What Research into Fads and Fashions Says About TLO’s Success
TLO’s history illustrates the rise in popularity and dissemination of a body of ideas, a particular way of thinking. Research about fads and fashions can make some interpretations of TLO’s history more plausible and others less plausible. However, the history of TLO differs from most of the fads and fashions that researchers have studied. This means that much of the prior research is only indirectly relevant and it suggests some opportunities for future research.
The terms fad and fashion encompass a wide variety of social phenomena. They may spread across large populations of people or organizations, or they may occur within individual organizations or small subpopulations. Many business techniques have had very short life cycles (Brandes, 1976; Carson et al., 2000). By contrast, Aristotle’s ideas dominated Western thinking about physics for over two millennia. As well, fads and fashions produce a wide variety of consequences, some beneficial and some harmful, some short term and others long term. Indeed, fads and fashions are kinds of social change, and change can be positive or negative, rapid or slow. Abrahamson and Rosenkopf (1993, 1997) characterized fads as forms of social change that incorporate contagion, and fashions as forms of social change in which followers imitate fashion setters.
It is helpful to consider fads and fashions as commodities bought and sold in markets. Some people and organizations act as buyers and others as sellers. A market perspective calls attention to some of the social structures that facilitate buying and selling and methods used to sell ideas. A market perspective aids in understanding the emergence of a fad and explains differences in popularity of some fads.
The market for business techniques
Senge’s ideas about TLO and his more general ideas about the ‘learning organization’ are so ambiguous that they may not qualify as business techniques. They are less specific than many of the techniques that have been studied. However, research about fads and fashions in business techniques provides suggestions about the processes affecting the popularity and consequences of TLO.
Abrahamson (1996) analyzed changes in business techniques in a market framework. The techniques bought and sold in this market bear labels—such as ‘The Learning Organization’—that provide concise characterizations for bundles of ideas, methods, requirements, and limitations that may be quite complicated. Both sellers and buyers of popular business techniques characterize them as ‘rational’ and ‘progressive.’ That is, the techniques supposedly help business firms and other organizations efficiently transform inputs into highly desirable outputs, and the techniques supposedly improve on previous techniques. The emphasis on progressive improvement guarantees that techniques will be constantly changing and that the sellers of techniques will claim that newer techniques are better.
Meyer and Rowan (1977) pointed out that criteria for judging rationality or improvement may have weak substantive support; there may be little or no clear evidence about efficiency, effectiveness, or benefits. However, the criteria have support from social norms. On the supply side, new techniques may allow consulting firms and gurus who market them to claim specialized expertise. On the demand side, stakeholders may withdraw support from organizations that do not use fashionable business techniques, and stakeholders may confer benefits on organizations that do adopt the latest techniques. Stakeholders may pursue fleeting opportunities or espouse new myths about organizational effectiveness (Abrahamson, 1996). Of course, societies differ in the degrees to which they value progressive change (Rogers, 1962). Competitive markets emphasize progressive change because competitors have to out-do each other (Campbell, 1985; Van Valen, 1973).
Several studies have found that claims about the effectiveness of new business techniques have very often been deceptive in that the buyers made little or no pragmatic use of the techniques (Staw and Epstein, 2000; Wang, 2010). For instance, Zbaracki (1998) found that the Total Quality Management (TQM) label was associated with very limited pragmatic use of TQM’s prescriptions, and the superficial pragmatic use of prescriptions that did occur generally yielded poor results. However, users hid the poor results behind various organizational facades (Nystrom and Starbuck, 2006), and then told stories of TQM’s successful implementation. Westphal, Gulati, and Shortell (1997) inferred that, among 2700 hospitals using TQM, early users showed a few performance increases, whereas later users tended to communicate TQM’s use only for the rhetorical benefits they obtained. Chevalier’s (1991) study of use of the Quality Circle (QC) label revealed two types of scenarios. In one scenario, each organization made very limited pragmatic use of QC’s prescriptions but hid the lack of pragmatic use from stakeholders. In the second scenario, managers adopted behavioral approaches that fit their organizations’ idiosyncrasies but that had little to do with QC’s prescriptions. Delacroix and Swaminathan (1991) concluded that nearly all organizational changes in the Californian wine industry are cosmetic, pointless, or speculative.
For there to be significant changes in business techniques, there must be large numbers of buyers of these techniques, which in turn means that there must be even larger numbers of potential buyers (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999). One way for a pool of potential buyers to develop is for a new technique to produce noticeably better solutions to pervasive problems. Although the sellers of new techniques typically claim that their techniques do this, the evidence cited above suggests that the claims rarely have justification. Because people have been redesigning and adapting organizations for a very long time, the chances are remote of coming up with a genuinely original idea.
A second way for a pool of potential buyers to develop is for buyers of an existing technique to gradually lose confidence in it. In part because they face mutually inconsistent demands from different stakeholders, managers are endlessly trying to ‘solve’ some intrinsic organizational problems that have no solutions (Starbuck, 1994). As a result, techniques that supposedly solve these unsolvable problems inevitably disappoint those who have bought them. As the disappointed buyers accumulate, they become potential buyers of new solutions for the corresponding unsolvable problems. Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999) found that people talk about fads and fashions in more positive and emotional language while adopters are increasing, whereas the talk becomes more negative and logical while adopters are decreasing (Jönsson and Lundin, 1977).
