Where do management fashions come from, and how long do they stay?

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.