Jurriaan J. Nijholt

Coevolution in Management Fashions The Case of Self-Managing Teams in The Netherlands

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 techniques 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.

Following Fashion: Visible Progressiveness and the Social Construction of Firm Value

A central tenet underlying studies on management fashions is that the diffusion of novel forms, models and techniques is driven by an institutional norm of progress, which is the societal expectation that managers will continuously use ‘new and improved’ management practices. We add to the literature on management fashions by arguing that, if the display of progressiveness in the manner of managing and organizing is expected of organizations, firms that are visibly progressive would be evaluated more positively by organizational audiences following this institutional prescription. Using article counts of co-occurrences of firms and various fashionable management practices in Wall Street Journal, we hypothesize positive effects of such associations on security analysts’ evaluations of these firms. Results support this hypothesis. Our study enriches the management fashion literature by highlighting the consequential relevance of organizational adherence to the norm of progress.