The Active Audience? Gurus, Management Ideas and Consumer Variability

Date01 April 2015
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12086
Published date01 April 2015
The Active Audience? Gurus, Management
Ideas and Consumer Variability
Claudia Groß, Stefan Heusinkveld1and Timothy Clark2
Institute for Management Research, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, 6500 HK Nijmegen, The
Netherlands, 1VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, De Boelelaan
1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2Durham University Business School, Mill Hill Lane, Durham
DH1 3LB, UK
Corresponding author email: c.gross@fm.ru.nl
This study draws on an active audience perspective to develop a better understanding of
mass audiences’ attraction towards popular management ideas. It focuses on audience
members’ own experiences and, in particular, what audience activities actually play a
role in shaping mass attraction, and how the deployment of these activities may vary.
Analysing 65 in-depth interviews with management practitioners in their role as audience
members of guru seminars, the authors identify different key consumption activities, and
explain how individual management practitioners may shift in consumption orientation
throughout the communication process. This paper argues that such a broader and more
dynamic understanding of consumption activity is essential in understanding the success
and impact of management ideas, and opens several fruitful research directions.
Introduction
In explaining the dissemination and widespread
attraction of particular management ideas among
a mass audience of managers, prior studies have
stressed the important role of managers’ psycho-
logical needs, the resonance of these ideas with
the zeitgeist, and the agency of various manage-
ment knowledge producers in creating and com-
municating these ideas to the managerial masses
(e.g. Abrahamson, 1996; Clark and Salaman,
1996, 1998; Greatbatch and Clark, 2003;
Huczynski, 1993; Jackson, 1996; Kieser, 1997;
Sturdy, 2004). Researchers have particularly
stressed the significance of knowledge producers’
ability to shape these ideas in ways that appeal to
an audience that is conceived of as a homogene-
ous mass whose favourable responses to certain
ideas are driven by generic impulses. Conse-
quently, we still know little about the ways in
which an audience may be differentiated and how
these differences have an impact on whether they
find an idea attractive.
Yet, this generic view of ‘the’ managerial audi-
ence as a reactive body that collectively adopts
ideas to satiate certain cravings is at variance with
the viewpoint in the literature on organizational
implementation. Here, organizational members
are portrayed as active agents in the ‘consump-
tion’ of different popular management ideas (e.g.
Ansari, Fiss and Zajac, 2010; Birkinshaw, Hamel
and Mol, 2008; Corbett-Etchevers and Mounoud,
2011; Mueller and Whittle, 2011; Røvik, 2011;
Wilhelm and Bort, 2013; Zbaracki, 1998).1More
The authors would like to thank the three anonymous
BJM reviewers and BJM senior editor Ewan Ferlie for
their critical and constructive comments in the develop-
ment of the paper. We also would like to thank the
participants at the EGOS 2010 conference (sub-theme
‘Institutions of Management Knowledge: Development
and Role’), and the AoM 2010 conference (session ‘The
Consulting Imagery’) for their helpful suggestions on a
previous version of the article. Timothy Clark is grateful
for the financial support of grant F/00128/BF from the
Leverhulme Trust on Tipping Points.
1Such a view is also present in long-standing debates in
marketing research (e.g. Wedel and Kamakura, 2000;
Wind, 1978), and the sociology of consumption (DuGay,
1996; Gabriel and Lang, 1995), among others.
© 2014 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.
British Journal of Management, Vol. 26, 273–291 (2015)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12086
specifically, a growing stream of research stresses
that, within the particular context of organiza-
tional implementation, organizational members’
responses to these ideas are: ‘riddled with ambi-
guity and range from open resistance to manipu-
lation to internalization’ (Kelemen, 2000, p. 483;
see also Boiral, 2003; Kostova and Roth, 2002;
Nicolai and Dautwiz, 2010; Sturdy, 1998;
Watson, 1994). Similarly, in the context of MBA
programmes, studies have revealed how students’
attitudes towards management ideas are charac-
terized by ambivalence and emphasize the signifi-
cance of identity processes in relation to the
acquisition of ideas (Sturdy and Gabriel, 2000;
Sturdy et al., 2006).
Given the generic approach to conceptualiza-
tions of mass audiences in prior research on the
promotion and popularity of different manage-
ment ideas and its contrast to the more differen-
tiated notions in the literature on other contexts
such as organizational implementation and MBA
programmes, there is a need to develop a deeper
and more nuanced understanding of audience
members’ responses to ideas as they are promoted
in mass communication settings. A lack of atten-
tion to the complexities of managerial audiences
may not only limit the development of an
improved understanding of the possible impact of
different management knowledge producers and
their ideas (Sturdy, 2011), but also limits the
advancement of a more enhanced conceptualiza-
tion of ‘the’ management idea consumer who is
considered a critical yet ‘poorly understood com-
ponent’ in the research on management ideas
(Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001, p. 939; see also
Clark, 2004; Heusinkveld, Sturdy and Werr, 2011;
Wilhelm and Bort, 2013).
To address this lacuna, we draw on an active
audience perspective from the field of communi-
cation research (Biocca, 1988; Kim and Rubin,
1997; Levy and Windahl, 1984). In this perspec-
tive, scholars have stressed the significance of
studying individual members’ experiences of audi-
ence activities in explaining how and why audi-
ence members may respond differently to media
messages in mass communication settings. It
views mass audiences not as passive or active per
se, but as ‘variably active’ (Godlewski and Perse,
2010, p. 150).
In this paper, we ask: What audience activities
play a role in shaping mass attraction towards
management ideas, and how does the deploy-
ment of these activities vary among individual
audience members throughout the communica-
tion process? To address these broad questions,
we focus on management guru seminars because,
as the most high profile communicators of man-
agement ideas, their live lectures constitute an
important moment of relatively unmediated and
bounded consumption that occurs prior to
organizational implementation (Carlone, 2006;
Clark and Salaman, 1998; Collins, 2012; Grint
and Case, 1998; Micklethwait and Wooldridge,
1996). As Greatbatch and Clark (2003) note,
these are critical events that ‘create the condi-
tions necessary to win and retain converts’
(p. 1539) and thus build the momentum neces-
sary for an idea to become popular (see Suddaby
and Greenwood, 2001).
Analysing 65 in-depth interviews with man-
agement practitioners about their role as audi-
ence members of guru seminars, we identify
different key audience activities and explain how
individual management practitioners may shift
in consumption orientation during the commu-
nication process. As such, this study makes two
main contributions. First, we extend prior work
on mass audiences in the dissemination of man-
agement ideas by providing a more differentiated
view of how audience members relate to ideas
in mass communication settings. Second, by
showing how individual audience members
may shift in their consumption orientation
during the mass communication process, we
add important nuance to extant understandings
of consumers’ active agency. In particular, we
stress the need for a more dynamic understand-
ing of audience responses that can account
for the individual-level shifts in consumption
orientations.
The next section outlines how mass audience
attraction has been explained in the literature on
the dissemination of management ideas. We then
introduce the notion of the ‘active audience’ from
communication theory. This is followed by the
discussion of our research method. The subse-
quent sections present the research findings relat-
ing to the different consumption orientations
adopted by individual audience members and
how they may shift between these consumption
orientations during the communication process.
Finally, we discuss the theoretical implications
and conclude by providing a number of sugges-
tions for future research.
© 2014 British Academy of Management.
274 C. Groß, S. Heusinkveld and T. Clark

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