“Management Fashion” by Abrahamson

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The article “Management Fashion” expands the literature on the management fashion setting process by justifying for academics to not only become active participants of the process with the view to establishing its limitations but also contribute actively in this process to deliver a more technically functional, collective learning process for use by relevant stakeholders. It is evident from the article that while fashion setters include consulting firms, management experts, business mass-media publications, and business institutions, stakeholders targeted to receive the transitory collective beliefs that certain management approaches are at the forefront of management progress include organizational shareholders, employees, managers, and students (Abrahamson 1996).

To be able to contribute effectively in the fashion setting process, scholars should internalize the knowledge that (1) fashionable management approaches must appear both rational (efficient means to significant ends) and progressive (new as well as improved about older management techniques), (2) management fashion should not be adopted due to sociopsychological forces only, but rather to quench the desire to learn about managerial approaches that would assist stakeholders to respond more effectively to organizational performance gaps opened up by real technical and economic environmental shifts, (3) management fashions are not merely impulsive diffusion of guru-driven approaches, but are shaped by culture, society, and economics, and that (4) the type of collective learning fostered by management fashions vary considerably depending on the scope and duration (Abrahamson 1996).

The author builds upon neo-institutional theory and theories of innovation and diffusion to propose his management fashion theory, which essentially views management fashion as largely a cultural experience produced by norms of rationality and progress to create an expectation of ever-improved techniques for managing organizations and individuals (Abrahamson 1996). In demonstrating how the type of collective learning fostered by learning differs substantially, the author argues that real learning is where cautiously considered arguments trigger the upswing of the fashion wave (more use of management perspectives) and counterfactual evidence triggers its downsizing (less use of management perspectives), while superstitious learning is where there are emotional explosions of impractical eagerness in the upswing followed by disillusionment in the downsizing (Abrahamson 1996).

Critique

The article appears insightful for management students, scholars, and practitioners in need of developing a framework to analyze which management perspectives and approaches are more fashionable to apply depending on scope, context, and duration. As suggested in the theoretical framework, scholars and students alike need to differentiate between real learning and superstitious learning not only to develop the capacity to utilize fashionable management paradigms and perspective in real-world contexts but also to understand how the norms of rationality and progress operate in the process of creating fashionable management approaches (Abrahamson 1996). As suggested by Baskerville and Myers (2009), the management fashion theory has been critical in determining which management perspectives to adopt and utilize because management research is typified by fashions. These particular authors have successfully applied Abrahamson’s theory of management fashion to demonstrate how the fashion waves represent a burst of interest in particular topics in information systems (IS) research.

However, the management fashion theory needs to be empirically validated to achieve more effectiveness in practice. Additionally, although it is clear that the study of management fashion is a very important discourse by its capacity to shape management practices as well as academia, there is a need to demonstrate further how management fashions diffuse in the context of their fundamentality in application and timelessness in scope.

Reference List

Abrahamson, E 1996, ‘Management fashion’, Academy of Management Review, vol. 21 no. 1, pp. 254-285.

Baskerville, RL & Myers, MD 2009, ‘Fashion waves in information systems research’, MIS Quarterly, vol. 33 no. 4, pp. 647-662.

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“Management Fashion” by Abrahamson

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