Stretching Concepts: The Role of Competing Pressures and Decoupling in the Evolution of Organization Concepts

Abstract

To contribute to the understanding of the evolution of organization concepts, this article focuses on how consultants respond to competing pressures during the maturity and decline phases of an initially popular concept. Management consultants are important fashion setters, but the actual strategies they use to deal with the pressures to remain legitimate, increase efficiency and differentiate themselves from competitors remain unclear. Such supply-side dynamics likely influence how organization concepts evolve and are relevant for understanding how management knowledge may survive a fashion boom and bust. Using interview and print media data from 32 consultants from 14 consultancies, we identify seven response strategies, and show how these are associated with multiple pressures, and comprise different implications for the evolution of a concept. We argue that this variety of responses is essential to better understand the evolution of organization concepts and opens several fruitful research directions.

Keywords

institutional theory management consultancies management fashion organization concepts response strategy

Introduction

A contested issue in research into organization concepts pertains to what happens after a concept’s popularity declines: does it die or does it stay (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999; Clark, 2004; O’Mahoney, 2007; Perkmann & Spicer, 2008; Røvik, 2011; Spell, 2001)? Prior literature provides important insights into the character of, and causes for, swings in popularity of organization concepts (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999; Carson et al., 2000; Kieser, 1997). Theorists have suggested that these swings are the result of supply-side dynamics induced by fashion setters who are particularly involved in ‘productivizing’ (Huczynski, 1993, p. 217) or commodifying (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2001; Heusinkveld & Benders, 2005) management knowledge into a form that can be sold on a market for managerial solutions.

Yet, what do we know about the way these concepts evolve once they are introduced into the market? Most studies focus on the early stages in the ‘lives’ of an organization concept and primarily on the way these concepts are produced so as to be inherently attractive and accessible to managers (Clark, 2004; Clark & Greatbatch, 2004). But research offers less detail about the supply-side dynamics that arise after the initial stages beyond the assumption that these concepts are either abandoned or maintained as a result of their (lack of) legitimacy on the management knowledge market (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999; David & Strang, 2006), or that ‘old’ ideas may be re-iterated as new concepts (Abrahamson & Eisenman, 2008; Guillén, 1994). This is an important gap in the literature on organization concepts because such supply-side dynamics shape the way organization concepts evolve and how management knowledge may survive a fashion boom and bust.

To contribute to prior literature on the role of the supply-side dynamics in the evolution of organization concepts, this study investigates how management consultants respond after the initial phase in the life of a concept, and especially when an initially popular concept goes out of vogue. We focus on management consultants because they are generally regarded as important fashion setters (Abrahamson, 1996; Sahlin-Andersson & Engwall, 2002). As such, consultants are not only widely involved in the creation and dissemination of ‘new’ concepts in the market for management solutions (Anand et al., 2007; Braam et al., 2007; Collins, 2003; Faust, 2002; Fincham, 1995; Heusinkveld & Benders, 2005; Kipping & Clark 2012; Suddaby & Greenwood 2001), but are also often closely involved in translating these concepts into practice in the context of assignments within client organizations (O’Shea & Madigan, 1997; Sturdy et al., 2009; Wright & Kitay, 2004).

Therefore, our research question is: how do consultancies respond to competing pressures in the maturity and decline phases of an organization concept? To address this question we adopt an institutional perspective because it allows furthering of our understanding about how fashion setters respond to multiple pressures (Deephouse, 1999; Oliver, 1991; Pache & Santos, 2010). Using interview and print media data from 32 consultants from 14 consultancies we show how an organization concept is constantly shaped and reshaped by fashion setters to ensure its continued viability. From these data, we identify seven distinct response strategies and show how these are associated with the multiple pressures that management consultancies confront, and comprise different implications for the form of a concept. We suggest that this variety of responses is essential to develop a better understanding of the evolution of organization concepts because it sheds more light on how and why these concepts are reshaped over time, and allows us to better connect population-level lifecycle models with firm-level dynamics.

In turn, our research contributes to extant literature in three main ways. First, rather than only considering the concept’s legitimacy to explain why consultancies act as they do and how concepts evolve, we account for multiple pressures and thus add depth and nuance to the underlying rationales that drive fashion setters’ responses. Second, by identifying different response strategies, our study goes beyond the assumption that fashion setters simply abandon or maintain organization concepts. Rather, conceptualizations of supply-side dynamics should pay more attention to the various options that can ‘stretch’ a concept’s longevity. Third, we elucidate the different implications of various response strategies for the form that a concept takes, thereby showing the pivotal role of decoupling an organization concept’s contents, its market positioning, and its label in understanding how these concepts evolve. We thus argue for a more fluid, dynamic conceptualization of the evolving supply-side dynamics of organization concepts that can provide a basis for the coexistence of divergent evolution patterns.

In the next section, we discuss prior literature on the supply-side dynamics of organization concepts. After we outline our institutional perspective, we explain our research method. To present the results of our empirical analysis, we elaborate on various relevant pressures and response strategies. Finally, we discuss the theoretical implications of our analysis and provide some fruitful directions for further research.

The Supply-Side Dynamics of Organization Concepts

Organization concepts have always played an important role in the way fashion setters such as consultancies have legitimized their existence, created their business and intervened in organizations (Guillén, 1994; Kipping, 1999; Kipping & Clark, 2012; McKenna, 2006; Shenhav, 1999). An organization concept, sometimes also referred to as a management concept (Kieser, 1997; Nicolai & Dautwiz 2010), management idea (Clark, 2004; Giroux, 2006; Whittle, 2008) or management technique (Abrahamson, 1996; David & Strang, 2006), is here understood as a more or less coherent prescriptive vision, that includes guidelines for managers and other organizational members regarding how to deal with specific organizational issues, and is known by a particular label (Benders & Verlaar, 2003). Well-known examples of these organization concepts from the 1980s and 1990s are quality circles (QC), business process reengineering (BPR) and total quality management (TQM) (Carson et al., 2000).

Prior literature on the supply-side dynamics of organization concepts focuses mainly on the way these concepts are produced by fashion setters so as to be inherently attractive and accessible to managers (Abrahamson, 1996; Clark & Greatbatch, 2004; Furusten, 1999; Jackson, 1996; Kieser, 1997). One important stream of research regards their creation as a series of different activities, designed to transform or commodify management knowledge into a form that can be sold in the management knowledge market (Anand et al., 2007; Heusinkveld & Benders, 2005; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2001). These activities involve constructing a new concept and also engaging in collaborative efforts with internal (Morris, 2001) and external (Fosstenløkken et al., 2003; Heusinkveld et al., 2009) constituencies. As a result, these concepts are considered as ‘collective social products’ (Clark & Greatbatch, 2004, p. 410) that are shaped in the interaction across a network of actors.

