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The dissemination of management ideas has been depicted as central to the processes of globalization and the international institutionalization of Western management ideas (Guillen, 2001; Strange, 1997; Sturdy, 2004). The role of management consultancies has been shown to be central to this dissemination process (Bessant and Rush, 1995; Morris, 2000; Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 2003). Theoretically, the diffusion of management, or other, ideas, raises the important question of what happens to management knowledge when it is diffused? Whilst answers to this question are hardly rare, they themselves, tend to be based upon waves of fashion, or at least the researcher’s favourite theoretical perspective, rather than on a context-dependent typology of what happens in different circumstances. Below, we briefly outline the three main approaches to explaining what happens to management knowledge during the diffusion process and the types of consultancy depicted in these studies.

2.1 Knowledge transfer

In many, especially earlier, accounts of knowledge transfer, knowledge is portrayed as remaining relatively coherent and intact during the transfer process. Such a view is often borrowed from studies of technical innovations where stability and change are easier to track (Abrahamson, 1996). This view often depicts management fashions as being generated through a series of ‘waves’ where ideas remain relatively stable but grow and decline in popularity throughout a fashion’s lifecycle. The underlying assumption of stability in the content of the knowledge being transferred is manifested in the bibliometric methodologies by which such innovations are tracked (Harris and Purdy, 2000; Heady et al., 1997; Kieser, 1997). Here, the ‘counting’ of instances of innovations is based primarily upon the presence of a keyword in an article, book or academic paper, rather than appreciation of the variance of the innovation in the empirical setting.

The key question from this perspective is less what happens to the knowledge as it is transferred, because it is assumed to remain relatively stable, and more how is the transfer characterised . Thus, the seminal paper by Carson et al. (2000) states it studies the ‘sixteen management fashions that emerged over the past five decades’ with little appreciation of how these fashions were changed over the period. However, such a perspective is not necessarily ‘wrong’, despite frequent attacks by other theoretical positions. One might postulate that some types of knowledge that, in a stable environment might vary little as they are passed between consultants, clients, authors, readers, teachers or students. One example might be Porter’s Five Forces which is still taught in many business schools in roughly the same way as it was over thirty years ago.

Where consultants are represented in this perspective, they are most commonly ‘recognized as carriers of advanced knowledge“ (Alvesson, 1993, p. 1004) - that is, they pick up the knowledge in one area (books, clients, MBAs, internal tools) and drop it in another area (usually the client). This might be seen as typical of those consulting firms that practice ‘engineering’ or ‘codified’ business models (Hansen et al.,

86 1999) which rely upon a standardised model or methodology that is a suitable basis for a high leverage company (i.e. one where junior workers can deliver a service due to a highly prescribed repertoire).

2.2 Knowledge translation

Translation has been used to understand how things ‘spread in time and space’ (Latour, 1986, p. 267), and more recently, has been used to understand the spread of management ideas and practices (Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996; Callon, 1986). Rather than taking innovations as ‘things’ that are spread to different organisations:

‘in this perspective, management ideas are translated into objects (models, books, transparencies), are sent to other places than those where they emerged, translated into new kind of objects, and then sometimes into actions….The concept of translation works exactly because it is polysemous: usually associated with language, it also means transformation and transference. It attracts attention to the fact that a thing moved from one place to another cannot emerge unchanged: to set something in a new place or another point in time is to construct it anew’ (Czarniawska, 2009, p. 425).

The process of translation is contextualised and enabled by the networks of power that frame and legitimise it. Thus, rather than focusing on the power of the actor that transmits the idea to an ‘other’, translation theory suggests that the idea is translated through the receiver’s power, thus ‘more agency is placed with what was previously termed “the controlled”, while still placing that agency under structural constraints’ (Kalonaityte and Stafsudd, 2005, p. 5). Thus, networks of agents seek alliances to legitimise their construction so that it, in effect, becomes a ‘black box’, achieving a legitimised solidity which remains unquestioned for some time (Latour and Woolgar, 1979).

Such an approach is sensitive to both the dynamics by which networks of power shift though time and space and the potency of the ‘recipient’ of management knowledge. As such, it is potentially useful in showing how ideas are negotiated through the agency of those who would traditionally be depicted as the receivers of knowledge. In the consulting world, the concept helps counter the representation of clients as passive recipients of service innovations and instead enables an understanding of how ideas are translated as power relationships shift over time (Doorewaard and Bijsterveld, 2001; Saka, 2004, Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001).

The depiction of consultants in studies of translation tends towards imagery of partnership, focusing on the joint production of knowledge or the ways in which the power of the client is exercised through agency to exert control over both the consultancy and their forms of knowledge (Werr and Linnarsson, 2002; Werr and Stjernberg, 2003). A common metaphor concerning consultants who translate is that of the bricoleur. This emphasises both the inherent ambiguity of knowledge in this perspective and the work done to transform knowledge by consultants and clients (Benders et al., 1998; Benders and van Veen, 2001; Morris, 2001; Visscher, 2001).

2.3 Knowledge evolution

The third perspective emphasises the way in which knowledge evolves through a dynamic of replication, selection and variation (Nelson and Winter, 1992; Carayannis, 2008; Baum and Singh, 1994). This incorporates knowledge transfer (replication) but also incorporates selection, by which the client has some ability to select more effective or attractive forms of knowledge, and variation, whereby replicated instances of any idea will contain variations in form and content from the original idea, whether by chance mutation or by intentional agency (Clarke, 2009). Thus, from this perspective, knowledge, like many technological inventions, is subject to a social dynamic by which the ‘fittest’ ideas (i.e. those best suited to their environment) survive, whilst others die. Such a view is inherently processual in that it relies upon knowledge transfer taking place repeatedly and temporally (Williams, 2004).

Consultants represented in studies of knowledge evolution are seen as both replicators (as above) but also as providing elements of variation (for example, by changing models for new clients). Central to their the evolutionary dynamic are the networks by which their knowledge is transmitted (Baum and Singh, 1994, p. 43) and also the frequency with which knowledge is transmitted (ibid. p.149). The result is not knowledge that is inherently ‘better’ (i.e. more efficient or profitable) but one that is more keenly suited to the changing

environment. O’Mahoney (2007), for example, shows how forms of BPR evolved through the activities of consultants and clients replicating, selecting and varying a model for their own purposes.

2.4 Context dependency or perspective?

The three theories of knowledge outlined above tend to be used rather single-mindedly by the associated authors. Translation theorists, for example, rarely suggest that an evolutionary answer might be more applicable than translation to a new case, and vice versa. However, from the discussion above it does seem that in some situations an evolutionary perspective might be more applicable because there are opportunities for replication, selection and variation, and in others a translation perspective might be more suited.

For this reason, we examine in more detail, below, the role of consultants in developing countries. This is chosen precisely because it provides greater extremes of environmental conditions than are usually studied in Western corporations. In developing countries, as we shall see, interventions range from the wholesale transformation of a country after a war to a training intervention in a charity project. Such diversity will help us examine more closely the different examples of what happens to management knowledge when it is diffused and to understand if differing theories can help us understand how this happens.