Management Fashions

Turning Bestselling Ideas into Objects and Institutions

Krzysztof Klincewicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351507363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Using the theory of management fashions proposed in the 1990s by Eric Abrahamson, Krzysztof Klincewicz analyzes the changing popularity of management concepts accompanied by solutions. Among these are management bestsellers, consulting services, software systems, methodologies, and approaches to organizational change, training courses, professional certifications and even new corporate positions.The book presents the phenomena of management fashions as being the key driver for the development of the management knowledge industry, consisting of consulting companies, computer firms, publishing houses, professional institutes, and other organizations involved in the launching and the promotion of new management techniques. The author supplements the existing body of knowledge by focusing on the supply-side of management fashions, particularly the strategies and marketing techniques of solution vendors, and proposes a model of relations between management ideas and tangible solutions, explaining how bestselling ideas are turned into objects and institutions.The empirical research described in this volume involves multiple methods, including discourse volume analysis and qualitative historical techniques. Included also is a comprehensive overview of the recent relevant developments in sociology, marketing, and organization sciences, in which the author draws on the heritage of praxiology by taking a meta-level perspective on the propositions of management science.

1. Introduction

This book invites the reader for a journey into the world of management knowledge industries – individuals and firms, shaping our views about the realm of management, and offering ready-made solutions, which allow organizations to look at their environment as through pink glasses. These solutions comprise of popular management bestsellers, consulting services, software systems, “methodologies” and approaches to organizational change, training courses, professional certifications and even new corporate positions. Many dream of being part of this fascinating world, which generates unproportionally high revenues when compared to the investments and material resources, using merely intangible ideas and sophisticated marketing techniques. Equally many criticize this world – regardless of whether they are motivated by envy or actual concerns about the efficiency of proposed means.

The theory of management fashions was proposed in the early 1990s by Eric Abrahamson, who observed changes in the popularity of ideas and concepts, paralleling the development of fashions in consumer markets: initial latency, followed by dramatic growth and subsequent decline. He labeled management fashions as inefficient innovations, which escaped the attention of innovation diffusion researchers. Abrahamson’s followers explored the fashions, extending the body of knowledge by analyzing the rhetoric of popular management books, interests of fashion setters and historical changes in popularity of various concepts.

By the end of the 20th century, the theory of management fashions was an established research perspective, generating also substantial attention of popular management writers. Some researchers claim, that writing about management fashions became fashionable itself, which is also the view presented in this book: there are numerous publications which criticize new management concepts and related solutions, as driven by the greed of bestseller authors and consulting companies. This general “fashion bashing” attitude turns out to be unconstructive and nihilist, as it could prevent any development of management discourse by its immediate rejection. Another approach to the phenomenon, proposed by this book, will however show that management fashions could create new value, the related solutions could offer benefits to adopting organizations, and the launch and promotion of new fashions is an inherent element of management knowledge industries (including consulting and IT firms).

While documenting an empirical research project, uses specialist terminology and refers to many technical phenomena (such as I.C.T. – Information and Communication Technologies – solutions), the book reveals mechanisms, which may be very important both for potential adopters of management fashions, as well as companies in management knowledge industries. When Barbara Czarniawska proposed the (by many regarded as seditious) comparison between management science research and detective stories (Czarniawska 1999), she must have had this sort of research in mind.

• We have a crime - that of deception and manipulation of potential adopters by using marketing techniques, which promoted certain management concepts, turning out not to offer the promised benefits and leaving customer organizations with empty bank accounts and damaged morale.
• We have witnesses and evidence - collected using multiple investigatory techniques, from both secondary and primary sources. In the process of reconstruction, secondary sources proved actually to provide a more reliable account of past events and decisions than a posteriori sense making by the "suspects".
• We shall finally put ourselves in the shoes of judges, who analyze the findings and are expected to make a decision.

I believe that the presented evidence will gradually change the perspectives on the events and lead to re-assessment of the nature of the committed crime – or even doubts whether it was a crime at all...

The book draws on the heritage of organization sciences, especially recent theories including the neo-institutionalism and discursive perspectives, established by the linguistic turn in social sciences. It uses multiple research methods, which can jointly be classified as historical, including both qualitative and quantitative techniques. Its topic is also highly relevant for praxiologists, who investigate the nature of human action in business, its limits and conditions – as philosophy of action, praxiology takes a meta-level perspective on the propositions of management science just like the theory of management fashions does.

I would like to thank many people, whose encouragement, comments and suggestions on the early drafts of this book helped to improve its content and argumentation - they include: Prof. Wojciech Casparski (Polish Academy of Sciences), Prof. Monika Kostera and Prof. Marian Dobrzyhski (Warsaw University, Poland) and Prof. Alfred Kieser (Mannheim University, Germany). I shall also express my gratitude to Warsaw University and the government of Japan, whose generous support enabled me to conduct and successfully complete this research project.

