The Management Idea Factory

Innovation and Commodification in Management Consulting

Stefan Heusinkveld

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134662500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

Although there has traditionally been considerable field-level attention on how consultants market their ideas and practices, there is still a lack of research that discusses the earlier intra-organizational phases in the development process. While the present literature provides important insights that enhance our understanding of consulting, the consultancy industry, and the way that consultants present their ideas and services on the market for management solutions, we know relatively little about the way knowledge-based innovations develop within consultancy firms and the mechanisms that shape the intra-organizational evolution of these ideas and practices.

This book seeks to address this gap by revealing how the development of new ideas and practices takes shape in consultancies. The work addresses questions such as: In which way do consultancies sense the contemporary market needs? How do new ideas and practices become established within a consultancy? How do consultancies seek to maintain their repertoire? And what role do these new ideas and practices play in their assignments? To provide more insight into these different aspects of knowledge-based innovation in consultancies, the book draws on and integrates literature from diverse relevant fields such as product innovation and market orientation, but also uses institutional and practice-based perspectives. The research presented in this book can be seen in the light of emerging research into 'knowledge-based innovation' and 'new concept development' that concentrate on empirically studying how knowledge entrepreneurs seek to develop commercially viable ideas and practices that have the potential to have a significant impact on management and organizational praxis.

1 Management Ideas as Commodities

Where do management ideas come from? Although ideas such as the BCG-Matrix, 7-S Model, Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering, the Balanced Scorecard, Corporate Social Responsibility, Customer Relationship Management, and Lean Management have become widely known among management scholars and management practitioners alike, critical questions about their origin and fabrication are still relatively rare. A management idea, sometimes also referred to as a management concept (Kieser, 1997; Nicolai and Dautwiz, 2010), organization concept (Benders and van Veen, 2001), or management technique (Abrahamson, 1996; David and Strang, 2006; Strang, 2010), is here understood as a more or less coherent prescriptive vision, that includes guidelines for managers and other organizational members regarding how to deal with specific organizational issues, and is known by a particular label (Benders and Verlaar, 2003). Given their inclusion in many standard textbooks on management and organization, some of these ideas have become a taken-for-granted element in the canon of management, or at least seen as an inseparable part of the accepted management vocabulary and related processes of socialization (ten Bos, 2000; Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002). For students of management, and organizations that employ managers, business school curricula have become ‘unthinkable’ without some explicit attention to these ideas, or their successors.

Unsurprisingly, given that an increasing number of today’s managers have received some form of formal management education, management ideas are often considered central to managers’ occupational identities and constitutive for their sense of self (Jackson, 2001; Clark and Salaman, 1998; Sturdy et al., 2006; ten Bos, 2000; Parker, 2002). This will increase the likelihood that they will draw upon these ideas in framing complex organizational processes (Cornelissen, 2011), to legitimate decisions that they make (Astley and Zammuto, 1992), to acquire social status in the management community (Huczynski, 1993), and constitute an important precondition in adequate communications with other management practitioners such as colleagues and consultants (Clark and Salaman, 1998; Wilhelm and Bort, 2013). Given the assumed defining role of these ideas in the world of management, scholarly and managerial discourses remain remarkably silent about the social practices that have produced them beyond some general assumptions and insightful anecdotal evidence (e.g. Crainer, 1997; O’Shea and Madigan, 1997). This is a nontrivial issue given that concealing the way these ideas are fabricated may tarnish a critical assessment of their broader values, the underlying interests and beliefs of those who produced them, limit the recognition of viable alternatives, and impede an adequate understanding of their impact on management and organizational practice.

