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Big Data is disrupting the fashion retail industry and revolutionising the traditional fashion business models. Nowadays, leading fashion brands and new start-ups are actively engaging with Big Data analytics to enhance their operations and maximise on profitability. In hope of motivating and providing direction to fashion retail managers, industry experts, and academics alike, the purpose of this paper is to consider the most recent and trending applications of Big Data in fashion retailing with the aim of concisely summarising the industry’s current position and status.

This conceptual paper provides a brief introduction to the emerging topic of Big Data in fashion retailing by briefly synthesising findings from industry, market and academic research.

Most existing fashion brands are yet to fully engage with Big Data. The authors find that the main reasons underlying the application of Big Data analytics in fashion are trend prediction, waste reduction, consumer experience, consumer engagement and marketing, better quality control, less counterfeits and shortening of supply chains. The authors also identify key challenges which must be overcome for the most fashionable industry to be able to capitalize on Big Data to understand and predict fashion consumer behaviour.

The brief synthesis provides a foundation for future investigations into the use of Big Data in fashion retailing.

This paper serves as an up-to-date introduction to how Big Data can transform fashion retailing and can act as a sound reference guide for fashion industry managers and professionals grappling with Big Data-related issues.

The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to the benchmarking literature by examining the historical emergence and evolution of benchmarking using the management fashion perspective as a theoretical lens.

The research approach followed in this paper can be characterized as explorative and theoretical. Insights from different data sources have been combined to provide a rich description of the emergence and evolution of benchmarking.

This analysis casts new light on several aspects of benchmarking’s emergence and evolution pattern. The characteristics of the benchmarking idea give it potential as a fashionable management tool. The widespread popularity and longevity of benchmarking can to a large extent be explained by the efforts of various actors to turn benchmarking into an institution.

The paper is explorative and is limited by a reliance on secondary sources.

Although some researchers have noted that benchmarking could be viewed as a management fashion, management fashion theory has, only to a very limited extent, been used as a theoretical lens in the context of benchmarking. This research paper demonstrates that management fashion theory can provide valuable insights for research on benchmarking.

This paper aims to examine the historical evolution and popularity of activity-based thinking in management accounting. As an organising framework, this paper applies the lens of management fashion theory, which is a perspective that is well suited to the examination of the lifecycles of management accounting concepts and ideas.

This paper pursues a bibliographic approach to better understand the past and present state of activity-based thinking. Thus, this paper attempts to piece together a mosaic picture by synthesising existing research on activity-based thinking from a wide range of academic and practitioner-oriented sources.

While the original activity-based costing (ABC) model has evolved and broadened and has generated new related concepts, studies suggest that it is not as successful as accounting concepts such as the balanced scorecard. The overall popularity trajectory of activity-based thinking can be considered to be negative, and it is currently not receiving much attention in accounting journals.

This paper is based on desk research and is limited by a reliance on secondary sources. In addition, it may be subject to the authors’ own biases when it comes to defining relevant articles studied.

This paper provides more insight into the evolution and popularity of activity-based thinking and discusses some of the reasons why it is not more widely used in practice.

Although many studies have examined the diffusion of ABC-related techniques, most are quite dated. More than 30 years have passed since the coining of the ABC term, and the time is ripe to provide a historical re-examination of the impact of this type of thinking in the field of accounting and to consider the latest developments and trends.

This paper examines the evolution of a company's management control package (MCP) over time. The overall aim is to gain a deeper understanding of internal and external factors shaping a company's management control package.

This paper employs a retrospective single-case methodology where a company is followed over a ten-year period (2005–2015). Theoretically, the paper builds on Malmi and Brown's (2008) MCP framework while also utilizing Simons' (1994) levers of control framework as well as Abrahamson's (1991) management fashion theory.

The company's MCP evolved in several ways. First, there was a change from using an interactive to a diagnostic budget. Second, the Balanced Scorecard approach was replaced by a narrow, strong focus on shareholder value. Finally, the quality system was reduced from a system for continuous learning and improvement to a system for compliance purposes only.

This paper offers naturalistic generalization to enable a holistic understanding of the changes to a management control package over time. The findings suggest that history matters in the design and configuration of MCPs. The MCP has evolved from being balanced and interactive, resembling Beyond Budgeting, to a diagnostic approach resembling traditional budgetary control. In 2005, the different controls were complementary and used for different purposes, while in 2015 the controls solely support the creation of shareholder value. The findings also indicate that management accounting innovations such as The Balanced Scorecard and Beyond Budgeting in this specific context may be considered fashions or even fads.

The findings of the paper could be useful for CFOs and other managers who are involved in the design and configuration of MCPs. The findings show that internal and external events shape how much leeway managers have in the design and configuration of MCPs.

The paper answers a call for more empirical studies on MCPs. By adopting a retrospective approach, the paper can provide insight into the temporal evolution of a control package.

The diffusion of management accounting innovations (MAIs) is the focus of much debate in the management accounting research community. Extant contributions have drawn on a large of number of theories, including innovation diffusion theory and various sociologically inspired theories such as management fashion. The purpose of this paper is to examine and develop Røvik’s virus theory in the context of how MAIs diffuse. The paper further evaluates and elaborates on the potential usefulness of the virus perspective to empirical research on MAIs.

The paper uses a conceptual and explorative research approach. The paper introduces the virus perspective and compares this perspective with several other theoretical perspectives often used in studies of the diffusion of MAIs. This enables the identification of characteristics specific to the virus perspective. The paper also re-examines a number of prior studies of MAIs and identifies different virus characteristics implicit in these studies.

The findings of the paper imply that the virus perspective is a useful basis for empirical research on MAIs. The virus perspective differs from other theoretical perspectives in several respects and is particularly suited for longitudinal studies of both MAIs and organizational change. However, the perspective could be used at other levels of analysis as well. The extant studies reviewed in this paper provide support for the viral characteristics of MAIs. The paper also identifies and discusses avenues for future research using the virus perspective as a theoretical lens.

The virus perspective has been given little attention in research on MAIs, as well as more generally within accounting research. This research paper demonstrates that the virus perspective offers a rich and valuable conceptual framework for studying how demand-side organizations are affected by MAIs over extensive periods of time. The paper also discusses the implications of the virus perspective with respect to the research method.

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 Danish Social Democrats have been through a lengthy period of ideological change and transformation, whose effects have become particularly manifest in recent times. This chapter argues that these developments are to be seen in the light of the particular Danish political context and developments, already prefigured at the dawn of the century. Notably, the populist and anti-immigration right in Denmark which quickly made use of the political opportunities to exploit the weaknesses, indecision and the ambiguities on the Right and the Left to gain support. The strategy repertoires activated by the Social Democrats to stem the electoral appeal of the right-wing populist anti-immigration have shifted from attempts to isolate, ignore and dismiss the saliency of some policy issues, towards efforts to adverse and recently to accommodate and co-opt stricter positions on immigration and tougher integration politics. While it is premature to tell whether the Social Democratic right wing turn on immigration helped undermining the populist right-wing momentum, the party has not yet managed to take back the support it hoped for. Moreover, the paradigm shift on immigration and the opening up to transversal alliances might mobilise new friends, but also shed old ones. The new pattern undertaken by the Danish Social Democrats seems also to require internal consent, more control and party discipline to avoid internal disagreements and criticism from within the party. Our interviews unravel some discontent with the restrictive right turn on immigration bubbling under the surface among the party ranks and files.

Social democratic unionism has arguably been one of the most successful worker organisations in modern history. Through collective bargaining and political influence, this type of unionism has been effective in redistributing the gains from capitalist markets. This paper reviews the challenges, pathways and dilemmas social democratic unions face in the knowledge economy. Similar to industrialisation, the knowledge economy has the potential to fundamentally change the social fabric that trade unions derive their power resources from. There are three major and interrelated challenges: (1) technological change and the knowledge economy, (2) new socio-political coalitions and (3) keeping employers in. Focussing on Denmark and Sweden, it is argued that these three challenges strike the core of social democratic unionism, as they can undermine the ability to encompass the whole labour market because of polarisation or upgrading of jobs. The paper goes on to outline three possible pathways: ‘going radical’, ‘going academic’ and ‘going old-school’. ‘Going radical’ entails a sharper focus on fighting precarious work with other regulatory means other than collective bargaining. ‘Going academic’ entails a focus on education and lifting all occupational groups. ‘Going old-school’ entails adapting the principle of collective bargaining to new types of companies and occupations while sticking to the regulatory means as before. It is argued that none of the strategies is a silver bullet to the challenges, but that a key to the success of any of the strategies is that minimum wage levels are defended, as this will fuel investment in education for lower-paid work.

This paper compares the research traditions of organizational translation studies and adaptation studies. The purpose of this paper is to identify differences and similarities in how these traditions approach the study of change in adopted constructs, and by doing so, provide a better understanding of each and how they can inform research into the connection between collective learning and the continuous transformation of circulating constructs.

The paper is conceptual in that it discusses, critiques and compares other authors’ work and thinking. It also has similarities with a literature review in that it draws out the main tendencies of many scholarly contributions from translation and adaptation literatures, respectively.

Although the paper identifies differences between translation and adaptation literatures concerning their basic assumptions, it also calls for better integration of the insights provided by them. It argues that both are needed to better understand the learning aspects involved in the transformation of circulating constructs.

This paper is the first to compare translation studies with adaptation studies and to call for better integration of these literatures to better understand the change in circulating constructs.