Management Fashions and Fads

Diffusion Studies

The scholarly interest in managerial fads and fashions can be traced back to diffusion theory, as propagated by the anthropologist Everett Rogers, who, in turn, was inspired by Gabriel Tarde—a French sociologist who was a contemporary and rival of Durkheim. Tarde postulated that imitation is the basic social mechanism and that it is directed toward the imitation of novel inventions; thus he defined fashion. Tarde's idea of diffusion was far from mechanistic; to the contrary, he postulated that particles diffuse in the same way ideas do, not the other way around. Thus by highlighting the variation resulting from each displacement, he differed from the diffusionists (an early school of anthropology opposing evolutionists), and by pointing out the role of action, that is, imitation, he differed from the evolutionists (he spoke of evolution by association).

Diffusion studies multiplied from the 1920s onward, so that Rogers, writing in 1962, could describe formal characteristics of the process fairly accurately. Diffusion curves tend to be bell-shaped, and patterns of adoption allow one to distinguish between innovators, early adopters, early and late majorities, and laggards.

Interest in the specifically managerial fashions can be traced to the seminal work of Henry Mintzberg from 1979. Following this inspiration, Eric Abrahamson took up the issue of fashion in management and studied it systematically through the example of Quality Circles. Many other studies followed.

At the outset, however, fashion was portrayed primarily as an irrational deviation from rational managerial behavior, as indicated by a frequent repetition of the hendiadys (an expression consisting of two words connected by “and”) “fads and fashions.” Because of the stubbornness of the phenomenon, however, its simple denigration to the status of deviant behavior did not solve the problem. Fashion-following was too frequent and too persistent to be classified as pathology. This fact was noted by the economist Paul Nystrom as early as 1928, and he set out to find a rational explanation of fashions.

Accordingly, managerial fashions have been “rationalized” by being framed into the supply-and-demand model, as, for instance, Abrahamson has done. Double and triple interpretative loops were constructed to show that there must be something rational about fashion—if not a promise of efficiency, then at least legitimacy, the striving for which is highly rational in modernity. Jos Benders and Kees van Veen borrowed the notion of interpretive viability from the German sociologist Günther Ortmann by claiming, ingeniously if tautologically, that fads that survive and become fashions (and are therefore “viable”) are characterized by an interpretive viability. Furthermore, the phenomenon has been tamed by having been divided into stages (John Gill and Sue Whittle suggested invention, dissemination, acceptance, disenchantment, and decline), making fashion appear orderly and therefore predictable. In the same vein, Abrahamson contributed to the impression of a controlled or at least controllable process through the assumption that it was possible to discern the “fashionsetters” in advance. Thus fashion could be rationally explained: There was a market for it, as it was rationally (although not in a simple sense) demanded by managers and supplied by consultants.

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