Another substantial body of literature focuses instead on the key elements contained in the rhetoric of popular concepts, such as promises of performance improvement, references to successful users, and descriptions of the concept as easily understandable (Benders & van Veen, 2001; Clark & Greatbatch, 2004; Kieser, 1997). Relatedly, theorists have stressed that for organization concepts to be successful and gain widespread attention, they require some ‘interpretative viability’ (Benders & van Veen, 2001) or ‘conceptual ambiguity’ (Clark, 2004; Giroux, 2006; Kieser, 1997). When they do, it allows varied users to deploy concepts for their own specific purposes (Benders & Verlaar, 2003; Frenkel, 2005), perhaps even differently than the developers of the concept intended (Hackman & Wageman, 1995). A concept’s interpretive space also provides consultancies an opportunity to expand their possible clientele and business (Benders et al., 1998; Berglund & Werr, 2000; Whittle, 2008). Finally, conceptual ambiguity means the concept is more adaptable to ‘fit’ the client’s specific situation (Ansari et al., 2010; Benders & Verlaar, 2003; Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996; Frenkel, 2005; Sturdy et al., 2009).

While these studies provide valuable insights into the supply-side dynamics, in terms of the creation and dissemination of ‘new’ concepts, remarkably little research has been devoted to how fashion setters shape the way concepts evolve after the initial phase in the life of a concept, and especially when an initially popular concept falls out of vogue. What we do know is that prior literature generally assumes that concepts are abandoned or maintained as a result of (a lack of) legitimacy pressures. This implies that fashion setters may feel compelled to abandon a concept that has fallen out of fashion because maintaining it will likely be detrimental to their legitimacy as a knowledge provider (Kipping, 1999; McKenna, 2006; Whittle, 2008). Theorists have stressed that fashion setters regularly need new organization concepts to ensure demand for their services (Clark & Greatbatch, 2004; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2001) or debunk existing ideas to promote novel concepts (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999; Gill & Whittle, 1993; Huczynski, 1993). For example, in an historical account McKenna (2006) showed that McKinsey & Co. based its reputation on the ‘multidivisional’ model in the 1960s, then suffered serious problems when multidivisionalization lost favor among large business organizations in the early 1970s. McKinsey re-emerged as a top consulting firm only after abandoning the multidivisional model and popularizing its 7S model and corporate culture concepts in the 1980s.

Similarly, in the absence of legitimacy pressures, fashion setters adopt a ‘sustaining strategy’ (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999, p. 730), because they have a vested interest in continuing to use the concepts that they have built (Morris, 2001; Nicolai & Thomas, 2006; Werr & Stjernberg, 2003). For example, David and Strang (2006) show that when TQM was no longer in vogue, specialist consultancies continued in the market for TQM consulting, even though generalist consultancies had abandoned it.

In parallel, theorists note repeatedly that organization concepts presented as ‘new’ actually may contain substantial re-iterations of existing ideas (Barley & Kunda, 1992; Bendix, 1956; Jacques, 1996; Kieser, 1996; Lammers, 1988; Spell, 2001). For instance, Bendix (1956, p. 342) observes that ‘traditional ideologies have been formulated anew in the terminology which have been currently fashionable,’ and Guillén (1994) reveals that three basic approaches established in the early 20th century underlie the popular concepts introduced by gurus and consultants during the 1990s (e.g. Lean Production and TQM). This ‘old wine in new bottles’ criticism implies more continuity, or at least more gradual changes, in the evolution of management knowledge than the rapid turnover of new concepts would suggest (Abrahamson & Eisenman, 2008; Lammers, 1988; Spell, 2001).

Although insightful at a generic level, prior literature still largely ignores the important complexities that stem from the specific nature of a concept’s interpretive viability. Czarniawska and Sevón (1996) recognize the translation of ideas as an ongoing and dynamic process, yet existing analyses of supply-side dynamics continue to treat organization concepts as stable products, modified merely during their implementation (Ansari et al., 2010; Benders & Verlaar, 2003; Frenkel, 2005; Nicolai & Dautwiz, 2010) without specifying alternative ways in which management consultants might shape concepts to enhance their longevity. As a result, these analyses cannot explain how and why concepts are reshaped over time, or remain unclear about how population-level lifecycle models relate to firm-level dynamics.

We take these issues as points of departure for our research into how organization concepts evolve over time and how they may survive a management fashion boom and bust. For this purpose, we adopt an institutional perspective to study how the contents of a concept might relate only loosely to its label as a response to multiple pressures that confront the management consultants who develop the concept (Oliver, 1991; Westphal & Zajac, 2001).

Studying Pressures and Responses

Following the work of Oliver (1991, 1992), who connected the degree of (de)institutionalization to both the strength of pressures exerted on organizations, and the organizations’ active agency, various institutional theorists have stressed the importance of studying how organizations satisfy multiple, often competing, pressures (Boxenbaum & Jonsson, 2008; Deephouse, 1999; Greenwood et al., 2010; Pache & Santos, 2010). We first discuss the nature of these pressures and then consider how organizations may respond to them.

Pressures

Institutional theorists suggest that organizations are subject to legitimacy pressures that may enhance or inhibit the institutionalization of particular practices (Oliver, 1991, 1992; Zeitz et al., 1999). These pressures originate from cultural frameworks in the environment (Brunsson & Olsen, 1997; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Scott, 2001). By conforming to these socially constructed demands (Suchman, 1995), organizations can earn social acceptance among relevant actors in their environment (Scott, 2001; Tolbert & Zucker, 1996). An inability to become socially accepted will likely impede an organization’s access to critical resources (Kumar & Das, 2007; Scott, 2001), regardless of their value for the internal functioning of the organization (Staw & Epstein, 2000; Tolbert & Zucker, 1996). These cultural frameworks are crucial for understanding legitimacy pressures on organizations, but scholars also argue that considering only institutional forces is insufficient to explain diversity in organizational responses (e.g. Deephouse, 1999; Kraatz & Zajac, 1996; Oliver, 1992). Rather, legitimacy pressures may interact with efficiency and differentiation pressures.

