Translating Management Ideas

Accounts of the spread of management ideas emphasizing the role of ‘supply-side’ actors underplay the active role recipients play in translating them into new and different forms. Comparing firms undergoing a similar process and looking at how a specific event unfolded, this paper aims to extend understanding of the concept of translation. It examines how ideas are rendered appropriate to a new setting through translation from the broad policy level into a set of specific practices. To do this, it looks at how a proposal to introduce lean management into the construction industry was applied within a set of firms and the projects they were undertaking. In the context of large ‘distance’ between the original arenas of the idea and its new one, the paper uncovers how the editing rules that are said to guide the process of translation are operationalized using a set of change interventions