Surges and sediments : organization concepts between transience and continuity

Abstract

Congruent to fashions in clothing, management knowledge, as contained in organization concepts, is continuously and collectively rejected while embraced only a short time before, a phenomenon referred to as 'concepticide'. These organization concepts play an important role in the diffusion of management in organizational praxis. Soon after their introduction, some concepts become extensively debated and widely associated with changes in actual organizations. However these allegedly novel ideas are easily abandoned after a short while and replaced by the next innovative vision on organizing. Unsurprisingly, these temporarily popular concepts leave an impression of management intellectuals and practitioners as capricious, constantly jumping on the next management idea. The presumed transient and non-cumulative nature of these 'management fashions' easily invites various knowledge carriers to repeatedly start from scratch and provides a fertile ground for reinventing the wheel. Management fashion literature suggests that these recurring patterns unavoidably induce 'continuous transience' in management knowledge. Constantly introducing knowledge commodities as new easily makes the existing regarded as old and reduce its attractiveness. Such a view at least suggests little bases for entrenchment within important knowledge carriers. Starting from the premise that 'new' not necessarily implies transience of the 'old', this book seeks to develop a theory of sedimentation. Unlike current management fashion accounts, this study shows that during an alleged downturn, a concept leaves a variety of different traces in various knowledge carriers such as print media, consultancies and business organizations that follow their own trajectory loosely coupled to the concept they were initially associated with. At the same time the paper identifies important factors shaping the likelihood of a concept's erosion, thereby emphasizing that the viability of these traces remains particularly fragile