ABSTRACT
The preceding review of the management guru and management fashion literature led to the conclusion that one potentially profitable line of inquiry for researchers might be to subject individual management fashions to the scrutiny of a sophisticated method of rhetorical criticism. In this chapter I describe a method of rhetorical criticism which I think might be particularly suitable for studying this phenomenon. Fantasy Theme Analysis (FTA) is a peculiarly dramatistic method of rhetorical criticism developed in the 1970s by Ernest Bormann and his colleagues at the “Minnesota School” of communications to understand better how and why certain types of messages excite widespread public attention on sporadic and cyclical bases. The method they developed to do this is founded on a general theory of communication known as Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT), which attempts to provide an explanatory framework for the analysis of group
and mass communication processes. While FTA has become well established within the realm of rhetorical criticism, it has been used only fleetingly within organizational research. It is, however, a method that deserves greater attention as a means to reach a better understanding of not just the management guru and fashion phenomenon, but potentially a number of other management and organizational phenomena.
