Information Technology Fashions: Lifecycle Phase Analysis

Over the last decade, studies of management fashions have shown that the rise and fall of the fashions can be seen as a reflection of a knowledge enterprise, where knowledge of new management techniques is selectively proposed, promoted, and propagated by different stakeholders. This research on management fashions has yielded a number of insightful research questions and a set of methods for investigating them. Like management fashions, there are many IT 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. This study contributes to this goal by building on an earlier work that tested three hypotheses that illuminate the similarities and differences between IT fashions and management fashions: 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. The earlier work provided confirmation of these hypotheses. In this paper, we go further by first providing operational definitions of the latency and growth phases that make up the ascent phase in the fashion lifecycle and using a bibliometric study to test whether the hypotheses still hold for each of the individual phases. The result does show phase-specific differences: in particular, the hypotheses hold for the growth phase but not the latency phase. We explore explanations and implications for this finding. We also underscore the usefulness of the theoretical framework by identifying areas for future research.