Reading Summary of Eric Abrahamson and Gregory Fairchild’s Management Fashion Essay

Thesis While most fads in management technique be short-lived some techniques become institutionalized and evolve and argon determined to fits flowing fashions. Exogenous and endogenous forces shape the demand for management- knowledge entrepreneurs to constantly reshape and redefine rational management processes. Evidence Abrahamson and Fairchilds study yielded hapings that uphold contextualize the concept of management fashion. Lifecycles of a management techniques typically follow a short-lived, bell-shaped, symmetric popularity curve.Positive feedback on management techniques increases the discourse promoting that technique, make it more diffuse across organizations. Exogenous forces facilitate or squelch fashion niches and endogenous maintain niches. Superstitious learning suggests that managers seek to find instant-results and cure-all solutions for their management approach, motivated by emotion rather than exposit studies. Whereas real-learning constitutes careful pl anning and evaluation of ideas to produce an effective management technique. LimitationsAbrahamson and Fairchild allege the negative aspects of constant transience -temporal instability and cross-sectional diversity- but discover to indicate the effects these management fashions have on the institutions in which they are implemented. Do shifting management techniques stunt institution growth, do ever-changing techniques disrupt the markets for the products of these institutions? Questions (1) What causes certain management practices to become institutionalized while others are only passing fads? (2) Are the results of superstitious-learning or real-learning more likely to be adopted? Which is more effective?