ABSTRACT
Where do management ideas come from? Although ideas such as the BCG-Matrix, 7-S Model, Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering, the Balanced Scorecard, Corporate Social Responsibility, Customer Relationship Management, and Lean Management have become widely known among management scholars and management practitioners alike, critical questions about their origin and fabrication are still relatively rare. A management idea, sometimes also referred to as a management concept (Kieser, 1997; Nicolai and Dautwiz, 2010), organization concept (Benders and van Veen, 2001), or management technique (Abrahamson, 1996; David and Strang, 2006; Strang, 2010), 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 and Verlaar, 2003). Given their inclusion in many standard textbooks on management and organization, some of these ideas have become a taken-for-granted element in the canon of management, or at least seen as an inseparable part of the accepted management vocabulary and related processes of socialization (ten Bos, 2000; Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall, 2002). For students of management, and organizations that employ managers, business school curricula have become ‘unthinkable’ without some explicit attention to these ideas, or their successors.
