Abstract
AbstractBig Data (BD) is currently one of the most talked about management ideas in the business community. Many call it the “buzzword of the day.” In books and media articles, BD has been referred to as a “revolution” and “new era.” There is lots of optimistic and upbeat rhetoric surrounding BD. This has led some to question whether BD is a hyped-up management fashion. In this paper, the BD phenomenon is viewed through the lens of management fashion theory. Management fashion provides an analytical lens which can be used to analyze the supply and demand side forces shaping the emergence and evolution of BD. The analysis shows that BD emerged in the late 1990s, gained momentum during the mid-2000s and legitimacy in the late 2000s, and enjoyed an almost meteoric rise in popularity in 2011 and 2012. Moreover, the analysis shows that BD currently is a very popular and highly contagious management idea exhibiting several hallmarks of a management fashion. At the same time, evidence suggests that it may be of ...
Highlights
Big Data exhibits the characteristics of a management fashion, the evidence presented in this paper suggests it could be of a longer duration
The data presented in this paper show that many more actors are involved in online Big Data (BD) discourse than what has been seen to date in the cases of other management concepts such as the Balanced Scorecard, Beyond Budgeting, and Total Quality Management (TQM) (Madsen & Slåtten, 2015b)
Findings and contributions The current paper has utilized the management fashion theory as a theoretical lens and sensitizing framework to understand the popularization of BD
Summary
Big Data Big Data (BD) is currently one of the most talked about management ideas in the business community and something of a buzzword (Bruns, 2013; Lewis & Westlund, 2015; Waller & Fawcett, 2013). Big Data is currently one of the most talked about management ideas in the business community Many call it the “buzzword of the day” and the discourse about Big Data is heavily dominated by optimistic and upbeat rhetoric. Taking a fashion perspective on BD is natural given that it is currently one of the biggest buzzwords (Bruns, 2013; Lewis & Westlund, 2015; Waller & Fawcett, 2013) and much “hype and hullabaloo” (Boellstorff, 2013) around it.
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