A cross-national comparison of the adoption of business process reengineering: fashion-setting networks?

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) was developed as a new idea which, it was suggested, could revolutionise the corporation and give it a major competitive advantage by simplifying key business processes and utilising information technology to secure cross-functional communication and focus on customer requirements. Rather than continue the debate about whether BPR is 'good' or 'bad', 'old' or 'new' (e.g. Earl, M.J., 1994. The new and the old of business process redesign. Journal of Strategic information Systems 3 (1), 5-22; Mumford, E., 1994. New treatments or old remedies: is business process reengineering really socio-technical design. Journal of Strategic Information Systems 3 (4), 313-326), the focus here is on understanding how the concept 'BPR', however defined, has been diffused across European firms. The results from a survey of firms in four countries support previous research on the diffusion process with the rate of adoption of BPR related to micro-organisational level variables-characteristics of the firm and the boundary spanning activities of individual members. In addition there were differences across industry sectors and across countries in the extent of adoption of BPR. It is argued that attention to these meso-industry level and macro-national level factors, as well as the micro-organisational level dynamics, will improve our understanding of the relationship between networking and innovation processes. in particular, the paper focuses on how networking activity can be restrictive and lead to the creation of fashions which limit the extent of organisational learning during BPR adoption. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.