Hitch‐hiking on a hype: Dutch consultants engineering re‐engineering

Abstract

Business process re‐engineering (BPR) is described as a management fashion. Manage‐ment fashions are introduced on the market for management knowledge by fashion‐setters, who are often consultants. Characteristic for management fashions are multi‐interpretability and promises of performance improvements. The demand for and supply of management fashions is constituted in iterative cycles. By drawing on primary and secondary data, we show how Dutch consultants handle the management fashion BPR. They tend to be highly pragmatic in using this fashionable label. In close interaction with clients, elements of the original BPR concept are dropped and notions of other concepts are included in what are called “BPR‐projects”. The label “BPR” is used for commercial reasons, yet it is easily decoupled from the original concepts and coupled to notions of other concepts. The consequences of these findings for the current literature on management fashions are discussed.