Abstract
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a one of the most popular and contagious management ideas of our time. In previous research the diffusion and institutionalization of the BSC has been viewed through different theoretical lenses, most notably the management fashion perspective. Recently the virus perspective has been introduced as an alternative theory of how management ideas spread, but so far no study has applied this theory in the context of the BSC. In this paper we show that the fashion and virus perspectives provide complementary insights into the diffusion and institutionalization of the BSC. The fashion perspective is particularly well suited for explaining the infectiousness of the BSC and the ways in which organizations are exposed to the BSC idea. The virus theory can better explain how the BSC idea is implemented as a practice in organizations, and the different trajectories that the BSC idea may take in different contexts. A combination of these two perspectives provides a fuller picture of the diffusion and institutionalization of the BSC.
Highlights
We aim to address the following overall research question: Can the fashion and virus perspectives be combined to provide a better understanding of the diffusion and institutionalization of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC)? In doing this, the paper contributes to the literature about diffusion and institutionalization of the BSC in several ways
The multi-theoretical approach taken in this paper has illustrated how the fashion and virus theories can cast light on the diffusion and institutionalization of the BSC
We show that the two fashion and virus perspectives should not be viewed as mutually exclusive, but instead are complementary
Summary
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary as a management idea [1,2,3]. Since it was introduced in a Harvard Business Review article in 1992 [4], Kaplan and. A string of widely selling books have been written about the BSC, by Kaplan and Norton [5,6,7,8,9] and by other authors [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. In 1997, the Harvard Business Review named the BSC one of the most important management ideas of the last 75 years [18] There is little doubt that BSC is among the most popular and contagious management ideas of our time; a range of studies show that the BSC is widely used in countries around the world [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]
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