When Fashion is Fleeting: Transitory Collective Beliefs and the Dynamics of TQM Consulting

Abstract

We analyze changes over time in the types of consulting firms offering total quality management services. When TQM was a booming management fashion, consultants tended to be generalists with weak links to the technical foundations of the practice; after the fashion went bust, TQM consulting was increasingly populated by specialists with quality control expertise. These results suggest that fashionable practices can return to their technical roots after the hype is over, reversing the usual institutional trajectory. They also help explain why fashion booms are so fragile and how management practices can be sustained once a boom is over.Management fashions are a striking feature of contemporary organizational life. Attention rapidly coalesces around a management practice as a powerful and robust means of achieving competitive success. But as Abrahamson (1996: 257) argued, the collective belief that a practice "leads rational management progress" is relatively transitory. Enthusiasm soon wanes, skepticism mounts, and yesterday's panacea becomes today's run-of-the-mill application. In the language we will use in this article, a "fashion boom" turns into a "fashion bust."These cycles in collective beliefs have important consequences. Fashionable practices consume scarce resources-not just time and money, but leadership opportunities and organizational commitment as well. And when the winds of fashion shift, managers and workers alike may be left jaded, if not embittered, by the experience. Given the significance of fashion swings, it is not surprising that scholarly attention has increasingly turned to investigate their sources and internal dynamics.Two research strategies dominate empirical analysis of management fashions. The first focuses on discourse as a means of understanding fashion origins and trajectories. Barley and Kunda (1992) argued that management discourse oscillates between rational and normative logics. Abrahamson (1996;Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999) elaborated a model of management fashion that comprises a supply side and a demand side and examined how "fashion setters" and external triggers interact to produce fashion cycles. Kieser (1997) identified the rhetorical characteristics of fashions that promote their diffusion (see also Jackson, 2001). Zbaracki (1998) analyzed how total quality management (TQM) rhetoric is both consumed and produced by managers. Carson, Lanier, Carson, and Guidry (2000) showed that cycles of media attention have increased in amplitude and frequency over the last half century. A second body of research examines the causes and consequences of fashion adoption. For example, Osterman (1994) linked early adoption of TQM and related innovations to corporate strategy, CEO philosophy, and the pressure of international competition. Westphal, Gulati, and Shortell (1997) found evidence for network contagion among hospitals and demonstrated a shift from "customized" to "conforming" applications as TQM became increasingly popular. Staw and Epstein (2000) showed that "bandwagon" adopt...

How are management fashions institutionalized? The role of institutional work

“…An example of can be found in the history of TQM as recounted in a study by David and Strang (2006). When TQM was booming as a management fashion, it was promoted mainly by generalist consultancies with weak expertise in the technical foundations of the practice.…”

“…For instance, in the case of TQM, standards organizations and the state were lobbied during attempts to advocate the usefulness of TQM (Mendel, 2006). Similarly, specialist consultancies built operational models of TQM, deploying analytical skills (David & Strang, 2006). Finally, the ability to connect TQM with broader organizational frames and transform it into an accepted professional area of expertise was pursued by fledgling professional bodies (Knights & McCabe, 1999).…”

“…Proponents of TQM also engaged in technical work by building formal standards and schemata around quality which could be used by technical experts (David & Strang, 2006). …”

How are Practices Made to Vary? Managing Practice Adaptation in a Multinational Corporation

“…Instead, practices are likely to be adapted during diffusion arguably a dynamic, contested and emergent process (Ansari, Fiss & Zajac, 2010;; Drori, Höllerer, & Walgenbach, 2013;; Fiss & Zajac, 2004;; Sanders & Tuschke, 2007) contex frequently get reconfigured during implementation to make them meaningful and suitable within specific organizational contexts (Robertson, Swan, & Newell, 1996;; SahlinAndersson, 1996;; Strang & Kim, 2004;; Westphal, Gulati, & Shortell, 1997). Examples include TQM (David & Strang, 2006;; Kennedy & Fiss, 2009), Six Sigma (Canato, Ravasi & Phillips, forthcoming;; Parast, 2011), Manufacturing Best Practice Programmes (Love & Cebon, 2008), Telemedicine (Nicolini, 2010), Strategic Planning (Bromley et al, 2012), SelfManaging Teams (Vaccaro, Volberda & Van den Bosch, 2012), Corporate Social Responsibility (Höllerer, 2013), and Responsible Investment (Gond & Boxenbaum, forthcoming). Practice variation is thus likely to be the rule, rather than the exception Akrich, Callon Recent work on the diffusion of management practices has revealed novel insights into how practices are modified across networks, projects, and geographies (Perez-Aleman, 2011) local context (e.g., Ansari et al, 2010;; Canato et al, forthcoming;; Fiss, Kennedy & Greve, 2011).…”

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“…Os consultores, em especial, incluindo os consultores acadêmicos, como Porter, Kaplan e Norton, são vistos por muitos autores (ABRAHAMSON, 1996;FINCHAM;EVANS, 1999;DONADONE, 2001;FAUST, 2002;DAVID;STRANG, 2006) como inventores da maioria das novidades em relação às práticas corporativas. Suas estratégias, construídas a partir da perspectiva "how a non-codified body of knowledge like 'consultancy' could became so apparently influential", enfatizam as incertezas dos gerentes.…”