First, institutional theorists suggest that conformance to legitimacy pressures might contradict efficiency needs (Boxenbaum & Jonsson 2008; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Røvik, 1996; Tolbert & Zucker, 1983). Meyer and Rowan (1977, p. 355) call the adoption of institutional rules from the environment ‘pure costs from the point of view of efficiency’. By strictly acceding to legitimacy pressures, the organization limits its internal functioning, because it loses possibilities to optimize its (technical) work activities (Boxenbaum & Jonsson, 2008; Scott, 2001).

Second, institutional pressures may also compete with market-related competitive pressures (Deephouse, 1999), in the sense that organizations feel pressured to differentiate themselves from their competitors to improve their competitive positioning, which likely conflicts with the pressure to gain legitimacy (D’Aunno et al., 2000; Delmas & Toffel, 2008; Greenwood & Hinings, 1996; Kraatz & Zajac, 1996). D’Aunno et al. (2000) emphasize the importance of accounting for legitimacy and differentiation pressures together to fully understand the variety of organizational responses in an institutional field.

Responses

Organizations are subject to various pressures, but are not just passive victims of them. Rather, they have some latitude in how they respond to these pressures (Deephouse, 1999; Oliver, 1991; Pache & Santos, 2010; Røvik, 1996), within the specific boundaries that limit which strategic behaviors can take place (Scott, 2001). This latitude exists because of the possibility of decoupling (Brunsson, 1989; Hirsch & Bermiss, 2009; Meyer & Rowan, 1977), in that organizations can avoid pressures by developing different sets of organizational processes for various environments (Fiss & Zajac, 2006; Oliver, 1991; Westphal & Zajac, 2001). In this way, organizations can buffer their work routines from the often conflicting pressures that stem from intra-organizational dynamics and the organization’s environment (Boxenbaum & Jonsson, 2008; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Oliver, 1992; Tolbert & Zucker, 1983; Westphal & Zajac, 2001) and thus ‘operate independently from these pressures’ (Scott, 2001, p. 173). Decoupling loosens the tensions created as a result of external demands to change and internal preferences to avoid disruptions (Hirsch & Bermiss, 2009; Westphal & Zajac, 2001).

In the context of this research, these perspectives suggest that to understand how concepts evolve, it is necessary to examine how consultants respond to multiple, potentially conflicting pressures. By drawing on these insights from institutional theory, we explore empirically how a concept’s interpretive viability offers consultants a range of responses to the pressures they confront when these concepts appear in the market.

Method

To explore how management consultants deal with competing pressures during the maturity and decline phases of an organization concept, we focus on business process reengineering (BPR), a concept that already has experienced major changes in popularity (Benders & van Veen, 2001; Carson et al., 2000). Hammer and Champy’s (1993) work Reengineering the Corporation, commonly regarded as the main BPR text, is seen as ‘the biggest selling business book of the 1990s’ (Jackson, 1996, p. 575). In addition to its widespread managerial popularity, BPR has been added to the service portfolios of many consultancies (Benders et al., 1998; Fincham, 1995; Fincham & Evans, 1999; O’Shea & Madigan, 1997). At the time of the data collection, BPR had moved well past its prime popularity (Carson et al., 2000; Heusinkveld & Benders, 2001), providing us a theoretically relevant opportunity to study how consultants deal with this situation.

Our data collection was informed by several considerations (Miles & Huberman, 1994). In line with recommendations by Guillén (1994), we focused on BPR in a single country, the Netherlands, to ensure that we covered the majority of the discourse and increased our ability to attain rich insights into the evolution of this organization concept in one lingual context. Moreover, the general lifecycle of discourse about BPR in the Netherlands is consistent with its international evolution (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999; Heusinkveld & Benders, 2001; Kieser, 1997).

To find theoretically relevant informants, we started by following a common method to investigate a concept’s evolution (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999; Benders et al., 2007). Specifically, we collected Dutch print media publications about BPR authored by management consultants to gain an initial overview of who was active in the BPR market in the Netherlands. All the respondents in our research sample were closely involved in the development and supply of BPR within their firm; most had published related works. We thus started by scanning print media publications on BPR as important outlets for consultants (Braam et al., 2007; Faust, 2002) to promote their services and make proprietary claims on the status of being a key supplier of a new organization concept (Fincham, 1995; Morris, 2001). We also searched for new publications and commercial material authored by the same consultants, published after the BPR discourse had faded. This search revealed that these consultants had written about new topics (e.g. balanced scorecard (BSC), straight through processing (STP), mergers and E-business) and published works related to organization concepts in various fields. Ultimately, we gathered 49 books and articles authored by management consultants, totalling 814 pages of text (see Appendix A).

In addition to the Dutch print media data, we conducted interviews with the published management consultants, which provided us with a rich view of the perceptions of and influences on the evolution process. Where possible, we interviewed other consultants from the same firm for verification and in-depth views of the pressures experienced by these firms and their responses related to these pressures. The semi-structured interviews covered three main themes: (1) how their consulting firm created and embedded the concept; (2) the perceived changes to the concept over time and the reasons for those changes; and (3) the perceived current use of BPR by the consultancy. As the interviews progressed, we asked more detailed questions about competing pressures and related tensions. The interviews took place in the consultants’ offices and lasted 90 minutes on average. All interviews were recorded, transcribed and provided to the informants for confirmation or correction.

We ultimately interviewed 32 consultants employed by 14 consultancies actively involved in promoting BPR on the Dutch market and applying it in client organizations (see Appendix B). The consultants varied in their hierarchical levels and backgrounds; the consulting firms varied significantly in their origins, sizes and background. Comparing such a relatively large variety of theoretically relevant settings, these data increase the possibility of theory generation (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).

For our data analysis, we concentrated on consultants’ perceived pressures and responses in relation to the concept’s evolution, such as changes in the way their firm constructed BPR, to determine how they dealt with the conflicting pressures that arose after the creation and launch of BPR. With our print media, we verified the information collected through the interviews to avoid bias due to retrospective modifications. We also engaged in continuous comparisons of our data with relevant theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). To begin, we coded and compared the sections in the interviews associated with perceived changes after the consultancy adopted BPR. Integration of themes emerging from the data resulted in a variety of pressures related to these changes to the initial concept. We categorized the perceived pressures using simple data displays (Miles & Huberman, 1994) to distinguish pressures related to (1) efficiency, (2) differentiation and (3) legitimacy. Next, we developed this into a framework, verified by the coded data, which enabled us to specify the conceptual categories further. Similarly, we systematically compared the data to identify the ways consultants responded to these perceived pressures. Going back and forth between the slices of data and the emergent themes allowed us to discover and refine conceptually distinct response strategies that related to modifications of (1) the concept’s contents, (2) its market positioning and (3) its labelling. Through this in-depth analysis, we identified seven responses that are considered essential for understanding how organization concepts evolve.