Management Knowledge Commodification

In seeking to shed more light on the intricate puzzles related to the central question I started this book with, various theorists have stressed that these management ideas do not emerge fully developed out of nothing (Peterson, 1979; Abrahamson, 1996), are not the product of a sole genius (Becker, 1974; Clark, 2004; Clark and Greatbatch, 2004), neither can these ideas be understood as universally detached from any cultural and historical roots (Guillén, 1994; Grint 1994; Shenhav, 1999), nor are they an unavoidable exponent of progress in management research (Jacques, 1996; Lammers, 1988). Rather, an influential stream of research posits that these management ideas should be seen as the result of processes of productivization (Huczynski, 1993) or commodification (Fincham, 1995) which, according to Suddaby and Greenwood involves: ‘the conversion of localized, experiential and highly contingent managerial knowledge into a reified, commercially valuable form presented as objective, ahistorical and having universal principles’ (2001: 938). Here particular research attention has been given to the role of various knowledge entrepreneurs such as management consultants, management gurus, business schools, and seminar organizers involved in transforming management knowledge into a packaged and commercially valuable form that can be bought and sold on a market for management solutions (Fincham, 1995; Abrahamson, 1996; Carter and Crowther, 2000; Sturdy and Gabriel, 2000). Management scholars even consider knowledge commodification as a key element in understanding the growing supply of management solutions and the expansion of the management knowledge industry (Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002). Following Suddaby and Greenwood (2001), using the notion of commodification has been important because it has provided a number of useful insights which allowed gaining better insight into the emergence, prevalence, and perceived value of particular management ideas.

First, drawing on a commodification perspective allows better understanding of the skepticism and criticism that many popular management ideas or ‘fads’ attracted and how this relates to important concerns of treating management knowledge as a property that can be bought and sold on a market for solutions. Ten Bos and Heusinkveld (2007) distinguished between rationalist and humanistic-political approaches. They suggest that rationalist criticism sees the apparent mass production of commodified forms of management knowledge as an unwarranted simplification of the real complexities of organizations (McGill, 1988), and the knowledge commodities even as dangerous, amoral, or ‘sick’, potentially undermining the foundations of organizations’ competitive advantage (e.g. Hilmer and Donaldson, 1996; Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 1996; Sorge and van Witteloostuijn, 2004). Certainly, the process has been regarded as being significantly at odds with the academic ideal of knowledge development and accumulation (Kieser, 2002; Lammers, 1988; Guillén, 1994). Humanistic-political approaches have focused more on the negative consequences for employees of the new knowledge commodities and their application in organizations such as ‘more stressful’ working conditions and a tendency to privilege the interests of certain groups within and outside the organization over those of employees or other stakeholders (Grint, 1994; Grint and Case, 1998; Knights and McCabe, 1998).

Second, by focusing on an object’s exchange value in a market economy rather than only its (technical) use value, the notion of commodification contributes to understanding that management ideas have many different functions for knowledge entrepreneurs (Werr et al., 1997; Morris, 2001), not the least to enhance the possibility to be ‘exchanged’ and thereby generate business (Carter and Crowther, 2000; Fincham, 1995). Kieser assumes such packaged forms of knowledge better allows attracting clients ‘. . . as these create the impression that the methods of the respective management concept have been tested in many companies’ (2002: 168). As a result, important research attention has been given to the central attributes of commercially successful management ideas. Indeed, a substantial body of literature focuses on a number of key elements contained in the rhetoric of these ideas such as promises of significant performance improvement, references to successful consumers, easily understandable figures and vocabularies, and conceptual ambiguity (Benders and van Veen, 2001; Kieser, 1997). These elements are assumed to enhance an idea’s exchange value, thereby increasing the likelihood to become saleable and ultimately viable moneymaking items.

