The Life Cycle of Academic Management Fads

Institutions of higher education are always under pressure to become more efficient and effective. In response, many have attempted (either voluntarily or under mandate) to adopt new management systems and processes that were originally designed to meet the needs of (presumably) more efficient business or governmental organizations. One contemporary observer, referring to "the hum of corporate buzzwords" in the academy, has commented that "a person would be hard pressed these days to find a college that doesn't claim to be evaluating or reshaping itself through one of these approaches" (Nicklin, 1995, p. A33). This "hum" is not new; it has been a feature of the higher education landscape for at least the past forty years. Among the first of these processes was the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS), initially developed by Rand for use by the Defense Department and adopted by many higher education institutions in the early 1960s. Among the most recent are Business Process Reengineering (BPR), and Benchmarking. In between, business management scholars have documented over two dozen management innovations that were proposed between 1950 and 1990 (Pascale, 1990), some of which were adopted by institutions of higher education. The development and advocacy of new management approaches in both nonacademic and academic management continues, and at an increasing pace. In the business sector these new ideas are often "presented as universally applicable quick-fix solutions--along with the obligatory and explicit caution that their recommendations are not quick fixes and will require substantial management understanding and commitment. As many managers will attest, the result has been a dazzling array of what are often perceived as management fads--fads that frequently become discredited soon after they have been widely propagated" (Eccles & Nohria, 1992, p. 7). Many of these management innovations, when adopted by higher education, also exhibit the characteristics that led Allen and Chaffee (1981) to define them as fads; they are usually borrowed from other settings, applied without full consideration of their limitations, presented either as complex or deceptively simple, rely on jargon, and emphasize rational decision making. Following Allen and Chaffee, I use the term "fads" to refer collectively and non-pejoratively to certain higher education management innovations enjoying brief popularity, a use consistent with the definition in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (p. 444) of a fad as "a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal. " Not all management innovations are fads. Some (for example, fund accounting) may diffuse and be adopted rapidly through institutional networks to become an accepted part of the system. On the other hand, fads, by definition, are ultimately not widely adopted throughout an organizational system. This study is grounded in two basic propositions: first, that it is possible to use the literature to trace the evolution of a management fad from the time of its creation to its eventual abandonment and second, that management fads may diffuse between nonacademic and academic systems. These are not novel notions. Informal observations of one or both of them have been noted previously by higher education scholars. For example, commenting on the movement of management innovations between the nonacademic and academic sectors, Baldridge and Okimi (1982) said "Every six months, it seems, a new fad sweeps through management circles. First it strikes the business community, then government, and finally education. Think back a few years and the mind stumbles on the carcasses of fads once touted as the newest 'scientific' way to manage an organization. " These fads may "arrive at higher education's doorstep five years after their trial in business, often just as corporations are discarding them" (Marchese, 1991, p. 7) . Once the fad has been introduced into higher education, a standard sequence is suggested: "First, the system will be widely acclaimed in the higher education literature; institutions will eagerly ask how best to implement it. …