2. Setting the Stage — Reflections on Ogranisations and Management

2.1. The nature of organizational purchasing processes

Industrial marketing defines the organizational purchasing as a decision making process, enabling organizations realize their needs, as well as identify, evaluate and choose products and suppliers (Fill 1999: 107). The purchasing process is presented as problem-solving exercise, involving group of employees called Decision Making Unit (DMU) or Buying Centre, with varying roles such as the actual deciders, influencers, end users and gatekeepers, and different perspectives, views of the organizational problems and concerns. The complexity of purchasing processes results from the involvement of many people who on the one hand represent organizational objectives, on the other hand have also personal goals (such as promotion or career advancement) and engage themselves in internal micro-political games. The people are subject to various influences, shaping the processes of requirement definition and selection, including:

• influences from the external environment - e.g. regulations of the industry, strategies and actions of competitors, suppliers and customers,
• influences from the organization - such as organizational culture, strategy, reward structures and purchasing policies,
• individual influences – including personality (e.g. risk aversion), perception and motivation.

The classical purchasing model by Robinson refers to an apparently natural sequence of phases in a purchasing process for a new buyclass (Fill 1999: 110–111):

• need / problem recognition,
• product specification,
• supplier and product search,
• evaluation of proposals,
• supplier selection,
• evaluation.

These traditional concepts may be subject to criticism, as they pay no attention to the ways in which the selected products or services address the actual organizational needs. The focus of the model is on purchasing procedure, not on its purposes, whereas the need recognition and product specification stages tend to be strongly influenced by vendors, who shape the problem definitions, affecting their prioritization by companies.

The actual buying process starts long before the Decision Making Unit summits for the first time, and is not necessarily initiated by the end users, who notice a problem, which should be fixed by the new purchase. In many cases the buyer does not realize the problem or is not concerned about it, and it is the seller who actively participates in the problem definition. This fact is underplayed by traditional theories and models of industrial marketing, which assume the rationality of organizational decision making processes, but strongly emphasized by various sales methodologies, such as e.g. Solutions Selling^® (Bosworth 1995), which in turn intend to maximize the effectiveness of sales processes. The methodology in question introduces a distinction between three levels of buyer need: latent pain (which is not admitted yet, or even not noticed), admitted pain (meaning discomfort or dissatisfaction with the current situation, and awareness that the problem can be solved), and finally a vision of the solution. “The seller recognizes latent needs for his products and services. Latent needs are potential needs for products or services in the mind of the seller, not the buyer. The seller sees the need; the buyer does not see the need. Thus, sellers usually operate by projecting their own vision of a buyer’s need for their product or service” (Bosworth 1995: 34).

The approach shows that problem definitions by organizations (and thus their needs) can be manipulated by vendors, thanks to sales methodologies like Solutions Selling^®, recommending among others the use of reference stories (case studies) to convert a latent pain into an admitted pain (Bosworth 1995: 40). These reference stories present other, possibly similar organizations, which already identified their problems and decided to address them by the use of the seller’s solution. As a result, companies may purchase solutions to problems, which are of minor (if any) importance to them, because their priorities changed due to persuasive techniques applied by vendors. The need of purchasing organization can thus result from a decision to admit the pain and accept its importance (regardless of whether it is ‘real’ or ‘imaginative’, lacking criteria for distinguishing between these two categories), and once the decision is made, the actual purchasing procedure involving the Decision Making Unit continues.

The traditional perspective on organizational buying processes has various limitations, resulting from influences on decision makers, environmental uncertainty and complexity of business problems. Organizations’ objectives undergo dynamic changes and the sole process of setting them may be problematic as it represents conflicting interests of various organizational members. These observations laid foundation to a group of theories, emphasizing irrational (or rather based on an alternative concept of rationality) aspects of organizational decision-making processes – including relationship marketing, experience economy and the garbage can model of decision making, which assume implicitly that reasons different from the traditional business logic govern the organizational choices.

The concept of relationship marketing is based on the argument that customer retention is a key predictor of profitability (Hooley, Saunders 1998: 351). “A relationship includes more than exchanges, and if a trusting relationship between two or several business partners exists, exchanges should inevitably occur from time to time” (Grönroos 1996: 8). Empirical research in European markets proved that the focus on customer relations enabled organizations to meet their financial objectives in medium-term by various kinds of exchanges (Grönroos 1990: 7). Based on these recommendations, vendors should focus on establishing and maintaining close relations with their customers, and the object of sale can be defined later, as customers feel obligations to reciprocate the hospitability of the vendor. As a result, a preferred supplier will have special access to the customer and ability to shape his vision easily, thus promoting new products. The importance of relations grows for products with significant service content and high switching costs, including most of infrastructure goods traded in industrial markets. The relationship model becomes particularly evident in high-tech markets, where close ties among customer organizations and the technically competent suppliers induce a “cooperative” way of conducting business, and an abandonment of the traditional practice of competitive bidding to select the preferred supplier in favor of close and mutually beneficial relationships with only few vendors (Patterson, Dawes 1999: 396-397).