Third, another important insight offered by a commodification perspective lies in recognizing that the objectivation of management knowledge products may alienate potential ‘consumers’ from the social practices that have produced these ideas. As Suddaby and Greenwood phrase: ‘Services produced for exchange, thus, become detached from their producers and become objectified’ (2001: 944). For instance, Berglund and Werr (2000) stressed that consultants aim to present their knowledge products as objectified and universal, while at the same time propagate the necessity of drawing on consulting expertise to recontextualize the abstracted principles. Therefore, in line with Becker’s (1974) and Peterson’s (1979) renowned work on the production of cultural artifacts, theorists emphasized the significance of not treating successful knowledge commodities as given, but to focus on a series of crucial activities designed to transform management knowledge into a codified and abstracted from (Abrahamson, 1996; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001). Moreover studies have shown how management knowledge can be considered as ‘collective social product’ (Clark and Greatbatch, 2004: 410) that is shaped in the interaction between different relevant constituencies. Thus rather than being concerned with contents or accepting a reified account of a knowledge commodity’s history (Shenhav, 1999) that is constructed to gain legitimacy, a commodification perspective focuses on ‘issues about how and why certain types of knowledge are produced’ (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001: 944).

Finally, the notion of commodification has contributed to explaining the continued supply and replacement of one management idea by another. In his seminal work, Huczynski frames this phenomenon in terms of ‘planned obsolescence’, which, in his words entails that: ‘A producer can enter the management idea market with the confidence that a particular product which is selling well will be displaced at a future time’ (1993: 285). In line with this, theorists have stressed that knowledge entrepreneurs continuously have to invest in the development and commercialization of new commodities to keep their portfolio in tune with market demand (Gill and Whittle, 1993; Clark and Greatbatch, 2004). Indeed, maintaining a knowledge commodity that has fallen out of fashion is likely detrimental to a knowledge entrepreneurs’ legitimacy in the market (Kipping, 1999; McKenna, 2006). For instance, McKinsey’s reputation on the Multidivisional model in the 1960s led to serious problems for this consulting firm when many large business organizations no longer considered this model as state-of-the art or useful. The attention for this commodity witnessed a significant decline and demand for ‘Multidivisionalization’ dropped off by the early 1970s. As a result, at the McKinsey offices: ‘somewhere about the 1970 the phone stopped ringing’ (McKenna, 1997: 230). Applying the notion of commodification thus focuses attention to an increased competition and a ‘spiraling need for new ideas and practices’ (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001: 945) that is induced by the fact that commodified forms of management knowledge can be more easily commensurated and imitated (O’Mahoney, Heusinkveld and Wright, 2013).

The 'Social Life' of Commodities

As discussed above, prior literature on management knowledge commodification has significantly furthered our insight into the supply-side dynamics of management ideas in various ways, yet little is known about a commodity’s ‘social life’ (Appadurai, 2005) or ‘cultural biography’ (Kopytoff, 1986), an essential element in developing a more comprehensive understanding of commodification (Ertman and Williams, 2005). The concept of commodity has a long history in social and (political) economic theory (see also O’Mahoney et al., 2013). Marx’s treatise of commodity fetishism in the first parts of his seminal work Capital is considered one of the earliest and unquestionably the most influential, albeit controversial, understanding of commodity and commodification (Appadurai, 1986; Bocock, 1993; Corrigan, 1997; Ertman and Williams, 2005; Fine, 2002). In contrast to feudal or preindustrial modes of production in which goods are typically manufactured for direct use, Marx explained that under industrial capitalism, goods are primarily produced for market exchange (Bocock, 1993). He sees commodity fetishism as unavoidably intertwined with privileging goods’ exchange value over their use value. This entails that through the mechanisms of market exchange, not only goods are reified into an object representing a particular exchange value, but also the ‘underlying’ labor is put in economic terms and ‘brought into equivalence with one another’ (Fine, 2002: 35), while the social activity that produced these commodities remain hidden in the marketplace resulting in ‘alienation of workers from the products of their labor’ (Bocock, 1993: 36).

