Defense of Thesis in International Business, Riku Reunamäki, M.Sc (Econ. & Bus. Admin)

The employee perspective on translating management fashions

Managers are tasked with navigating a complex and constantly changing business environment, so they are often on the lookout for new ideas that they could adopt. Many of these ideas can be labeled management fashions – relatively transitory collective beliefs that a certain popular management idea is at the forefront of management progress. Created and disseminated by fashion setters such as management consultants, management fashions are a prominent feature of contemporary organizing and our daily working lives.

Management fashions change and are changed as they travel globally and are adopted locally. Their creation and spread are well studied, but the key role of employees in implementing them has not been properly acknowledged. As a result, the adaptation and implementation processes of management fashions inside companies are still not well understood. Instead, fashions are often treated merely as having been either adopted or rejected, and their users are thought of as rather passive recipients of ideas invented elsewhere.

In contrast, this dissertation presents a case study of an organizational implementation of the “agile” management fashion from the employee perspective. The purpose was to find out how employees shape the fashion they confronted in the case company OP Financial Group during its transformation into a more agile and self-managed organization. The primary research data consists of 73 interviews and 140 days of observations over a 17-months period. In addition, the data includes hundreds of press releases, news articles, and internal documents about the change.

The data was analyzed using the translation approach, which highlights the context-dependency of the interpretation of ideas when they are implemented – ideas acquire new meanings through the acts of translating. The dissertation proposes a dynamic model of the evolution of management fashions and demonstrates how their intra-organizational translation is more complex than simple adoption-rejection dichotomies. Understanding the role of employees helps in developing a more nuanced view of management fashions, i.e., how and to what degree they are adapted, consumed, and rejected inside companies. The study also shows how managers strive to make management fashions legitimate in the eyes of employees, and critically analyzes the role of the popular media by reflecting on its participation in the legitimation of management fashions. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that employees are an essential, yet somewhat neglected, group of actors in determining the fates of management fashions such as agile.