Managers’ awareness of fashionable management concepts: an empirical study

Literature on fashionable management concepts has a strong focus on the supply side. Attention to the demand side is usually restricted to implementation questions. However, between supply and implementation, there is an `awareness phase’, which has been neglected up till now. The level of awareness will vary between managers. As a result, one might expect that depending on certain contextual and individual characteristics, different subgroups of managers are aware of various concepts in different ways. As a result, the management population is not homogenous, but rather segmented. Hypotheses have been formulated to explain this segmentation based on contextual and individual characteristics. These hypotheses have been tested with 60 different management concepts on a Belgian sample of 681 respondents. The results showed the expected segmentation, but also raised interesting explanatory questions.