Chapter 1: Management Fashionas Collective Action: The Production of Management Best-Sellers¹

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the notion that management ideas are subject to recurrent swings in fashion in the same way that aesthetic aspects of life, such as clothing styles and musical tastes, are characterized by surges of popularity then decline. This chapter is concerned with a specific feature of management fashion—the production of best-selling management books. This focus is not to imply that this area has been totally neglected. A trickle of publications has analyzed these texts using a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches (Furusten, 1999; Grint, 1994; Jackson, 2001) and these studies, in turn, have been integrated into the broader literature on management fashion. Yet, the relative neglect of this area as a focus for previous research stems from the view held by many scholars that these books convey naive, superficial and overly commercialized ideas that are inferior to those generated by academic scholarship. Their potential contribution to understanding organizational life and theory is therefore seen as extremely limited and, as a consequence, not worthy of serious attention.