Building on the Theory of Management Fashions Information Technology Fashions: Building on the Theory of Management Fashions

Recent studies of management fashions have used discourse data that contributed to our understanding of the forces underlying the rise and fall in popularity of new management techniques. Like management fashions, there are many IT (information technology) fashions. Testing the extent to which the theory of management fashions apply to IT fashions help us better understand not only IT fashions but also what is generic to the fashion phenomenon and what is unique to particular fashions like IT or management fashions. This study makes a step toward that goal by postulating and testing three hypotheses concerning the similarity and difference between IT and management fashion lifecycles: that IT fashions depend more heavily – relative to management fashions – on exogenous factors. As a result, the duration of its ascent period is (1) shortening over time, (2) shortening at a rate faster than that for management fashions, (3) but yet longer in absolute magnitude than that for management fashions. A bibliometric study yields partial confirmation, illustrating the usefulness of the theoretical framework provided by the theory of management fashion in the study of IT fashions while revealing unique characteristics of IT fashions that deserve further investigations.