Haute Couture and Prêt-à-Porter: The Popular Press and the Diffusion of Management Practices

Abstract

The transformation of management practices has recently become the object of many theoretical and empirical works. While most of these works focus mainly on universities, business schools and consulting firms, our paper aims at investigating the still largely unexplored role of the popular press in the production and legitimation of management ideas and practices. Based on the content analysis of the articles on human resource management published in the last decade in leading newspapers and magazines in Italy, we argue that popular press is the arena where the legitimacy of management ideas and practices is produced. We also suggest that the dynamics of management practice legitimation in Italy, described in this paper, is representative of similar processes occurring in other European countries.

Bundling and diffusion of management accounting innovations—the case of the balanced scorecard in Sweden

“…As regards supply side actors, important channels for presenting ideas to potential adopters were conferences, books and professional journals (Mazza, 1998;Mazza and Alvarez, 2000;Thomas, 1999).…”

“…supply side factors. Alvarez (1998) and Mazza and Alvarez (2000) stress the importance of making innovations compatible with the societies to which they are transmitted (diffused). They also argue that cultural discourses and legitimisation are the main resources needed to enable the popularisation of an innovation.…”

Dressing up for Diffusion: Codes of Conduct in the German Textile and Apparel Industry, 1997–2010

“…In fact, this tendency to concentrate on analyzing discourses without thoroughly assessing material consequences in terms of adoption behavior is not confined to research on the diffusion of CSR practices, but has been described as a limiting factor of much diffusion research from an institutional theory perspective within the past years (Zilber 2008;Mazza and Alvarez 2000). In order to contribute to closing these gaps, I will combine existing theoretical arguments from institutional theory in order to derive empirically testable propositions on how reporting by infomediaries on codes of conduct within an industry should interrelate with organization's adoption behavior.…”

“…Furthermore, it has been argued that infomediaries might influence diffusion through the way they interpret Dressing up for Diffusion and frame organizational practices-irrespective of reporting intensity (Hirsch 1986;Strang 1997;Mazza and Alvarez 2000). Existing research has thereby identified two central aspects of meaning construction that might affect adoption decisions by consumers of discourses produced by infomediaries surrounding the diffusion of an organizational practice: (1) explanatory accounts and (2) frames of reference.…”

“…Existing research in the CSR field has conceptually (Deephouse and Heugens 2009) and empirically (Grafström and Windell 2011) assessed the role of infomediaries in constructing the meaning and relevance of CSR practices. Mazza and Alvarez (2000) as well as Vaara and Tienari (2002) have discussed the importance of the establishment of normative an economic rhetoric produced by professional media for the establishment of management practices and Greenwood et al (2002) have analyzed specific role of professional groups as infomediaries. Green (2004) developed a theoretical model capturing interrelations between a declining need for discursive justification and material practices diffusion [also see Lamertz and Baum (1998)].…”