The Role of Intermediary Groups in Shaping Management Fashion: The Case of Knowledge Management

This article seeks to analyze the role of intermediary groups, specifically professional groups and consultants, in the development of management fashion. Consideration of that role highlights the need to develop the institutional perspective on fashion to encompass not only diffusion, but also episodes of theorization and institutionalization. Based on available evidence on the importance of intermediary groups in these episodes, a number of propositions are advanced as to their roles and activities, and the implications that these have for the development of fashion. These propositions are illustrated and explored by drawing on experience with the knowledge management (KM) fashion. Here, evidence on the activities of professionals and consultants highlights the interplay between the colonizing efforts of professionals and the commodifying activities of consultants. Both constituencies are seen as benefiting from the ambiguity of KM, in that it allows particular groups to pursue competitive differentiation through the development of their own interpretations. The analysis of KM's development suggests that the factors that promote the diffusion of a new fashion may in turn limit its translation into practice. The role of intermediary groups is important here. The collusive interaction between and among consultants and professional groups to promote their own versions of KM may have accelerated its diffusion, but it also had the effect of reducing the legitimacy of KM-inspired changes to a narrowly technological domain--thereby rendering them ineffective, on the one hand, but intensifying the fashion cycle, on the other.