A third way for a pool of potential buyers to develop is for social or technological evolution to create new organizational problems. The later part of the twentieth century brought many, many new organizational problems. Because agriculture and manufacturing industries competed with their counterparts in economies with lower wage levels, developed economies did less and less farming and manufacturing and shifted toward service industries that take advantage of education. In developed economies, and especially in the US, workers’ educational levels rose dramatically. Because educated workers want autonomy and resent direct supervision, employers placed more emphasis on teamwork; team members supervise each other. Of course, the demand for organizations to ‘learn’ is partly one of those unsolvable organizational problems: to know what is worth learning requires coping with great complexity and predicting the future rather accurately. Therefore, Senge could not propose a lasting solution. He could, however, propose a solution that utilized computers and that would appeal to more highly educated workers who know how to collaborate in teams.
The marketing of business technique
Because social norms exert very strong influence in the market for fads and fashions, language and appearances are key properties in promoting success. Some fads and fashions also gain impetus from characteristics of their purveyors, including academics, consulting firms, and gurus.
A technique’s name matters. ‘The learning organization’ sounds more proactive and progressive than ‘the adaptive organization’ or ‘the reactive organization.’ ‘Six sigma’ sounds quantitative and scientific, and quality-improvement personnel who bear the labels ‘black belt’ or ‘green belt’ certainly sound like they are capable of significant accomplishments. Buyers of business techniques use labels to communicate to their stakeholders that their organizations are using progressive, rational business techniques.
Jackson (1995: 38) commented, ‘fads tend to recommend solutions which they believe hold in all circumstances.’ Prescriptions that allow for many interpretations can be very successful. Organizations can clarify, particularize, and use such advice pragmatically in very different ways to fit various idiosyncrasies, from geographic locations (Giroux, 2006; Kieser, 1997) to distinctive swaths of time in different organizational sectors (Morris and Lancaster, 2006) or nations (Czarniawska-Joerges and Sevón, 2005). However, potential adopters also want or need easy-to-use tools that facilitate initial steps toward implementation. Many purveyors of business techniques supply tools for information gathering or self-training—questionnaires, forms, frameworks for discussing concepts—and many purveyors offer training.
The purveyors of business techniques come in at least three varieties. Academics come up with quite a few proposals about business techniques, but nearly all of these proposals lack easy means of implementation so they attract few adoptions. One exception to this pattern was a proposal by Richard Hackman, Ed Lawler, and Greg Oldham to ‘enrich’ jobs. Academic and mass-market publications by these academics included reports of field research that gave credibility to their ideas and questionnaires for assessing the characteristics of jobs (Hackman and Lawler, 1971; Hackman and Oldham, 1980). As a result, thousands of HR departments around the world used the questionnaires and attempted to redesign jobs.
Other purveyors are consultants. Consultants are continually searching for services that will entice clients to hire them (Kieser, 2001). Consultants perform activities such as information gathering and training that convert ideas into actions that appear practical. For example, in 1970, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) began to advocate that a company should have a balanced portfolio of business activities that include (a) ‘stars’ with high market shares and high growth, (b) ‘cash cows’ that generate profits, and (c) ‘question marks’ that have potential to become stars. BCG’s staff offered to put on strategic planning sessions to help client firms diagnose their existing strategic portfolios and to develop scenarios for future development. However, BCG gained limited advantage from its schema because it was so appealing, easily understood, and superficially logical that many other consultants imitated it and it appeared in all of the strategic management textbooks.
Many new business techniques, although not all, have support and stimulus from gurus (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999; Gill and Whittle, 1993). To be perceived as a guru, someone has to be a compelling spokesperson. Some gurus also serve as living symbols of the ideas they promote. However, all gurus have human defects and these defects sometimes undermine enthusiasm for their techniques. Peter Senge has been formally anointed a world-class guru by the Financial Times and Business Week, and he exhibits some characteristics that reinforce TLO and some that do not. His photo on the cover of The Fifth Discipline portrays him as boyish and idealistic, and, in person, he comes across as sincere and optimistic. However, his workbooks did not provide easily used implementation tools, and his efforts to create delivery systems for TLO have been less than successful. The Center for Organizational Learning at MIT, which Senge created in 1991, did not deliver solutions; rather it encouraged two score companies to attempt various experiments. Next, in 1997, Senge founded the Society for Organizational Learning, but the members of this society seem to have drifted away from Senge’s own ideas.
In general, research indicates that adoption of new business techniques involves strong reliance on rhetoric, weak results hidden behind facades, and strong claims of success (Hirsch, 1986; Strang and Macy, 2001; Strang and Meyer, 1994). Some business techniques involve easy-to-use implementation tools, other techniques offer very general prescriptions that adopters can interpret in many ways. Senge’s affiliation with a prestigious academic institution, the complexity of his prescriptions, the jargon and scientific appearance of systems analysis, his emphasis on honesty, forthrightness, and collaboration, all give the TLO label a cachet. Yet, the idealism is so strong that very few people, if any, would try to implement TLO as Senge prescribes it. Indeed, Senge himself stated that he was talking about a kind of organization that could possibly exist someday in the future. Senge’s audiences have expressed uncertainty about what TLO entails. Worrell (1995: 353) characterized the ‘complete learning organization’ of Senge’s design as ‘more of an ideal than a reality’ and noted that firms had been adopting only one or two elements of TLO, not the entire package. Ortenblad (2007) collected some very diverse definitions of TLO, which led him to liken dissemination of the concept to children’s ‘whisper- down-the-lane’ game. He remarked that people cite different passages from The Fifth Discipline, which, he said, leaves room for dynamic thinking and inspiration. Smith (2008) also commented that lack of clarity of the concept allows managers, researchers, students, and even editors to make TLO into what they wish.