What's in a fashion? interpretative viability and management fashions

Building and reacting on the most influential article on the topic, namely, 'Management Fashion' by Abrahamson (Academy of Management Review 21(1), 19 96), we propose that management fashions are best conceptualized as 'the pr oduction and consumption of temporarily intensive management discourse, and the organizational changes induced by and associated with this discourse'. This conceptualization allows us to take account of 'interpretative viabil ity', a certain degree of ambiguity about a fashion's content, and ifs cons equences for the dynamics involved in the ongoing shaping and reshaping of a concept's connotations. Our arguments are illustrated by drawing on a var iety of empirical work on Business Process Reengineering in the Netherlands .