Findings: Response Strategies, Pressures and Implications

Three types of pressures emerged as crucial elements for the evolving supply-side dynamics of organization concepts. Consultants experienced various pressures after they introduced the concept to the market: pressures to increase or maintain efficiency and/or legitimacy and/or pressures to differentiate (see Table 1). The data also showed that, at several points in time, the consultants perceived these pressures as conflicting, such as when they needed to increase the efficiency of their service but also maintain its legitimacy – that is, simultaneously change and preserve the concept.

Table 1.

Response strategies, main pressures and implications

Main pressures	Response categories and strategies	Illustrative examples	Main implications for a concept
			Δ Contents	Δ Market	Δ Label
Efficiency: high pressure to improve performance during assignments and within firm Legitimacy: high pressure to exploit concept’s social acceptance Differentiation: low pressure to differentiate	Optimization: Enhance efficiency of a concept by improving its underlying contents
	Streamlining: Using experiences to smoothen the implementation process of a concept	“From that [failed project] I learned that you need to be much clearer to the commissioner about the consequences of his choices right from the beginning.” As a result he now explains his clients upfront what BPR implies This allows him to reduce the number of changes clients want to make during the implementation of the project. [#19]	Yes	No	No
	Standardizing: Codifying the implementation procedures of a concept to increase possibilities for re-use and leveraging	“We learned a lot from the initial assignments and this has been used to standardize the concept in terms of procedures, presentation but also ways to involve other consultants”. In each individual project the continuously improved standard method was customized to fit the specific requirements. “The main advantage of such a standard method is that you have something in the drawers which you can use as an important starting point.” [#32]	Yes	No	No
Differentiation: high pressure to distinct from similar services of competitors and saturation among present clienteleEfficiency: high pressure to exploit existing expertiseLegitimacy: high pressure to exploit social acceptance the concepts has/had in original market	Repositioning: Enhance differentiation by developing a specific concept-related market positioning
	Refocusing: Concentrate on a unique interpretation of the concept and present as a specialist in a market niche	“We noticed that the image of BPR in the market became one of large-scale restructuring to generate short-term results. We thought to let the market keep that definition but it is not in line with our reputation. We tried a couple of times to obtain these kinds of assignments but it never succeeded because we had to compete with these large American firms. As a result we decided to redefine [BPR] into a smaller new tool for consultant that is included in our perspective and approaches that we usually perform.” [#18]	No	Yes	No
	Broadening: Expanding a concept’s application range by framing it as solution to a larger number of problem areas	“At a certain moment we broadened the concept to Business Transformation because it appeared that elements such as cultural change were considered as important and different kind of strategic questions were seen as part of it […]. people from Human Resource Management and Finance were included. In this way the [BPR-]concept developed by providing a place for these aspects.” [#21]	No	Yes	No
	Relocating: Introducing the same concept into an entirely different market	“BPR is starting to gain in popularity within the healthcare sector. (…) The ‘zeitgeist’ seems to be more favorable: newspapers constantly report about problems in this sector. (…) Within our firm the [BPR] concept has become an important product because we have the feeling that the Healthcare sector is increasingly much more open to it.” [#17].	No	Yes	No
				(Continued)
Legitimacy: high pressure to abandon contaminated label and adopt new or neutral labelsEfficiency: high pressure to exploit existing expertiseDifferentiation: low pressure to differentiate	Remarketing : Enhance legitimacy of a concept by presenting it in a different way on the market
	Relabelling: Using new/different terms and language for a concept to maintain an image as innovative service supplier	“We totally abandoned the term BPR because that was considered out of fashion. (…) BPR was seen as yesterday’s thing. The client wanted to hear something new and sexy and at that moment it was E-everything. I continued to use the same slides but under the label of E-business. (…) If you look at E-business related concepts […]that is not new, it is all BPR.” [#26]	No	No	Yes
	Normalizing: Presenting a concept as common part of other services to maintain using underlying contents	“BPR has been an important service to us but it had become a commodity and therefore seen as nothing new. As a result we used BPR as a core consulting product on the basis of which all kinds of fashionable end-products could be grafted. We used to call this ‘BPI inside‘ to provide the client with a feeling of solidity and experience. You could present your service as new, but still based on the experiences with BPR.” [#22]	No	No	Yes

However, consultants did not simply maintain or abandon their services in the face of these pressures. Rather they drew on a broad range of potential strategies (Table 1) to deal with the multiple pressures that they confront. On the basis of our analysis, we found that the response strategies could be grouped into three categories: optimization, repositioning and remarketing. Each category has different implications for the form of a concept, in terms of the adaption of the underlying contents, market positioning and labelling. The following section discusses and illustrates these strategies, how they relate to different pressures and entail different implications for a concept.

Concept optimization

The first category of responses emerging from our data involved concept optimization, that is, a consultancy’s strategies to improve the implementation procedure of an existing concept and increase the chances of success for client projects. This response category was used when consultancies felt pressured to enhance the efficiency of the concept’s contents, yet the firm also did not want to jeopardize the legitimacy of the concept. The data revealed that efficiency pressures originated when consultants experienced inadequate performance in their use of the concept in client assignments. Concept optimization offered the possibility of enhancing efficiency by adapting the extant contents, without harming the legitimacy of the overall practice. The data also revealed two distinct strategies in relation to this response category.

Strategy 1: Streamlining

To respond to pressures to increase the technical performance of the concept and related practice while maintaining legitimacy, firms streamline the contents underlying the concept. For example, informants experienced that if a BPR implementation took too long or ran into complications, it lessened client satisfaction and ultimately undermined the consultancy’s and concept’s reputation. Therefore, several consultants indicated that they learned from previous experiences to smooth out the methods and implementation procedures associated with BPR. By adapting BPR’s underlying contents, they worked to deploy it more efficiently and reduce the resources needed to execute a related project.

The changes to the concept’s contents were not accompanied by modifications to the marketing of the concept. The consultants’ services were still sold under a popular banner, so consultants could improve the functioning of their methods (and increase efficiency) while still drawing on and maintaining legitimacy (to generate new sales). One managing consultant stressed this strategy by describing,

Those adaptations [to the BPR concept] were particularly the result of our experiences at [consultancy M]. We saw that some of our BPR trajectories simply lasted too long.… We used to pay a lot of attention to the analysis of the current situation by exploring the functioning of the organization. In those trajectories we made an advanced design, but that was soon outdated because of the developments in the environment. That’s why we try to keep the analysis phase [of the new BPR trajectories] as brief as possible. (#30)

In the media publications (e.g. 1a, 7a, 8b and 22b; Appendix A), we found various instances of consultants adapting the contents of a concept through streamlining. For example, one consultant initially wrote about BPR’s contents in terms of ‘radically approaching the primary processes and redesign them with IT as a leverage’ (24a, p. 7), and then just two years later, adapted his initial interpretation to promote a cyclical, step-by-step approach and warn, ‘the reengineering thinking of the last couple of years is dangerous because the implementation is too complex and takes too long’ (24d, p. 66). The same concept was being marketed, but consultants reinterpreted it and made inconspicuous changes to its contents. In his interview, the same consultant confirmed that even while using the same label, his interpretation of the concept had changed significantly over time:

My lesson from the experiences with BPR was that often you cannot do it all at once, but have to manage it in cycles of change. With this you could say that I more or less abandoned the initial BPR philosophy. (#24)

Strategy 2: Standardizing

Another response involved standardizing a concept’s underlying contents without changing anything in formal communications to the market. Standardization entails codifying the concept’s contents in more detail and internally disseminating it to further a shared understanding of ‘how to do BPR’ among consultants within a firm. For example, attempts to routinize the various elements of BPR included standard frameworks and implementation methods. Although the concept’s content changes, it is regarded mainly as an internal issue, without consequences for its labelling in the market. Standardization may enhance efficiency by allowing consultants to reuse material from prior assignments, as we observed in several articles (8a, 16c, 22a, 24a, 25a, 25b, and 26a; Appendix A).

Standardization was particularly used when consultants felt pressured to become more efficient in the commercialization and implementation of a concept; they continued to draw on and feed the initial legitimacy of the concept while routinizing the generation of assignments and service delivery. Our informants indicated that standardizing may improve communication, both among consultants and with customers, which also increases the efficiency of concept deployment. Standardized language, methods and models facilitate intra-organizational learning and make it easier to assign inexperienced (i.e. less expensive) consultants to BPR projects. Legitimacy remains though, because the BPR banner still flies. Standardizing could even increase a concept’s legitimacy as a general framework, and a common language used by all consultants may give clients a better impression of BPR’s value. For example, a director of a consultancy described how consultants seek to standardize a concept’s contents to improve the impression they give to possible clients:

The initial concept remained standing, but it has been detailed into methods, techniques and tools. Initially we came to the client with just a number of vague PowerPoint slides…. But when BPR became more commoditized, and also was adopted by other consultancies, we had to be better documented and build up a better experience database. For instance, currently we have elaborate databases of every sector and industry you can imagine, including various improvements that have been applied in these projects. (#23)

Repositioning

A second category of responses that arose from the data is repositioning. This refers to firm’s strategies focused on adapting the position of the concept in the market in comparison with potential competitors. The content and the label remained the same, but consultants tried to sell it to another market or market segment. These strategies arose mainly when consultancies perceived limited possibilities to differentiate their concept-related service offerings from those of competitors, even though they still wanted to use the concept’s legitimacy in the field and maintain efficiency by drawing on their concept-related experience. We discovered three distinct repositioning strategies.

Strategy 1: Refocusing

A first strategy that could be discerned concerns narrowing the concept’s interpretation to focus on specialist market niches. When competitors entered the market with their own version of BPR, it was seen as an important incentive to achieve a clearer position as a specialist for a particular aspect of this concept. As they remained active in the same market and used the same contents and (legitimate) labels, these firms tried to differentiate from (new) competitors by focusing on specific, narrower types of BPR assignments, thereby associating themselves with a particular niche in the BPR market.

We found a number of different instances of refocusing in the data, such as 19a (HRM-focused approach), and 27a (organizational structural approach) (see Appendix A). Some firms targeted clients particularly interested in more formalized approaches to BPR (2a, 4a and 10a); others focused on a strategic business transformation view of BPR to distinguish themselves from more IT-focused competitors offering BPR services (24c). The director of a consultancy thus explained how his firm sought to adapt its market position to address pressures to differentiate while retaining the use of the same label and practices:

Some years after our first BPR projects, IT consultancies started to embrace the concept…. We concluded that those consultancies only were involved in process reengineering and strongly associated this with IT. We positioned ourselves with a much more strategic approach [to BPR]. We were particularly equipped for designing and guiding transformations of two to three years, and we still approach it that way.… This was positioned as something substantially different than those [consultancies who offered] process redesign trajectories. (#22)

Still other informants indicated that they sought to refocus by ‘upgrading’ their BPR approach to a more strategic level and concentrate on more firm-wide, general and long-term applications. In such a case the same concept (BPR) is used but repositioned as a large-scale strategic effort. Such a response strategy allows consultancies to make their ‘products’ more distinct and maintain the efficiency of their previous investments in the concept. At the same time, it also allows for the possibility of retaining the label under which the service is presented to the market, thereby still drawing on the concept’s legitimacy. For instance, one senior consultant explained that they still used the label BPR, but reserved it for more strategy-level assignments, in the expectation that this specific market niche would generate more revenues:

So the consulting division of firm [G] considered the BPR concept as an important means to become more ‘up-market’, create more added value and perform bigger projects. So they just wanted to have the strategic mega projects and compete with consultancies such as Booz.Allen, BCG and McKinsey. (#9)

Strategy 2: Broadening

In contrast, while the previous strategy aims at limiting the concept’s interpretation, a second response strategy that emerges from the data involves broadening the application range of BPR, that is, positioning their BPR services as more inclusive. Once established, consultants may experience the clients’ problematique in which they applied BPR as being too narrow to take full advantage of their expertise. Associating the same underlying contents of this concept to a broader variety of client problems allows consultants to differentiate their expertise but still draw on and feed the label’s legitimacy. By widening the application range, consultants could present themselves as generalists, thereby enhancing the likelihood to generate more assignments and selling their expertise, using the same concept.

