Summary
Ideas such as lean management, digital transformation, and agile organizing have travelled widely across organizations. Expert consultants are often cast as champions of these ideas – but what roles do the recipients and others play? In our recent study, “It Takes a Village: Translating Management Ideas through an Ecology of Roles,” published in the Journal of Management Studies, we studied how management ideas develop and circulate in the market for management expertise. Based on a study of the Leadership Pipeline in Denmark, we demonstrate how ideas move through an ecology of translation roles—multiple, interdependent roles that actors enact and reciprocally authorize to enable and shape the traveling of ideas across an organizational field.
Challenging the Downstream View of Idea Translation
Translation is considered the vehicle for making management ideas travel. Prior studies have examined the various actors and roles involved in this process, yet the literature predominantly assumes that the travelling of ideas unfolds in dyadic formations and translation chains where ideas are seen as moving from the supply side (e.g., consultants) to adopting actors (e.g., managers, employees). In this process, consultants are often highlighted as experts in framing and adapting ideas to fit specific organizational contexts. Whereas these studies draw attention to how ideas circulate and become part of the market for management expertise, the existing focus often contains a problematic top-down assumption: that consultants drive development and push ideas into organizations. However, research has pointed out that this creates a paradox of self-promotion: How can an idea be credibly disseminated by those who have developed it and thus represent their own interests in its spread? Moreover, management consultants often struggle with a strained role as commercial actors, criticized for selling their own ideas. Our case suggests that such a scenario is mitigated if other actors enact or support the codification and translation of ideas. Hence, different actors with varying roles build on one another in the process of developing and translating ideas, thereby making the idea relevant to new audiences.
Six Translation Roles
When ideas circulate, actors (e.g. consultants and managers) assume a variety of roles to translate ideas into new contexts. By roles, we mean patterned sets of activities and expectations attached to positions – not persons. For instance, a consultant acting as a carrier of an idea may be expected to demonstrate a certain level of expertise on the idea. In our 10-year case study, we examine how the US-born management idea of the Leadership Pipeline was translated into a domesticated public sector version in Denmark. We document how an ecology of translation roles—a network of multiple, interdependent actors such as managers, HR specialists, and government agencies—drove this process.
Specifically, we identified six translation roles that were salient in the Leadership Pipeline case: catalyst, codifier, contextualizer, liaison, endorser, and opponent. Five of these roles operated in ways that mutually reinforced the legitimacy of both the actors involved and the translated idea, whereas the opponent role disrupted this process by casting doubt on both. As a result, the ecology of roles remained dynamic rather than fixed. For example, in the early stages, HR consultants acted as contextualizers by providing domain-specific expertise on public management, thereby lending practical credibility to the Leadership Pipeline idea. Later, this role became entwined with their status as early adopters. Together, these interrelated positions formed what we conceptualize as an ecology of translation roles.
An Ecology of Roles Perspective
An ecology of translation roles refers to a configuration of interdependent roles that interact around a travelling idea. In our study, we traced how this ecology was composed, evolved, and adapted across three phases of idea circulation—initiating, expanding, and reinventing—and identified three defining characteristics of its development.
Firstly, we observed a multiplicity of roles, meaning that actors often enacted more than one role. In the Leadership Pipeline case, consultants, managers, and HR specialists moved across roles as the process unfolded. For example, consultants acted as catalysts when facilitating meeting points that leveraged public managers’ domain expertise, as codifiers when contributing systematized knowledge about the idea, and later as endorsers when promoting variations of the idea. Hence, actors may enact different translation roles in response to the specific needs and challenges of the situation.
Secondly, we observed a morphing of roles. Actors did not only assume multiple roles, but over time, the function and contribution of roles shifted. For example, the Contextualizer role, which contributed domain-specific expertise to help develop a domesticated version of the Leadership Pipeline in phase 1, later shifted toward expertise about the model’s practical impact in phase 2, and then toward sub-domain-specific expertise used to reinvent the model in phase 3. Hence, while the role as contextualizer remained, what counted as a relevant contribution from the role morphed over time.
Thirdly, we observed the connecting mechanism of reciprocal authorization of roles. Roles gain legitimacy and effect through mutual recognition among actors in the translation ecosystem. For example, consultants (Codifiers) emphasized that public managers (Contextualizers) brought indispensable domain-specific expertise in public leadership. Conversely, public managers stressed the consultants’ expertise, which lent LP ideas theoretical credibility. In doing so, each side validated the other’s expertise. These dynamics persisted across phases and helped making the PLP idea meaningful and legitimate to a broader audience.
Implications
Our study is an invitation to recognize idea traveling and translation as a dynamic, collective process. Our case demonstrates how actors in different roles, drawing on both abstract and domain-specific knowledge, depend on one another to circulate ideas. In doing so, they form an ecology of roles through which mutual legitimacy is built, maintained, and contested. From this perspective, translation is not a sequential hand-off from “suppliers” to “adopters” but a multidirectional process in which recipient actors themselves take on different roles as they strive to legitimate—or de-legitimate—management ideas.
Viewing idea translation through an ecology of roles perspective highlights how management ideas circulate through interdependent actors and roles. By doing so, channeling and amplifying, for example, expert consultants’ and managers’ influence while masking their direct, self-interested promotion of the idea. Hence, rather than consultants championing and driving the idea, its translation is distributed among many actors who assume multiple roles and represent various interests.
The implication of our study is clear. Professionals taking on a change agent or translation role need not only to perform certain practices, but to be sensitive to how they can engage with, build on, and reciprocally authorize other actors and roles to make an idea travel, thereby advancing the translation ecosystem.
