Coevolution in Management Fashions

Abstract

In their theory-development case study on management fashions, Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999) proposed that “[t]he lifecycle of discourse promoting a fashionable management technique co-evolves with the lifecycle of this technique's diffusion across organizations” (p. 731). Because this generalization is based on the case of a single management fashion in one national setting, management fashion literature should benefit from additional data supporting or contradicting this claim. The authors reassess coevolution by comparing the life cycle of Dutch discourse on self-managing teams (SMTs) with data on their prevalence. They show that Dutch discourse on SMTs was temporarily intensive, while in praxis they see signs of a stabilization in the number of organizations that use SMTs. Unlike past conceptualizations, they assert that organization concepts that are the subject of a temporary popular discourse are thus not necessarily transient in praxis.