The Fashion of Management Fashion

By: Timothy Clark
Durham Business School, UK

I like this article because this is new topic and hot issue of this era. Every organization is working on new ideas. Thay are trying to impliment new ideas in thier for getting competitive advantage. Management fashion is basically the fashion of ideas. Now a days everyone is trying to get new ideas which are beneficial for their businesses.
In this article author says that in recent years there has been growing interest in the notion that management ideas and techniques are subject to swings in fashion in the same way as in the aesthetic life such clothing styles, hair length, music tastes, furniture design, paint colours become much popular and then declines. In this study author describe that this era is the era ideas. New and new ideas are coming and more and more innovations are created. We can say that this is the time of management fashion. This fashion is fashion of ideas.
Gill and Whittle says that management fashions are seen to progress through a series of discrete stages:
1. Invention, when the idea is initially created
2. Dissemination, when the idea is initially brought to the attention of its intended audience.
3. Acceptance, when the idea becomes implemented
4. Disenchantment, when negative evaluations and frustrations with the idea emerge
5. Decline, or the abandonment of the ideas
In this study three issues are discussed:
1. The (over) use of citation analysis
2. The focus on the dissemination/broadcasting phase of the fashion cycle
3. The incorporation of ideas into different domains within the management fashion-setting community.
They use the citation analysis to identify the life cycle of fashionable management. They mainly focus on diffusion process and the degree to which ideas become institutionalized within organizations and profess that one outcome of their research is the development of the criteria to assist managers in detecting those ideas/techniques which are potentially transient and toxic, they rarely provide direct empirical evidence of organizational implementation. Abrahamson (1996: 264-7) identifies a four-fold fashion-setting process:
1. Creation
2. Selection
3. Processing
4. Dissemination
This is the study of ideas that ideas collected from different ways and then interpret the ideas according to organization point of views. All the management fashions are not equally implement for all the organizations. It depends upon the organization. The key feature of popular management ideas is their malleability and plasticity.
Findings:
After reading and discussing about this article I came to know that management fashion means the new ideas which are very important for all the organizations to get in the market. This is new name of management. It is not possible for all the organizations to adopt this fashion because they have much barriers for adaptation. We can say the innovative ideas about management are the fashion of management now a days. This topic need more research and study. This is the hot issue now a days. This also give us little information about the new ideas and ways to implement those ideas and what is the impact of those ideas on the managers of the organization.