How Managers Talk about their Consumption of Popular Management Concepts: Identity, Rules and Situations
| Date | 01 September 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00813.x |
| Author | Hendrik Wilhelm,Suleika Bort |
| Published date | 01 September 2013 |
How Managers Talk about their
Consumption of Popular Management
Concepts: Identity, Rules and Situations
Hendrik Wilhelm and Suleika Bort1
University of Cologne, Seminar for Business Administration, Corporate Development and Organization,
50923 Cologne, Germany, and 1University of Mannheim, Department of Strategic and International
Management, Schloss, 68131 Mannheim, Germany
Corresponding author email: wilhelm@wiso.uni-koeln.de
This paper analyses how top managers account for their consumption of popular man-
agement concepts. By ‘consumption’ we refer to managers acting as active users of
popular management concepts within their organizations. After reviewing the relevant
literature, we argue that the logic of appropriateness is a better theoretical perspective to
view, understand and analyse managers’ accounts of concept consumption than is the
logic of consequence. We apply this perspective to extensive interviews we conducted
with top managers in Germany. Based on the managers’ own accounts of how they
understand and apply popular management concepts, we identified four discourse
categories: (1) learning from others’ experiences, (2) controlling organizational change,
(3) gaining external legitimacy and (4) collective sensemaking. We argue that these
discourse categories all draw on the social norm of rationality central to managerial
identity, while differing in socially defined rules about how rationality is realized in
typical management situations. Our findings strongly encourage researchers, when inves-
tigating popular management concepts in the future, to take into account the situational
nature of rationality that circumstantiates the consumption of concepts.
Introduction
Managers are routine users of popular manage-
ment concepts1such as total quality management
and lean production (Abrahamson, 1996; Kieser,
1997; Watson, 1994). Their engagement with
abundant yet ambiguous advice dates back (at
least) to the early consultant models of Frederick
Winslow Taylor (1911) (cf. George, 1972). Ever
since, popular concepts have been promoted as
well-tested principles of good management
(Kieser, 1997). Reports of increased organiza-
tional performance following concept adoption
(cf. Hammer and Champy, 1993; Siebers et al.,
2008; Womack, Jones and Roos, 1990), as well as
the international diffusion and transient popu-
larity of concepts (Abrahamson and Fairchild,
1999), sparked an extensive research interest over
the last few decades (Clark, 2004; Heusinkveld,
Sturdy and Werr, 2011).
Early research in particular centred on
managers’ motives for adopting popular ideas
(Abrahamson, 1996; Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer
The authors thank associate editor Monika Kostera and
the three anonymous reviewers for their numerous
insightful suggestions. This paper has also benefited from
the helpful comments of Mark Ebers, Erich Frese, Alfred
Kieser and Indre Maurer, as well as conference and
seminar participants at the Academy of Management
Meeting 2010, the EGOS Colloquium 2010 and research
seminar participants at the University of Cologne. The
authors extend their appreciation to the study inform-
ants for sharing their time and insights.
1Throughout this paper, we refrain from applying the
term ‘management fashion’. Because our paper does not
build on the sociology of fashion, we chose to use the
more neutral term ‘popular management concept’.
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British Journal of Management, Vol. 24, 428–444 (2013)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00813.x
© 2012 The Author(s)
British Journal of Management © 2012 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
and Welch, 1998; Strang and Macy, 2001; Sturdy,
2004). While this research has significantly
advanced our understanding of why managers
adopt popular concepts, we still know little about
what happens to popular concepts after they have
been adopted by an organization (Heusinkveld,
Sturdy and Werr, 2011; Røvik, 2011). In observ-
ing this shortcoming, researchers recently shifted
their attention towards the consumption and
usage of popular concepts within organizations
(e.g. Corbett-Etchevers and Mounoud, 2011;
Gabriel, 2002; Nicolai and Dautwiz, 2010). These
researchers are particularly interested in depic-
ting concept consumers as ‘involving a variety of
different groups with their own specific back-
grounds, local problems and interests’ (Heu-
sinkveld, Sturdy and Werr, 2011, p. 144).
Focusing on the consumption of concepts moves
the actors responsible for the enactment of a
popular concept within an organization to the
forefront of inquiry (cf. Corbett-Etchevers and
Mounoud, 2011). We contribute to this emerging
stream of research by analysing the discourses
that result when managers talk about how
popular management concepts are enacted within
their organizations. While consuming concepts
involves many actors within an organization, our
study focuses on managerial discourses. Manag-
ers are not only held responsible for what happens
with popular concepts after their adoption, but
also have to account for the consumption of con-
cepts to a wide audience of stakeholders. Mana-
gerial accounts therefore provide a promising
vantage point from which to explore the local
problems and interests that underlie the consump-
tion of popular concepts within organizations.
This paper makes two contributions to the
research on popular management concepts. First,
we establish the logic of appropriateness as a
fruitful perspective for understanding the under-
lying rationale for the managerial consumption of
concepts. The logic of appropriateness explains
human reasoning based on matching actions
to situations by means of identity-based rules
(March, 1994, p. 57; March and Olsen, 1989). We
argue that this perspective on human reasoning is
capable of incorporating the local translation of
popular concepts (Czarniawska and Sevón, 2005)
and accurately reflects the indeterminateness of
organizational change following the adoption
of popular concepts (March, 1981). When study-
ing the consumption of concepts, the logic of
appropriateness therefore seems superior to the
deterministic logic of consequence perspective on
human reasoning – a perspective that still domi-
nates management literature.
Second, we provide a better understanding of
how managers account for concept consump-
tion. We do so by presenting and analysing four
discourses that we identified after conducting
an empirical inquiry among top managers in
Germany. In applying the logic of appropriate-
ness to these data, we find that these narratives
are based on norms of managerial identity and
socially defined rules about how rationality is
realized in typical management situations. These
findings urge researchers to pay close attention to
the central yet situational character of managerial
rationality when studying the consumption of
concepts. Hence, by pursuing the appropriate-
ness perspective, we provide a broader view than
does existing research about the rationales that
circumstantiate the managerial consumption of
concepts.
Managers’ rationales for consuming
popular concepts
How do managers rationalize, to themselves and
others, their consumption of popular manage-
ment concepts? To answer this question, resear-
chers sometimes apply theories that can be sum-
marized as following a logic of consequence (cf.
March, 1994, p. 2). This perspective suggests that
managers act based on the anticipated conse-
quences of alternative choices: the logic of their
actions is assumed to be consequential and pref-
erence based. Seen from this perspective, manag-
ers explain, or rationalize, their consumption of
management concepts based on the advantageous
consequences that are expected to result from
their proper implementation. Being an alleged
source of superior management techniques, these
popular concepts suggest that, when applied
properly, they can close performance gaps of an
organization (Abrahamson, 1996; Jackson, 2001;
Teece, 1980). Social scientists often support this
notion, providing mostly quantitative evidence
that specific concepts ‘undoubtedly ma[k]e a con-
tribution to the rationalization of managerial
practice’ (Nicolai and Röbken, 2005, p. 418). For
example, Huselid (1995) argues, based on a
sample of nearly 1000 firms, that concepts related
How Managers Talk about PopularManagement Concepts 429
© 2012 The Author(s)
British Journal of Management © 2012 British Academy of Management.
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