The Ecology of Management Concepts

Jerker Denrell () and Balázs Kovács ()
Additional contact information
Jerker Denrell: Department of Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom
Balázs Kovács: School of Management, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520

Strategy Science, 2020, vol. 5, issue 4, 293-310

Abstract: How does the popularity of a concept depend on how it contrasts with and complements existing concepts? We argue that being similar to existing concepts, being located in a popular domain, and being combined with similar existing concepts are important for gaining attention early on but less important and even negative for sustaining popularity. To examine this question, we focus on the rise and fall of management concepts. We analyze data on the rise and fall of keywords in the Harvard Business Review between 1922 and 2010. Multiple tests confirm our hypotheses. The implication is that lessons learned from studies of popular concepts can be misleading as guides for how to make novel concepts popular.

Keywords: diffusion; ecology; management concepts; Harvard Business Review; similarity; differentiation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2020.0108 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orstsc:v:5:y:2020:i:4:p:293-310

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Strategy Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().