Professional media and management fashion: The case of knowledge management

This paper aims to analyse the role and responses of professional groups and their media outlets in relation to fashionable management discourses. Although much emphasis has been given to the role played by 'knowledge entrepreneurs' in sponsoring and exploiting management fashion, this risks neglecting the degree of adaptation and re-invention involved in translating these ideas into practice. Professional groups, in particular, can be seen as mediators of the spread and assimilation of fashionable discourses. In an empirical study we sought to analyse the importance and implications of this mediating role by focussing on the academic and professional media associated with Human Resource (HR) and Information Systems (IS) practitioners and their responses to one of the most influential management fashions of the recent period--Knowledge Management (KM). The initial stage of the study involved a qualitative and quantitative review of the IS and HR literature to identify the critical elements of their response to the KM discourse. This highlighted the role of legitimation, differentiation and inter-professional competition as features of professional media's 'theorization' of new management fashions. A further element of the study focussed on a particular HR magazine sponsored by the HR profession. Analysis of these articles suggests that this magazine has evolved a distinctive perspective on KM, one which highlights the employee and behavioural issues associated with its application compared to the more IT-driven rhetorics found in the mainstream literature. The rhetorical claims of the new discourse were thereby interwoven with the overarching knowledge claims of the HR profession.