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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.

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.

The antecedents and typical stages of development of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs in a given organization or type of organization have been of minor interest in CSR research. Contrary to that the chapter argues that CSR communication strategies need to take the genesis and drivers of CSR institutionalization into account.

The chapter develops a complex set of interrelated drivers for CSR institutionalization from a literature review – among them leadership styles and management fashion. The chapter further discusses the influence of leadership styles and management fashions on CSR institutionalization and focuses on the diffusion of management concepts along a management fashion cycle. It then refers to executive trainers as the key facilitator and promoter of new business concepts and presents data from a first online-survey among German speaking management trainers.

The chapter clears manager’s role in institutionalization of CSR by contextualizing their behavior in a portfolio of performance indicators. From a management fashion perspective the various forms of explicit and implicit CSR are linked to management styles.

The chapter lays ground for further research of CSR institutionalization and integration into business strategy by providing a conceptualization of CSR drivers and settings that relate to a given organization. As such it is designed as groundwork for a yet to develop CSR scorecard.

The connection between organizational type, organizational environment, leadership behavior, and the chosen CSR approach of a corporation is usually overseen. The chapter aims to uncover this connection.

This paper aims to explore how management practitioners make sense of management fashions as sedimented elements within organizations.

To further understanding about sedimentation in management fashion, an institutional perspective was used.

This analysis reveals that sedimented fashions within organizations are framed as comprising different forms that are systematically associated with divergent evolution patterns.

This study extends the current literature on management fashion by showing how, unlike present conceptualizations, the long‐term impact of fashionable ideas in organizations cannot be considered a single entity with a uniform pattern of development. Building on this, the paper seeks to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the evolution of popular management ideas in organizational practice, which opens fruitful new research directions.

This paper may help managers, as important consumers of fashionable ideas, to better understand how elements of fashions may remain in organizations and play an important conditional role in future change initiatives.

Despite the substantial attention to the field‐level dissemination and evolution of popular management ideas in the management fashion literature, the possible long‐term impact of these ideas within organizations has received scant attention beyond the assumed transience of a fashion's discourse and the possible persistence of the organizational practices associated with a fashion.

Recent management history has seen a surge in the number of ideas that supposedly represent the cutting edge of management progress. This paper investigates the emergence of several of these management fashions. It examines the dissemination of fashions and the type of journals and areas from which particular fashions emerge. A bibliometric analysis is described that involved the following fashions: bench‐marking; pay for performance; quality circles; peer review; and MBO. The results of the analysis support hypotheses that fashions emerge in the popular press before academic literature and that some fashions emerge from sub‐fields before appearing throughout management publications.

The purpose of this study is to examine: direct effects of appearance management and fashion involvement on social participation; direct effects of social participation, appearance management, and fashion involvement on self‐esteem; and indirect effects of appearance management and fashion involvement on self‐esteem through social participation.

A total of 389 females aged 55 and over completed a mail survey measuring appearance management, fashion involvement, social participation, and self‐esteem. Principal component factor analysis was conducted to reduce multi‐items measuring the variables. Path analysis was employed to test direct and indirect effects among the variables.

The results of path analysis showed that social participation and appearance management had direct effects on self‐esteem, whereas fashion involvement had no direct effect on self‐esteem. However, both appearance management and fashion involvement had positive indirect effects on self‐esteem via social participation.

To maintain self‐esteem in old age, individuals should be encouraged to participate in social activities and appearance management activities. The fashion and personal care industry should have an awareness of older female consumers' needs and develop and provide age‐related products and services.

This paper provides important contributions to gerontology, retailing, marketing, and consumer behavior‐related research. Although older adults (55+) are an important market segment, especially for the fashion and personal care industry, little research has included this group of consumers. This study showed that older adult females' self‐esteem was influenced by social participation, appearance management, and fashion involvement. The finding of this study helps marketers developing products targeting seniors.

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.

Business process re‐engineering (BPR) is described as a management fashion. Manage‐ment fashions are introduced on the market for management knowledge by fashion‐setters, who are often consultants. Characteristic for management fashions are multi‐interpretability and promises of performance improvements. The demand for and supply of management fashions is constituted in iterative cycles. By drawing on primary and secondary data, we show how Dutch consultants handle the management fashion BPR. They tend to be highly pragmatic in using this fashionable label. In close interaction with clients, elements of the original BPR concept are dropped and notions of other concepts are included in what are called “BPR‐projects”. The label “BPR” is used for commercial reasons, yet it is easily decoupled from the original concepts and coupled to notions of other concepts. The consequences of these findings for the current literature on management fashions are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new perspective on ambidextrous innovation orientation looking at how the current digital transformation is accepted in the fashion industry in Italy. Precisely, the objective of the paper is to test whether the use of social media platforms positively influences ambidextrous innovation orientation in fashion companies.

Empirical quantitative research was carried out on a sample of 853 small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in the fashion industry in Italy. Using a logistic regression methodology, four hypotheses were tested to verify the correlation of four dimensions of social media platforms with an ambidextrous innovation orientation among fashion firms.

The four hypotheses were validated: the structural dimension, the relational behaviour dimension, the cognitive dimension and knowledge transfer practices of social media platforms were proven to positively influence ambidextrous innovation orientation in fashion firms.

Though this is one of the few research studies that offers a quantitative analysis in this field, it could be further developed, for instance by extending the sample of firms to SMEs operating in other countries or by comparing multinationals with SMEs.

This paper provides an original contribution to studies on the use of social media to promote ambidexterity in firms, which has only been studied to a limited extent in the extant literature. From this perspective, the originality of the study is further strengthened by the unique context of analysis, namely, the fashion industry in Italy.

The purpose of this article is to review the potential contributions of category management (CM) to the UK fashion sector and subsequently to establish evaluation criteria for the application of CM in the UK fashion sector.

Qualitative research was employed through an exploratory case study method.

Category management is limited in its application in the fashion industry. The study found that fashion companies adopted collaborative structures in order to implement a CM approach and a CM approach contributes to the development of a fast fashion business orientation.

Exploratory case study method does not allow for the results to be generalised.

The paper proposes a model of the evaluation of the application of category management in the fashion sector.