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The purpose of this paper is to give an account by a rehabilitation psychiatrist of many years of involvement in shared housing for former long-stay hospital residents and other long-term mental health service users.

The paper offers a personal view based on developments in one locality of East London, blending case study narrative with cited earlier published papers that confirm and/or give greater detail on specific aspects of the experience gained.

Long-term mental health service users, given the opportunity via shared housing to develop more lasting and natural relationships, proved to have social and interactive capacity that was obscured by both the conditions of hospital wards and by isolating accommodation “in the community”. The experience provides lessons for a better understanding of patients’ problems.

Shared housing is often seen as simply a poor substitute for independent living; but the experience recounted here suggests that shared living may have particular value for some client groups.

The housing developments and the associated research remain unusual and of potential value for planners of long-term services.

Bandwagon refers to the adoption of popular ideas, thoughts, or practices. Although the inter-organizational (macro) dynamics of the phenomenon have been widely studied, its intra-organizational (micro) aspects have received limited attention. The paper presents a theoretical framework and a model that address intra-organizational aspects of bandwagon drawing on distributed cognition, social relationships, and other elements of the organizational structure such as culture and defensive routines. The analysis of simulated data from the model suggests that the phenomenon is likely to decrease with highly informal culture, promotion of advice taking and giving, low levels of distrust, strong social ties, and minimal defensive routines.

The paper explores a management fashion within the Swedish Public Sector called intrapreneurships. Intrapreneurships became popular during a period of public debate on what forms of organizing are most suitable for the production of welfare. However, while the popularity of the model was short-lived, a few municipalities nevertheless constitute examples of where it was supported for a longer period. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the model became continuously legitimate having lost its appeal elsewhere.

The paper comprises a longitudinal analysis of two municipalities. Field-material was collected through qualitative methods including interviews (35 interviews, 42 interviewees) and document analysis.

The results draw attention to how management fashions become enduring. The metaphor of translation highlights how different professional actors in a local setting apply editing rules, and how they constitute work acquired for continuous translation of the model in order to make it legitimate, disseminated and supported. The study draws particular attention to the large number of actors involved in the editing process.

Besides an extended understanding of management concepts, to explain the anomaly of a long-standing management fashion, the paper illustrates the importance of acknowledging editing as processes and not process. A key notion in why intrapreneurships became legitimate is that professional actors edited the model differently in order to satisfy their desires and needs. This contradicts the more common case study design in translation studies, which seeks a unitary translation process, in a single local setting.

In this paper, we examine the roles of innovation experts in organizations as part of a new and evolving field of knowledge. In our examination, we integrate two fields of study: the rise of new experts in organizations and the development of role identity. Our main goal is to map the epistemological processes these new experts go through coupled with their perceived identity, roles, and duties. Based on interviews with 33 innovation experts in profit and nonprofit organizations, we analyze the role expectations, the complexities associated with this role, and the unfolding identity processes. The analysis is based on three analytical lenses for understanding the identity processes of innovation experts in organizations: “becoming,” “doing,” and “relating.” Our findings are that identity work is needed to facilitate adaptation and reduce ambiguity in the work of innovation experts.

Project ventures are an increasingly prevalent organizational form in many industries. The management literature has stressed their flexibility and adaptability advantages. This chapter focuses on the learning implications of the source of flexibility most essential to project ventures: the ability to switch partners during project formation and execution. This partnering flexibility creates opportunities to respond to new knowledge about characteristics of project tasks and project partners. Partnering flexibility, however, also creates learning challenges. The short-term nature of relationships between project partners and the disintegration of the project team after project completion challenges the accumulation and transfer of knowledge to future projects. Beyond the introduction of related learning opportunities and challenges, we identify potential contingency factors in the project context that shape when partner flexibility will have beneficial versus harmful effects. On the organizational level, we propose that project-governing permanent organizations can support project-venture learning. On the industry level, we highlight potential learning benefits of standardized partner roles and coordination practices. Thus, our chapter introduces a multilevel contingency framework for the evaluation of both learning opportunities and challenges of partnering flexibility in project-venture settings. We formulate testable propositions focused on partner-project fit and project performance.

Although drawing from neoinstitutional theoretical apparatus and ontology, management fashion theory is understood as a theory that explains the transitory nature of popular ideas and practices while institutional theory explains their stabilization, persistence and further institutionalization. In a nutshell, it seems that being opposed to each other, these two theories describe and predict different, incommensurable diffusion trajectories and organizational behaviour patterns. The purpose of this paper is to unify these two competing perspectives.

This paper makes an attempt toward further unification of management fashion theory with new institutionalism by offering an alternative understanding and conceptualization of institutional change and deinstitutionalization and by distinguishing emerging concepts from already popular fashions.

Most emerging concepts never achieve popularity and disappear while few of them achieve massive media attention and diffuse widely becoming new management fashions. Once these concepts have achieved a wide popularity institutional forces would favor them and lead to further institutionalization. Institutional change is understood not as a deinstitutionalization of existing management fashion in terms of erosion, discontinuity or disappearance but as a decline in its media coverage while media attention focuses on new fashionable concept. The former management fashion gets institutionalized, institutional change occurs in terms of shifting attention toward new fashion and diffusion and institutionalization cycle restarts. Institutional prediction of isomorphism and institutionalization as irreversible tendencies thus can be unified with MF prediction about the bell-shaped curves in fashions’ popularity. Therefore, postulates and predictions of management fashion theory can be derived from new institutionalism and vice versa.

The paper aims to cover, generalize and explain different trajectories of various management and organizational concepts, deducing theoretical propositions from both institutional theory and management fashion theory. Theoretical and methodological ideas offered in this paper can be helpful in future research on management fashions and diffusion. Studies on the evolution of management concept can benefit from proposed categorization and causal relationships between different stages of the life cycle.

Unifying seemingly conflicting and disparate perspectives and views allows making organization theory more coherent in terms of both explanatory power and ontological commensurability. Following other mature sciences, we share the same notion of progress, namely, the aim of achieving unification and demonstrating that different organizational theories still describe the same reality.

Drawing on managerial innovation model proposed by Abrahamson (1991), this chapter tries to gain a better understanding of how the UN SDGs have impacted the practice of sustainability reporting of Spanish public universities. Data were collected from a variety of sources, such as: several email structured interviews with university managers, an examination of the Chancellor letters of sustainability reports of Spanish public universities, a detailed reading of some sustainability reports and a consultation of the website of each Spanish public university. The findings reveal that there has been an increasing number of Spanish public universities that have started to publish stand-alone sustainability reporting since the appearance of the UN SDGs. According to Abrahamson's framework, our findings reveal that governmental-policy forces have shaped the sustainability reporting landscape in the Spanish public university setting, and their behaviour is mostly explained by the forced-selection and fad/fashion perspectives.