While various theorists have fruitfully developed the notion of commodity and commodity fetishism further, it has also been widely drawn upon in different fields of research such as law, sociology, anthropology, religious studies, literary studies, philosophy, and management to examine and critically asses contemporary phenomena that have occurred in these fields. A fundamental issue in these writings involves whether and how people and objects should be interpreted in economic terms and subjected to market principles, or to put it succinctly ‘what should be the scope of marketization?’ (Ertman and Williams, 2005: 2). For instance, the notion of commodification is often used to critically discuss the conceptualization and treatise of a large variety of different subjects and objects such as slaves (Kopytoff, 1982), religious items (Sinha, 2011), sex, children, and body parts (Radin, 2001), policing and security (Loader, 1999), information (Adair, 2010), knowledge (Hellström and Raman, 2001; Lyotard, 1984), academic research (Radder, 2010), academic labor (Willmott, 1995), management knowledge (Fincham, 1995), (mass) culture (DuGay, 1996; Gilbert, 2008), and teaching (Sturdy and Gabriel, 2000) as commodities. Obviously, this list is far from complete, but it may give a brief impression of the breadth of different phenomena that are analyzed in this light and perhaps is indicative for the widespread appeal of Marx’ framework, and the value that is attributed to pointing to the dangers of commodity fetishism and the underlying capitalist ideology that prevails in contemporary societies.

In any case, it is important to recognize that these analyses typically provide a critical view of the possibilities and limitations of putting ‘things’ in terms of exchange value. A characteristic example comes from Willmott (1995) who explains the institutional and political conditions under which academic labor is framed in terms of quasi exchange value. He argues that: ‘Individual academics, departments and institutions are currently being offered incentives to derive a sense of purpose and identity less from the substantive relationships with students, or even from their capacity to foster a supportive environment for scholarship and research, and more from the rankings they achieve’ (Willmott, 1995: 1024). In a similar way Radder (2010) has developed a philosophical critique on the practices of commodified academic research that, in his view, have a number of important undesirable or even harmful consequences such as less robust research methods, higher levels of secrecies, narrow focus on short-term achievements, and privatization of public knowledge.

An emerging line of work stressed the importance of moving beyond solely understanding commodities and commodification in relation to classic skepticism of marketization and underlying logics of capitalism. Here prior literature on commodification is criticized for being too much concerned with emphasizing and elucidating the limitations of interpreting ‘things’ in economic terms. Williams and Zelizer even state that the central question that dominates much of the literature, that is, ‘to commodify or not to commodify?’ (2005: 363), while useful and informative in itself, constitutes a restricted question that may impede further productive inquiries and limit the development of complementary fruitful understandings. Drawing on a cultural perspective, and in particular anthropological work on the biography approach, Kopytoff (1986) has developed a more processual conceptualization of commodification that allows for the possibility that ‘things’ have their own ‘lives’ which comprises cultural and cognitive processes that continuously redefines the social status of a ‘thing’ other than only in commodity terms (see also Appadurai, 1986; Corrigan, 1997). To illustrate how commodities may be better seen as a specific stage in the life of ‘things’, Kopytoff rather provocatively draws from the example of slavery (see also Kopytoff, 1982). He suggests that slavery, albeit morally reprehensible, cannot be seen as a stable and homogeneous status, but as a process in which the slave is continuously redefined as he or she may move into and out of the sphere of exchange. Thus, this assumes that the social status of commodities is fundamentally indeterminate, or in the words of Kopytoff: ‘. . . when the commodity is effectively out of the commodity sphere, its status is inevitably ambiguous and open to the push and pull of events and desires, as it is shuffled about in the flux of life’ (1986: 83). Building on this conceptualization, Appadurai (1986; 2005) stressed that to better understand the ‘commodity condition’, that is, when the exchangeability is considered a socially relevant status somewhere in the life of a ‘thing’, research should focus on the intersection between (1) the stage in a commodity’s cultural biography, (2) the degree of marketability or more broadly the measures by which potential commodities are perceived, and (3) the specific social arena(s) within which a (potential) commodity resides.

