A Religion-inspired Perspective for the Study of Management Ideas

• In Event: 1580 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Theoretical Developments and Applications

Abstract

The evolution, diffusion, and rhetoric of management ideas has received much attention by organizational scholars for more than three decades. A number of theoretical perspectives offer prisms through which to study and theorize about management ideas. Different lenses such as fashion, meme, translation and virus have been utilized by researchers to describe and analyze management ideas, their evolution, diffusion, and rhetoric. This paper introduces religion as an alternative lens in the field of management idea research. While religious aspects of management ideas have been frequently alluded to in past contributions, this perspective has not been developed in a systematic way. In this paper, we suggest that a religion-inspired perspective provides a promising explanation of the social mobilization of management ideas in idea movements, as well as the emotional side of idea adoption, related to faith and hope. We suggest that faith and hope are important, but often glossed over, aspects of the managerial enterprise in general, and in the rise and fall of management idea movements, in particular. The religion-inspired perspective is illustrated by a discussion of research on the evolution of two contemporary management idea movements: the quality movement, and the reengineering movement. We discuss six areas where a religion lens is promising: 1) Emergence and evolution, 2) Religious aspects of ideas, and the roles of 3) Evangelists and proselytizers, 4) Conversion, 5) Believers, as well as the lack of 6) Tolerance of criticism, found in religious movements and management idea movements alike.

Authors

• Dag Øivind Madsen, University College of Southeast Norway

• Pål Klethagen, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences

• Christian Wittrock, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences