kingdom (UK)  291, 356, 357 business schools  161 consultancy  144, 149, 150 healthcare system  144, 147 human relations techniques  93 ‘Make Do and Mend’ campaign  463 Research Excellence Framework (REF) 168

544   index United Nations Global Compact (UNGC)  381, 416 United States (USA)  97, 287–8, 294, 295, 356, 357, 396–9 antitrust regulation  396–7 business schools  160, 161, 168, 295, 397, 399 corporate capitalism  394, 396–7, 399 healthcare system  147 human relations techniques  93 post-war diffusion of management ideas from  399–402, 405–6 quality circles  59, 92, 93, 97 Taylorism 97 universalism 312 universities business schools see business schools as locale for activist inquiry  482–5 overseas campuses  166 research evaluations  168 Urwick, L.  459, 460, 463 šsdiken, B.  291, 294, 295 USSR see Soviet Union

Van Wassenhove, L. N.  382 Van Witteloostuijn, A.  253, 258, 313, 511 Varian, H. R.  345 variation-selection-retention (VSR) processes  26, 31–2, 34–7, 38 Vauchez, A.  405 Veblen, T.  160, 398–9 Venkatraman, N.  37 veracity 69 Vermeulen, F.  31, 33, 125 Viale, T.  322, 421 victims of management ideas  232 Vincent, S.  75 Vinten, G.  403 visibility 305–6 Visscher, K.  234, 238, 274 Volberda, H. W.  104 Volvo  256, 281 Von Hayek, F. A.  255 Von Hippel, E.  121 Voss, C. A.  108 Vurdubakis, T.  362, 365

Vaara, E.  198, 287, 297 Vaccaro, I. G.  33 Vafeas, N.  431 Vallas, S.  354, 368 value, distribution of  474–5 value stream mapping (VSM)  280 Valve  258, 260 Van Aken, J. E.  121, 168 Van Bijsterveld, M.  10, 55, 97, 272, 274, 281, 339 Vandehey, T.  464 Van de Ven, A. H.  31, 237 Van Dijck, J.  201, 205, 208 Vanek, J.  501 Van Essen, M.  437 Van Everdingen, Y.  72 Van Gills, A.  438 Van Grinsven, M.  8, 9, 251, 252, 254, 404 Van Leeuwen, T.  211 Van Maanen, J.  82 Van Reenen, J.  33 van Rossem, A.  98, 306 Van Veen, K.  2, 6, 36, 49, 54, 60, 121, 131, 233–4, 234, 252, 257, 273, 290, 297, 306, 312, 313, 339, 347, 348, 445, 498, 501

Waarts, E.  72 Waddell, D.  364 Waddock, S. A.  374, 380 Wageman, R.  49, 377 Wagner, H. M.  161 Walgenbach, P.  95, 96, 110, 112, 346 Walker, K.  309 Walker, R.  6 Wallace, M.  443, 447, 451 Walls, J. L.  431 Wall Street Journal, The  196, 203 Walsh, J. R.  418 Walton, J. S.  170 Walton, R. E.  256 Wan, F.  309 Wang, P.  253, 254 Wang, Q.  376 Warhurst, R.  238 Warner, M.  288t, 291 Wærness, M.  127 Warren, S.  463 Wasti, S. A.  291, 295 Waterman, R. H.  5, 25, 164, 197, 221, 222 Watson, J.  460

index   545 Watson, T.  2, 8, 114–15, 220, 238, 239, 308, 340, 354, 446, 465 W. D. Scott 145 Webb, T.  505 Weber, M.  3, 86, 413, 460, 462–3 Wedel, J.  451 Wedlin, L.  168, 288t, 291, 292, 294 Weick, K. E.  124 Weiskopf, R.  355 Welch, J.  221 wellness  466, 467–8 Wenger, E.  72 Werner-Muller, J.  454 Werr, A.  106, 112, 113, 114, 145, 236, 237 Westerfelhaus, R.  216 Westphal, J. D.  49, 88t, 90, 126, 239, 254, 308 Westwood, R.  362, 477 Weyerhauser 329 Wharerata Writing Group  474 Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania  160, 397 Whetten, D. A.  438 Whitaket, J.  341 White, L.  450 Whiteman, G.  152 Whitley, R.  168 Whittington, R.  112, 320, 322, 323, 324, 325, 327, 328, 331 Whittle, A.  97, 169, 236 Whittle, S.  7, 197, 290, 308, 310, 311 Wholey, D. R.  56, 90, 257, 411 Wickert, C.  381, 383, 387, 481 Wilhelm, H.  88t, 92, 235 Willemez, L.  405 Williams, A.  399 Williams, C.  179 Williams, S. J.  466, 467 Williamson, O. E.  36 Willis, P.  362, 365 Willmott, H.  82, 357, 360, 362, 363, 364, 476, 496 Wilson, L.  126 Windell, K.  418 Winter, S. G.  33, 36 W. L. Gore 258 Womack, J. P. Lean Thinking  278, 280

Machine That Changed the World, The 271, 275, 277 Wood, T.  196 Wood, T. Jr  311 Woodward, J.  5 Wooldridge, A.  142, 146, 148, 164, 217, 220, 225 Woolgar, S.  74 Worldcom 330 World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED)  428 World Economic Forum  419 Worren, N.  114 Wren, D. A.  31, 287, 399 Wright, C.  4, 92, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 188, 234, 357 Wright, R. P.  106, 112, 113, 115 Wruk, D.  242 Wrzesniewski, A.  260 Wylie, I.  150 Wymeersch, E.  347 Xerox 256 Ybema, S.  355, 364, 368 ‘young experts’ teams  401 Young, J. J.  326, 328 Young, S. M.  276 YouTube 208 Yue, T.  256, 260 Yunus, M.  429 Zagmani, V.  398 Zajac, E. J.  126, 254, 255 Zammuto, R.  167 Zandbergen, P. A.  431 Zappos  258, 259, 260 Zbaracki, M. J.  93, 130, 169, 253, 255 Zeff, S. A.  327 Zeitz, G.  45, 128, 255, 258 Zhang, L. E.  180 Zhang, W.  237 Zhao, J.  167 Zietsma, C.  324 Zimmerman, F.  107 Zmud, R. W.  32 Zucker, L. G.  45, 52, 54, 55, 58, 89, 108, 254