Our discussion about commodities and commodification, albeit by no means complete in itself, aims to set an agenda for more systematic research on our central question about the supply-side dynamics of management ideas. Drawing from the literature on commodification we indicate that it preludes prior discussions on management knowledge commodification and allows shedding more light on its social life or cultural biography, an issue that received scant attention in the literature about the production of management ideas and the management knowledge industry beyond the assumption that management knowledge commodities or their marketability follow a life cycle (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999; Gill and Whittle, 1993; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001).

Thus in the context of management ideas, these debates about commodification may alert us that gaining further insight into the ‘commodity situation’ of management idea goes beyond focusing only on the moment or state of an idea’s exchange, or as Appadurai plead, such a view allows: ‘breaking significantly with the production-dominated Marxian view of the commodity and focusing on its total trajectory from production through change/ distribution, to consumption’ (2005: 36). Similarly, the influential work of Czarniawska and Sevón (1996) refer to the translation of management ideas as an ongoing, dynamic process prior to and after a commodity is launched on the market for managerial solutions. However, prior analyses of management knowledge commodities are primarily based on a limited number of key characteristics or phases in isolation and treat these commodities as stable products, primarily modified during their implementation to ‘fit’ local contexts (Ansari et al., 2010; Nicolai and Dautwiz, 2010; Strang, 2010). Thus although insightful at a generic level, prior literature has paid scant attention to the important complexities that stem from a knowledge commodity’s social life outside of the exchange sphere. Therefore it is important to develop an adequate understanding of the variety of ‘social arenas’ (Appadurai, 2005: 37) in which a potential commodity resides during the different stages in its life.

Purpose of the Book

This book aims to contribute to debates about the supply-side dynamics of management ideas by exploring the way management consultants construct management ideas throughout different stages in its social life. I particularly focus on the way these consultants are involved in what is dubbed as new concept development (Heusinkveld and Benders, 2005), or knowledge-based innovation (Anand et al., 2007). It contributes to showing the significance of considering and studying the everyday processes of idea production thereby gaining further insight into a commodity’s social life, or in the words of Peterson and Anand: ‘culture being shaped in the mundane processes of their production’ (2004: 312). These processes remain often invisible or become reified (Shenhav, 1999) because of processes that induce collective forgetfulness (Lammers, 1988; Brunsson and Olsen, 1997), narrow-minded managerialist and utopian orientations (Parker, 2002; ten Bos, 2000), or as part of systematic efforts to create a favorable image thereby enhancing a commodity’s exchange value (Carter and Crowther, 2000; Kieser, 1997). Editing out a commodity’s social life from the canon of management will likely disconnect students of management from the social practices and related interests, intentions, and belief systems that shape the way potentially influential management ideas are fabricated.

The research presented in this book can therefore be seen in the light of emerging research into the supply-side dynamic (Clark and Greatbatch, 2004) that concentrate on empirically studying how knowledge entrepreneurs seek to develop commercially viable ideas that have the potential to have a significant impact on management and organizational praxis. The work addresses questions that are relevant in understanding biography of commodified forms of management knowledge: in which way do consultancies sense the contemporary market needs? How do new ideas and practices become established within a consultancy? What role do these new ideas and practices play in their assignments and how does this feed back into processes of management idea production? And how do consultancies seek to maintain their repertoire in a stage of decline?

To provide more insight into these different aspects of innovation and commodification in consultancies, the book draws on and synthesizes literature from diverse relevant fields of research such as market orientation (Day, 1994), product innovation (e.g. Dougherty and Heller, 1994), but also applies practice-based (e.g. Jarzabkowski, 2004) and institutional perspectives (e.g. Oliver, 1991) which are used as theoretical backdrops in analyzing the different stages in a commodity’s social life. Using print media data, interview data of a large number of consultants from differ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Management Ideas as Commodities
• 2 Studying Management Idea Production
• 3 Sensing the Market
• 4 Structural Tensions
• 5 Gaining Currency
• 6 Practicing and Preaching
• 7 Stretching Cycles
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendices
• References
• Index