The founders of another concept, referred to as experience economy, assume that we witness a widespread customization of products thanks to their additional service content, and services can also be customized through the dimension of experiences, which are memorable and personal (Pine, Gilmore 1999: 6). Customers value the process of experiencing more than the actual results – e.g. drinking coffee in an exclusive café in Venice, surrounded by historical buildings and unique atmosphere, is worth for them more than $15 a cup (Pine, Gilmore 1999: 2). Industrial purchases may also be influenced by the experiential dimension – going through a reengineering project or balanced scorecard implementation is not focused on measurable final results only, but involves also ongoing discussions and reflection, raising awareness among staff, changes to internal communication flows, strengthening of organizational culture and other elements, which possess clear characteristics of experience goods. It shows that a definition of an organizational problem, which should be used as a starting point for the procurement process, does not need to be complete, as often the process does actually not offer a solution to the problem that is purchased, but merely a problem-solving exercise.

The garbage can model of decision-making emphasizes the unclear relations between means and ends in organizational purchasing processes. As presented before using examples from sales manuals, the question whether a proposed solution can precede and generate the awareness (or maybe also existence) of an organizational problem can be a source of concerns, and for some sales processes the sequence cannot be unanimously established. The alternative model presents an organization as “a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be an answer, and decision-makers looking for work” (Cohen, March 1972: 2). The metaphor of a garbage can describes choice opportunities, into which participants dump various problems and solutions – decisions result from unintentional encounters and interactions between four independent streams of problems, solutions, participants and choice opportunities (Musselin 1996: 57). As a result, solutions appear even when no corresponding problems exist (Kieser, Hegele, Klimmer 1998: 185) – as if they were “looking for problems” which they could address. Timing has strategic importance in matching the streams (Cohen, March 1972: 2), whereas coincidence and simultaneity are more important than individual intentions and political coalitions (Kieser, Hegele, Klimmer 1998: 191).

Figure 1
Garbage can model of decision making Source: Kieser, Hegele, Klimmer (1998: 186)

The garbage can model questions the rationality of decision-makers, the predictability of decisions and the transparency of organizations (Musselin 1996: 55) – but it was initially proposed with reference to ‘organized anarchies’, such as public, educational or illegitimate organizations, characterized by problematic preferences, unclear technology and fluid participation (Cohen, March 1972). Buying behavior patterns displayed by many organizations comply however with the model, where existence of solutions precedes the appearance of admitted problems, thus corresponding to approaches exploited by sales methodologies such as the previously described Solution Selling^®, where vendors attempt to “manipulate the garbage cans” of client organizations.

This primacy of action over decisions (understood as commitment to action) is extended to a wider range of organizations and further elaborated by the concept of action generating mode. Starbuck presents two generic modes of organizational activities: a traditional problem-solving mode and an action-generating mode, where action taking motivates the search for problems to justify an already made decision (Starbuck 1983: 91-92). Actions do not need to be stimulated by needs, problems, threats or opportunities – action generators “are traditional, copied from other organizations, taught in schools of management, or legitimated by managerial literature and talk” (Starbuck 1983: 93). This concept, emphasizing irrational aspects of organizational decision-making (including purchasing processes) developed further into theories of mimetic isomorphism and management fashions, which will be discussed in the next chapters.

An overview of literature concerning strategic decision making processes reveals a tendency parallel to the action-generating mode, where organizational commitment is presented as gradually evolving, and the decision making processes as likely to follow an implementation, with decisions “forming part of a process of retrospective rationalization, legitimating or sense-making” (Hendry 2000: 956). Weick introduced the notion of sense-making which “consists of locating, articulating and ratifying earlier choice, bringing it forward to the present, and claiming it as the decision that has just been made” (Weick 1995: 185) – ethnomethodology and discourse analysis of organizational narratives proved that “a narrative is an attempt to privilege one voice and to suppress other voices which might offer counter-interpretations of actions and events” (Brown 1998: 38). Decision scientists James March and Johan Olsen represent similar view, with March presenting sense making as one of significant outputs of decision-making processes (March 1999), and Olsen interpreting reorganization itself as a garbage can (Olsen 1994). It has to be emphasized that the concepts of garbage can, action-generating mode and sense making analyze decision making processes from the perspective of organizational behavior, not industrial marketing. Industrial buying patterns are in fact similar to consumer behavior as they all appeal to emotions,⁴ emphasize the importance of reference groups, and can shape the needs of future users by exploiting the power of brands and fashions.

Beyond any doubts numerous organizational purchasing processes follow the traditional pattern of decision-making, defined by industrial marketing – for example, raw m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editorial
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Setting the Stage — Reflections on Ogranisations and Management
• 3. Fashion as Mechanism of Social Change
• 4. Management Fashions
• 5. Discourse - Lifecycle, Types and Translations
• 6. Fashion Area
• 7. I.C.T. Solutions in the Fashion Arena
• 8. Management Fashions and Marketing Strategies of Solution Vendors
• 9. Conclusions
• 10. Appendix 1 - Note on Discourse Volume Analysis as Research Technique
• 11. Appendix 2 - List of Documentary Sources
• References
• Notes
• About the Author