Cheap Talk: Managerial Discourse on Quality Circles as an Organizational Innovation

The contemporary business world appears riven by`fashionable innovation.' Much organizational change takes the form, not of internally-driven problem solving, but of the importation of recipes. For example, organizations can adopt standardized models of how to manage (management by objectives, 7 habits of highly effective people), how to organize work (job enrichment, business process reengineering), and how to direct the organization as a whole (total quality management, the balanced scorecard). When they do so, they adopt practices whose virtues and vices, successes and failures, and logic and illogic have been widely discussed within the American business community by managers, gurus, consultants, and academics. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to understanding the social and cultural work that goes into making a practice an innovation, and an innovation fashionable. We have close investigation of what makes an organization genericallyìnnovative': capable of learning, changing, and solving all kinds of problems (Burns and Stalker 1961; Van de Ven, Angle and Poole 1989; Brown and Eisenhardt 1997). But we don't know as much about the converse-what turns a practice into a solution for all kinds of organizations. The most developed line of related inquiry may be that of`diffusion analysis.' Here, spread is modeled as a `point-to-point' or contagion process, where adoption rates are functions of prior adoptions by socially proximate others (Strang and Tuma 1993). The focus is on elaborating what sort of linkages channel the spread of novel behavior. For example, Davis (1991) demonstrates that poison pill strategies for avoiding hostile takeovers diffused via director interlocks, while Haunschild (1993) shows that firms follow the merger and acquisition strategy of firms whose members sit on their boards. And Haveman (1993) finds that following deregulation, thrifts chose which new markets to enter by following their large, financially successful fellows. These analyses tell us much about who adopts when, and what sorts of inter-organizational networks channel information and influence within the business community. But they tell us little about how and why some practices become fashionable innovations that managers are obliged to take seriously. And behaviorally, point-to-point diffusion analyses act as though the only sort of meaningful information that organizations receive is information about who has previously adopted. This presumption ignores the large volume of communication that is broadcast rather than relational. (For work in the diffusion tradition that examines media reporting, see Burns and Wholey (1993), who show that business periodical coverage of matrix management …