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The purpose of this paper is to claim that Habermas's pragmatic speech act theory helps us to extend our understanding of how management concepts are actually applied. First, the relevant features of management concepts are examined, to indicate how the diffusion of knowledge about management practices and organizational structuring takes place. Subsequently, the paper focuses on the adoption of management concepts in companies, looking at the different ways management concepts are implemented. Some implementation is based on strategic actions, others on communicative action. This issue is further explored in the final section.

Compares Lervik and Lunnar's categorization of management concept implementation to Habermas's epistemology.

Identifies aspects of language as conversation as determinant of new management concept implementation.

Shows how role discourse analysis coupled with Habermas can give an understanding of implementation of new management concepts.

Practical application of Habermasian analysis of communication.

Drawing on the semantic field theory, the paper aims to uncover the challenges of importing and translating a management accounting concept into the Russian language and the semantic nature of resistance towards the imported management accounting concept.

The paper draws on the extensive literature review of the histories of accounting in the Soviet Union and the United States in the first part of the twentieth century and 17 interviews conducted with the Russian accounting academics.

We demonstrate the case of resistance in adopting the imported Anglo-Saxon management accounting concept. We also discuss historical underpinning and origins of this resistance in light of semantic field theory.

The paper calls for more research in the non-Anglo-Saxon contexts problematizing conventional assumptions and beliefs about objectivity and universality of accounting language.

The study demonstrates the importance of understanding historical and cross-cultural developments of accounting language for accounting educators and practitioners. Critical awareness of the differences in semantic fields of accounting can help accounting researchers and educators to develop contextualized research projects and context-relevant teaching practices.

The study contributes to the literature on translations of accounting concepts by demonstrating that accounting concepts are not understood in isolation, instead, they are interpreted in relation to each other. The present study demonstrates that the relationship between the management accounting concept (the signifier) and its meanings (signifieds) is fluid, culturally and historically contingent. To understand this relationship, we should attend to the historical development of semantic fields and associative relations between concepts.

The paper explores a management fashion within the Swedish Public Sector called intrapreneurships. Intrapreneurships became popular during a period of public debate on what forms of organizing are most suitable for the production of welfare. However, while the popularity of the model was short-lived, a few municipalities nevertheless constitute examples of where it was supported for a longer period. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the model became continuously legitimate having lost its appeal elsewhere.

The paper comprises a longitudinal analysis of two municipalities. Field-material was collected through qualitative methods including interviews (35 interviews, 42 interviewees) and document analysis.

The results draw attention to how management fashions become enduring. The metaphor of translation highlights how different professional actors in a local setting apply editing rules, and how they constitute work acquired for continuous translation of the model in order to make it legitimate, disseminated and supported. The study draws particular attention to the large number of actors involved in the editing process.

Besides an extended understanding of management concepts, to explain the anomaly of a long-standing management fashion, the paper illustrates the importance of acknowledging editing as processes and not process. A key notion in why intrapreneurships became legitimate is that professional actors edited the model differently in order to satisfy their desires and needs. This contradicts the more common case study design in translation studies, which seeks a unitary translation process, in a single local setting.

There is little consensus among academics on how to treat management fashions. The aim of this paper is to point out how management scientists have previously dealt with consulting concepts and which ways of dealing with them seem to be appropriate.

The debate surrounding management fashions alludes to the topic, how academia demarks its borders. Thus, a concept is required with which management studies and practice can be described as distinct entities in order to juxtapose the two spheres. This is done by applying Niklas Luhmann's systems theory to the realm of management studies.

The development of academia's attitude toward consulting concepts can be subdivided into three different phases: management academics considered consulting concepts as quasi‐scientific element; these concepts were then interpreted as a “foreign body”: and, finally, they were an object of scientific reflection. The last phase includes a transformation that has started only recently. From the perspective of the theory of self‐referential systems this change can be described as a sound development and it seems unlikely that academic approaches and consulting concepts will converge. In this perspective the non‐academic character of such consultancy‐concepts becomes evident‐just like their hidden usefulness.

Provides insights on how management scientists deal appropriately with consulting concepts. The change in attitude towards fashionable management concepts provides information not only about the consultancy concepts, but also about an altered self‐conception of management studies.

Although drawing from neoinstitutional theoretical apparatus and ontology, management fashion theory is understood as a theory that explains the transitory nature of popular ideas and practices while institutional theory explains their stabilization, persistence and further institutionalization. In a nutshell, it seems that being opposed to each other, these two theories describe and predict different, incommensurable diffusion trajectories and organizational behaviour patterns. The purpose of this paper is to unify these two competing perspectives.

This paper makes an attempt toward further unification of management fashion theory with new institutionalism by offering an alternative understanding and conceptualization of institutional change and deinstitutionalization and by distinguishing emerging concepts from already popular fashions.

Most emerging concepts never achieve popularity and disappear while few of them achieve massive media attention and diffuse widely becoming new management fashions. Once these concepts have achieved a wide popularity institutional forces would favor them and lead to further institutionalization. Institutional change is understood not as a deinstitutionalization of existing management fashion in terms of erosion, discontinuity or disappearance but as a decline in its media coverage while media attention focuses on new fashionable concept. The former management fashion gets institutionalized, institutional change occurs in terms of shifting attention toward new fashion and diffusion and institutionalization cycle restarts. Institutional prediction of isomorphism and institutionalization as irreversible tendencies thus can be unified with MF prediction about the bell-shaped curves in fashions’ popularity. Therefore, postulates and predictions of management fashion theory can be derived from new institutionalism and vice versa.

The paper aims to cover, generalize and explain different trajectories of various management and organizational concepts, deducing theoretical propositions from both institutional theory and management fashion theory. Theoretical and methodological ideas offered in this paper can be helpful in future research on management fashions and diffusion. Studies on the evolution of management concept can benefit from proposed categorization and causal relationships between different stages of the life cycle.

