Witty invention or dubious fad? Using argument mapping to examine the contours of management fashion Rudy Hirschheim ⁎, David M. Murungi, Santiago Peña Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences, E. J. Ourso College of Business, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, United States article info abstract Article history: Received 30 October 2011 Received in revised form 14 November 2011 Accepted 14 November 2011 Available online 16 December 2011 This paper examines management fashion discourse based on the premise that management fashions are not neutral, but problematic. It grounds this premise on Abrahamson and Fairchild's (1999) obser- vation that attributes the upswings of management fashion discourse to “emotionally charged, enthusiastic and unreasoned discourse”. Adopting this critical perspective, the paper conducts a careful analy- sis of faddish discourse in an attempt to understand the discursive ail- ments that would justify ascribing a diagnosis of “unreasoned” to this discourse. To achieve this goal, the paper employs the technique of argument mapping to examine and compare the structures of early discourse surrounding: (1) Business Process Reengineering (BPR) – typically now considered a fad; (2) Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – an enduring, non-faddish IS discourse; and (3) Service Ori- ented Architecture (SOA) – a more recent discourse that is evaluated based on insights derived from comparisons of BPR and ERP. Findings from the resultant argument maps show conspicuous differences be- tween BPR and ERP argumentation, which suggests an association be- tween early argument structure and the faddish trajectory of discourse. Similarly, insights derived from ERP and BPR argument comparisons suggest that SOA is more likely to follow the faddish course of its BPR predecessor rather than the enduring track of ERP. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. “Fashion is something that goes in one year and out the other.”– Denise Klahn “Old fashions please me best; I am not so nice To change true rules for odd inventions.”– William Shakespeare Information and Organization 22 (2012) 60–84 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: rudy@lsu.edu (R. Hirschheim). 1471-7727/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.infoandorg.2011.11.001 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Information and Organization journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ infoandorg