We found examples of this response strategy in various instances (16b, 22c, 23a, 24e, 24f, 24g, 29b, and 29c, see Appendix A). For example, a consultant stressed that BPR should go beyond a single focus on cost cutting: ‘The real BPR is a means to improve the internal and external power of an organization. Not only cost reduction’ (22c, p. 356). An author emphasized in his article on ‘second-generation BPR’ that ‘future BPR will increasingly focus on more difficult processes such as sales processes within an organization (29c, p. 16). In other words, the well-known BPR label was associated with adjacent domains. In our interview with this consultant, he explained that he sought to relate BPR to an increasing number of different organizational problems that might be considered relevant by his potential clientele, thereby finding a source of new assignments for his expertise:

We have increasingly used [BPR] for less obvious processes. So now we apply it not only to back-office processes at administrative offices, but also at front offices, multichannel and professional services. (#29)

Broadening is seen as an important means to enhance differentiation while retaining the concept’s underlying contents and label for presenting the service to the market. Extending the range of problems and solutions ultimately related to trajectories that generated more revenues. Thus the board of directors of one consultancy decided to refocus the BPR concept by associating it also with IT-related issues such as SAP implementations. This form of repositioning aimed to enhance the consultancy’s business by being more inclusive, in that:

Using BPR as front stage for SAP implementation worked out quite well in terms of revenues. As a result, at a certain moment most BPR projects led to SAP implementations. (#26)

Strategy 3: Relocating

A final strategy related to repositioning involves locating the same concept in an entirely different market sector. We found that this strategy was especially favored when consultants promoted their concept in a saturated market, making it difficult to differentiate themselves. Moving to an entirely different market with few competitors active with BPR and where BPR was still uncontroversial offered an appropriate strategy in these circumstances. For example, in the print media publications (Appendix A), we found examples of consultancies that tried to relocate the BPR concept to the banking and insurance (31a) or healthcare (17a, 17b, 30a) sectors. One informant recalled that his consultancy found it increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd, so it looked to other markets to sell its BPR expertise and found the healthcare sector very receptive:

BPR is becoming more and more accepted in the healthcare. This becomes apparent gradually but very explicitly in the number of assignments that is starting to develop. Also in the newspapers you can read more and more about the problems in the healthcare sector. At the same time, money seems to be less a problem given that the government sees ICT as a central issue within healthcare to invest in.… Therefore, to do BPR assignments in this sector, we asked some people within [consultancy G] who had a lot of experience in BPR projects to provide a specific education program for our Healthcare Group.… The concept has become an important and promising product because we feel that the healthcare sector is becoming more open to this concept. (#17)

With relocating, the consultancy would use the legitimacy the concept gained in other markets and exploit its expertise with implementing the concept. For example, when entering the healthcare sector, some BPR consultancies explicitly noted that BPR had been used successfully in other sectors. Although it provides new opportunities to maintain a concept’s underlying contents and draws on a label’s legitimacy, relocating existing concepts into a new market is not unproblematic; it requires the consultancy to obtain an in-depth understanding of the next market to be able to contextualize the concept appropriately. Thus the marketing approach should be positioned to fit the specific language and problems of a new group of clients. One informant described his firm’s relocating effort as follows:

While in other branches we were already beyond the hype, for commercial reasons we thought it was clever to maintain calling our approach BPR in the healthcare sector. We started propagating the notion of BPR in the healthcare sector and emphasized that we know a lot about this concept through our prior experiences in other sectors. However, initially [consultancy M] was not able to exploit this market themselves because they did not have the right networks and did not speak its language. Therefore, I was hired to further develop this market. (#30)

Remarketing

A final response category that we found in our data was remarketing, referring to a firm’s strategies that focus on naming an established concept in a different way but changing little of its actual contents or market positioning. Our analysis reveals that remarketing strategies are appropriate when consultants experience strong legitimacy pressures to abandon the concept but want to remain efficient by continuing to use the same underlying contents. For example, our informants indicate that, at a certain point, BPR had become contaminated and considered ‘no longer fashionable’ (#20), ‘less popular’ (#7), ‘yesterday’s thing’ (#23) or even an ‘obsolete product’ (#22) that ‘can no longer be sold’ (#1). Presenting the concept in a different way offered a productive strategy for addressing this tension. Our analysis revealed two remarketing strategies.

Strategy 1: Relabelling

Consultants indicated that when a ‘new’ competing concept acquires prominent status in the managerial discourse, they feel pressured to adopt the new terms, labels and language associated with this new concept to convey the impression that they (and their services) remain state-of-the-art. The interpretive space of the concept allows these consultants to offer similar service components and draw on established knowledge and experiences, under the banner of different, uncontaminated terms. We found this strategy in various cases in the investigated articles: The term BPR had been replaced by labels such as business process management (BPM) (2c, 6a, 8c, 11b), E-business (8d, 23c), straight through processing (STP) (11c, 11d), knowledge management (16d) and outsourcing (23d). Our data suggested that consultancies used these new labels for the same BPR services to address the declining legitimacy of the term while preserving the efficiency of the underlying contents. A striking example came from a managing consultant who emphasized that, to enhance the legitimacy of his service, he increasingly presented it with a new label:

Every client that called only wanted to hear E-something. And of course, as a consultancy you will sell E-everything. We totally abandoned the term BPR because that was out of fashion. I used the same slides, only then under the label of E-Business.… It’s striking when you consider E-Business, you’ll find all business processes again: production, logistics, procurement, marketing and sales. That’s not new. It’s all BPR. (#26)

A variation on this strategy involved not just using newer and more fashionable terms but reframing client questions in neutral terms to fit the firm’s existing services. Our informants indicated that whenever BPR developed a pejorative connotation among clients, they just stopped mentioning the label. The client’s request was reformulated using less controversial terms to describe the consultancy’s established BPR concept. That is, the concept’s name was avoided in communications between the consultant and the client, but the consultant offered the same service and presented it as useful. As one informant noted:

For us as consultants the term BPR does neither have a positive nor a negative connotation. But clients may be hesitant because they associate it with large-scale changes. So as a consultant you just name it differently but do the same. (#23)

Strategy 2: Normalizing

Portraying an established concept as a normal element of new service offerings constituted a second remarketing strategy. An unfavorable connotation of the BPR concept in the external environment made selling services under the BPR label difficult for consultants. When consultants noticed that its legitimacy was decreasing, some of them presented their BPR service explicitly as a useful part of other services. In our print media data (Appendix A), we found several instances in which consultants explicitly presented BPR as common practice in workflow management (2b, 5a and 11a), organizational change trajectories (13a), data warehousing (13b) and balanced scorecard (BSC) approaches (23b).

