Contrasting Perspectives on the Diffusion of Management Knowledge

Abstract

This article presents an in-depth case study of the adoption patterns of performance management within a Norwegian multinational enterprise. The case allows the contrasting of a set of theoretical perspectives that provide different accounts of management knowledge diffusion. We review four perspectives named Conformity, Transfer, Translation and Local Modification, and find that each perspective can account for only parts of the observed adoption patterns in the multinational. The perspectives complement each other and together they provide more comprehensive ‘lenses’ for studying the diffusion of management knowledge. For future research, we suggest three strategies: to develop multi-perspectives typologies of diffusion outcomes, to develop multi-perspective process models, and to develop a meta-theory with propositions specifying conditions when different outcome types will be prevalent.

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