Unifying seemingly conflicting and disparate perspectives and views allows making organization theory more coherent in terms of both explanatory power and ontological commensurability. Following other mature sciences, we share the same notion of progress, namely, the aim of achieving unification and demonstrating that different organizational theories still describe the same reality.

The purpose of this article is to look at the authors' own definition of systems thinking, which is applied to investigate management concepts. These are the most influential management concepts in Slovenia, a new EU member.

Between 1999 and 2003 a letter survey was used in Slovenian organisations. In 1999 about 300 organisations and in 2003 more than 400 were addressed. The authors tested their questionnaire on a pilot sample of organisations, all items being closed qualitative questions. Data from questionnaire were entered into Lotus Notes database and from it into excel and SPSS for a statistical analysis. The management concepts were analysed by the factor and discriminatory analysis. Both of them enabled the authors to comprehend innovation of management concepts in the Slovenian economy.

Management innovation is the crucial precondition for innovation management, where innovation has not yet become the prevailing culture.

In Slovenia, the authors came across no research on this topic, theoretical and applied at the same time. The governmental support gives the research a broader societal importance and a chance of a rather active impact over transition in Slovenian economy.

This paper offers broader possibilities for researchers and business people in order to better understand different management concepts and differences among them. This will help the reader to make better judgements while deciding to introduce the appropriate one.

It is contended that knowledge management is directed towards finding out how and why information users think, what they know about what they know, the knowledge and attitudes they have and the decisions they make when they interact with others. At the heart lies the mutation of information into knowledge, a process best understood through seeing, knowing and information retrieval as features common to cognitive psychology and information management. The knowledge we have of knowledge, and changes to knowledge, can be monitored in negotiations like knowledge interviews for trainees. Such knowledge and belief systems can also be translated into managerial strategies, both qualitative, as when we emphasise value and benefit in the marketing approach to information, and quantitative, as when we devise ways of assessing probabilities with which desired outcomes will occur. Knowledge management is as much the management of meaning as management of entities and people, for in meaning lies the key to our understanding of what we decide to do as information managers. It is a multi‐disciplinary field offering a semantics and pragmatics for the evaluating and self‐evaluating manager.

Although the literature is clear on what comprises effective project stakeholder management, communication between key stakeholders and project managers is often ineffective. Research is silent on stakeholders' insufficient knowledge of project management terminology, which is a barrier for such effective communication. This paper aims to identify the project management concepts that key stakeholders should understand to improve effective communication.

This paper employs a three-step research design. In the first step, based on threshold concept theory, the authors identify the key project management concepts through interviews with 20 project management practitioners, trainers and trainees. In the second step, the authors confirm the findings from the first step and identify effective approaches to enhance project stakeholders' communication through seven additional interviews with project stakeholders. In the third step, the authors construct a functional model of the research findings by employing a system-level modeling tool.

This research identifies five project management threshold concepts (TC) that are challenging for project stakeholders to understand (1) project benefits, (2) the iron triangle, (3) the critical path, (4) uncertainty and (5) project leadership. Following these knowledge barriers, the paper proposes unique approaches to develop effective project stakeholder communication.

This paper advances project stakeholder management research by identifying knowledge barriers and providing project managers with more effective approaches to better engage with their stakeholders.

The Iron Triangle, also called the Triple Constraint, is a central concept to project management research and practice, representing the relationship between key performance criteria. However, there is disagreement about which criteria should be represented on the vertices of this triangle. The purpose of this paper is to explore which concepts are part of the Iron Triangle, and how these concepts have changed over time.

This paper explores 45 years of project management research, drawing on a database of 109,804 records from 1970 to 2015. Three corpora were constructed, representing the project management and Time, Cost, and Quality Management literature. Time and Cost are consistently identified as part of the Iron Triangle. However, the status of quality is contested. Key concepts in the project management literature were explored using scientometric research techniques, to understand the relationship between these concepts.

Significant links were found between Time, Cost, and Quality, verifying these concepts as the vertices on the Iron Triangle. These links were significantly stronger than links to alternatives, such as Scope, Performance, or Requirements. Other concepts that are core to the Iron Triangle were also identified, and how these have changed over time.

This research develops the understanding of a key project management concept by clarifying which concepts are part of the Iron Triangle, based on evidence of how the concept is used in research. This paper also reveals the context in which this concept is used, and how this has changed over the last 45 years.

According to many authors, differences in firm performances are increasingly attributed to tacit knowledge that cannot easily be transmitted or imitated. On the other hand, current quality management models knowledge typically relates only to people. Situations, in which knowledge that is related to people is not available, sufficient, reliable or lucrative for application, are not considered. This paper aims to investigate how to overcome this gap.

Based on the adopted classification, types of knowledge typically present in an organisation are identified, and are discussed. Techniques for acquiring and formalising tacit knowledge are explored, and related criteria are defined. Particular attention is shown to knowledge management and artificial intelligence techniques.

A new approach to quality management called deep quality concept (DQC) is conceptualised, and mechanisms and concepts needed to acquire and integrate formalised knowledge into quality systems are identified. Other concepts that need to be incorporated are also identified. Finally, a new quality management model based on the DQC is developed.

In further research the main points of the presented theoretical framework need to be validated through real examples from practice, and the resulting quality standard, i.e. award criteria, as well as the related handbooks completed and formalised.

Knowledge‐related and other relevant concepts need to be incorporated into contemporary quality management systems, as systematically and carefully as conventional quality management concepts. Knowledge of methods and tools suitable for that also needs to be assimilated.

In the paper a novel knowledge‐focused approach to quality management is presented. For this reason the paper is of great value for quality management theory and practice.