One telling example came from a consultant who authored an article on BPR during the 1990s and two articles in 2001 on straight through processing (STP), which aimed to propagate the improvement of work processes among actors. The resemblance between his BPR and STP articles was striking. In both articles, workflow appeared as a key element in a successful organizational change project (11a, p. 57; 11c, p. 10). That is, existing competencies related to workflow, which originated in BPR, continued to be presented but now as an essential element of the new concept. Consultants from other firms similarly framed the concept as a conventional part of a broader approach when the BPR label was contaminated:

I no longer use the term [BPR] so often, even though I do the same kind of projects. Every time I do the Redesign workshop for a client, I explicitly tell the client that BPR has been developed in the early 1990s as a philosophy so they know that they are applying the BPR concept. But that does not mean that the entire project is labeled BPR. Rather, the practice is presented as for example improving work processes. (#19)

Discussion and Conclusion

Using an institutional perspective, this study has explored how consultancies respond to competing pressures after an organization concept has been established, and sheds more light on how such a concept may remain viable, even after its popularity declines. By identifying seven response strategies and showing how these are associated with multiple pressures, and comprise different implications for the form of a concept, we develop a more fluid, varied conceptualization of the evolving supply-side dynamics of organization concepts. These response strategies not only clarify how consultants deal with organization concepts but also further understanding of the evolution of such concepts. The findings indicate that the continuous shaping and reshaping of organization concepts is essential to ‘stretch’ their lives and increase the likelihood that management knowledge survives a collapse in the fashion. Thus, our study offers three key implications for the study of the supply-side dynamics and the evolution of organization concepts, as well as a number of fruitful research directions.

Competing pressures

By showing that the evolving supply-side dynamics are continuously influenced by multiple and potentially competing pressures we provide a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the underlying rationales as to why these concepts are reshaped over time. Prior studies focus primarily on the legitimacy of an organization concept as the key element driving its supply-side dynamics (Abrahamson, 1996; Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999; David & Strang, 2006; Kieser, 1997). This study points out that management consultants not only take legitimacy pressures into account in dealing with organization concepts, but also consider efficiency and differentiation pressures as relevant. In other words, the tension among pressures of legitimacy, efficiency and differentiation drives supply-side changes in the content, the positioning or the labelling and thus ultimately shapes the evolution of an organization concept.

Our findings also indicate that pressures experienced by fashion setters to change concepts are not limited to one time period; rather, concepts remain continuously ‘under pressure’ after they emerge on the market. At the same time, the relative strength of these pressures may vary over time. For example, while it is popular, a concept likely seems legitimate but still comes under pressure for being less efficient or offering only limited possibilities for differentiation. Later, the concept’s legitimacy could come under more pressure, but the relative strength of differentiation pressures may be relatively lower. Regardless of the case, the identification of multiple pressures is important, because it provides a more nuanced picture of the drivers of supply-side dynamics that shape the evolution of concepts and points to the reasons management consultants respond as they do.

Multiple strategies

By identifying various response strategies, we emphasize the importance of studying firm agency to better understand the concept’s evolution. Most conceptualizations in prior literature view evolving supply-side dynamics as homogeneous and predetermined (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999; Gill & Whittle, 1993; Giroux, 2006; Huczynski, 1993), but our data indicate three response categories, comprising seven response strategies, which management consultants adopt to deal with multiple pressures. This important finding pushes the study of organization concepts beyond the assumption that fashion setters simply abandon or maintain their concepts (e.g. Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999; David & Strang, 2006; Huczynski, 1993). In addition, our research reveals that managerial consultants have a much broader variety of options at their disposal to ‘stretch’ a concept’s longevity. All these strategies should be recognized as significant for developing a more open-ended, agency-driven comprehension of the evolution of organization concepts (see also Whittle, 2008).

An open-ended, agency-driven understanding of a concept’s evolution does not preclude the general tendency by which optimization strategies are more likely during an upswing phase, repositioning strategies become most conspicuous later in the cycle and remarketing strategies are likely to emerge in the downswing.¹ Our agency-driven understanding contributes to a better explanation of important firm-level variations by suggesting that different strategies coexist and revealing why. Our findings show that each consultancy may experience a specific (likely shifting) mix of pressures that stem from its environment or intra-organizational dynamics, which shape its response at any particular point in time. The agency-driven conceptualization also offers a better understanding of the variations in organization concepts’ lifecycles by relating consultancies’ strategic decisions to the potential to extend a concept’s longevity.

Coupling and decoupling

By showing that concepts continuously undergo changes to their contents, market positioning or labels, our study highlights the significance of (de)coupling as a key mechanism for understanding the evolving supply of organization concepts. While Czarniawska and Sevón (1996) refer to the translation of ideas as an ongoing, dynamic process, prior analyses of supply-side dynamics focus on the evolution of a single label (Abrahamson, 1996; Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999; David & Strang, 2006) and treat organization concepts as stable products, primarily modified during their implementation (Ansari et al., 2010; Benders & Verlaar, 2003; Frenkel, 2005), without specifying alternative ways in which these fashion setters persistently couple and decouple different elements of these concepts to enhance the longevity of their expertise.

Such a fluid, dynamic conceptualization of the evolving supply-side dynamics suggests more gradual changes in the evolution of organizational knowledge than the rapid and ostensibly revolutionary turnover in organization concepts would suggest (Jacques, 1996; Lammers, 1988; Perkmann & Spicer, 2008), but also extends this understanding in several ways. First, our study implies that continuity, or ‘old wine in new bottles’, is not a given but rather relates to firms’ strategies and in particular their responses to efficiency pressures. Similarly, it also allows for better understanding whether and why experience with applying concepts, even outdated ones, does not necessarily disappear into oblivion, but can be retained and reapplied to new concepts because they may not be put ‘under pressure’. Second, and related, our study explains that given the possibility of (de)coupling among a concept’s contents, market positioning and labelling, factors that may enhance or inhibit the concept’s longevity cannot relate to just a single entity (Oliver, 1992; Perkmann & Spicer, 2008; Zeitz et al., 1999). This entails that organization concepts do not necessarily follow a single, predetermined evolution pattern and that management consultants’ strategies constitute an important basis for different evolution trajectories.

Finally, conceptualizing the production of organization concepts as an ongoing and fluid process implies that management consultants likely adopt a ‘sense-and-probe’ approach in their decisions about the services they offer. They continuously try to make sense of the pressures that confront them, and they deal with them by creatively seeking to capitalize on the opportunities they find, developing and justifying combinations of new and familiar avenues and monitoring the reactions of other stakeholders (especially clients) before pursuing a new strategy (cf. Cornelissen & Clarke, 2010).

Limitations and further research directions

In its identification of seven response strategies, this study offers an exploratory first step toward developing a more fine-grained understanding of the evolution of organization concepts. It should be complemented by other studies that address remaining questions in this research area. First, we focus on how and why consultancies respond to competing pressures during various phases of an organization concept; additional studies might provide more clarity regarding the antecedents and consequences of the identified alternative strategies. In addition, intra-organizational forces likely shape firms’ decision-making processes in the way they deal with organization concepts (Greenwood & Hinings, 1996; Stjernberg & Philips, 1993), so research should identify the organizational elements that determine the longevity of management knowledge in consulting practice. This could shed more light on how and to what extent ‘old’ concepts and practices appear in new management knowledge production cycles (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2001). The presence of elements from previous concepts is no guarantee that related expertise can be reused and entrenched (Zeitz et al., 1999) or that consultants might not reinvent the wheel.

Second, despite our concentration on supply-side dynamics, this study raises some important questions about the consumption of organization concepts. Prior research has noted customers’ involvement in the production of ‘new’ organization concepts (Fosstenløkken et al., 2003), so ongoing research should attend to how customer participation activities and organizational implementation dynamics feeds ongoing processes of producing and disseminating management knowledge. Such evidence might reveal how the production and consumption of organization concepts can co-evolve (Nijholt & Benders, 2007), as well as how consultants employ different agenda-setting activities (Dutton et al., 2001) to shape managers’ attention to particular organization concepts and induce investments in projects to implement these concepts. Moving beyond a productionist approach by including clients’ perspectives offers a fertile ground for further research into the production of management knowledge (Collins, 2004).

Third, it is necessary to replicate the proposed framework in different settings. In our theoretical sampling we focused on management consultants who published on BPR. These consultants may differ from other consultants who do not aim to achieve some form of thought leadership (Wright & Kitay, 2004). Also, given the consistency of the lifecycle of Dutch BPR discourse with those in other national settings (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999; Heusinkveld & Benders, 2001), we have no reason to expect that any peculiarities of BPR or the Dutch context influence our results. However, this can only be refuted through studies of management consultancies in other countries and other organization concepts. We believe that knowledge about supply-side dynamics can be enriched further by drawing on multiple methods of research. Longitudinal case studies, surveys and ethnographic approaches (e.g. Sturdy et al., 2009) would extend our research approach and provide further clues into how the response strategies relate to different types of firms and different stages in a concept’s lifecycle.

Footnotes

Appendix

Appendix B.

Consultant informants

Informant			Firm
No	Level	Background	Code	Origin	Size*	Background
1	Senior consultant	Information Science	A	National	Medium	IT
2	Managing consultant	Computer Science
3	Director	Computer Science
4	Senior consultant	Business Administration
5	Junior consultant	Information Science
6	Senior consultant	Business engineering	B	National	Large	General mgt
7	Senior consultant	Mathematics
8	Director	Electrical engineering	C	National	Small	IT
9	Senior consultant	Economics	D	International	Large	IT
10	Managing consultant	Information Science
11	Senior consultant	Computer Science	E	International	Medium	IT
12	Managing consultant	Information Science
13	Managing consultant	Philosophy	F	National	Large	IT
14	Managing consultant	Information Science	G	International	Large	Accounting
15	Junior consultant	Business economics
16	Director	Psychology, MBA
17	Managing consultant	Medicine
18	Managing consultant	Psychology	H	National	Medium	HRM
19	Senior consultant	Water engineering
20	Managing consultant	Mechanical engineering	I	International	Large	Accounting
21	Senior consultant	Mechanical engineering
22	Director	Architecture, MBA
23	Director	Computer science, MBA	J	National	Medium	Strategy
24	Senior consultant	Economics
25	Managing consultant	Accounting	K	International	Large	Accounting
26	Managing consultant	Accounting
27	Senior consultant	Business administration	L	National	Medium	General mgt
28	Junior consultant	Business economics	M	National	Small	General mgt
29	Director	Psychology
30	Junior consultant	Health school
31	Managing consultant	Business administration	N	National	Large	General mgt
32	Senior consultant	Business administration

Small < 50, medium 50–250, large > 250 employees.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the participants at the AoM MCD 2011 conference, the Novak Druce 2012 Conference on Professional Service Firms, and in particular Pojanath Bhatanacharoen, David Brock, Anthony Buono, Timothy Clark, Chris McKenna, Markus Reihlen, David Strang, Andrew Sturdy, Andreas Werr, senior OS editor Yehouda Shenhav and three anonymous OS reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biographies

Stefan Heusinkveld is Associate Professor at the VU University Amsterdam. His research concentrates on the production and consumption of management ideas and, in particular, the role of management consultants and management gurus. He has published on these topics in journals such as Human Relations, Information and Management, Journal of Management Studies, Management Learning, Organization Studies, Quality and Quantity, Scandinavian Journal of Management and Technovation. His book on knowledge-based innovation in consultancies is published by Routledge next year.

Jos Benders holds the chair Organization Concepts at Tilburg University and is a Guest Professor at the Centre for Sociological Research of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. His research interests include (fashionable) organization concepts, new technology in organizations, “lean health care”, self-managed work-teams and late medieval coinage in the Low Countries. He is co-author and author of a wide range of publications, and published in such journals as Human Relations, Information and Management, Journal of Management Studies, Numismatic Chronicle and Organization.

Bas Hillebrand is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Institute for Management Research, Radboud University Nijmegen. His research interests include product management, innovation, stakeholder management, interorganizational relationships, and institutional theory. He has published in journals such as Organization Studies, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Product Innovation Management and Journal of Business Research.

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