‘The costumes don’t do it for me’: Obstacles to the translation of ‘new’ management ideas
研究了一家制造企业引入管理大师思想时遇到的障碍，发现管理者参与、幽默使用和文化对象（如服装）反而可能阻碍变革，对关注管理实践落地的学者和从业者有参考价值。
It has been argued that management support is important to successfully translate new management ideas into practice. Through focusing on the obstacles to the translation of a management guru text in a manufacturing organisation, we point towards a far more uncertain situation. First, we explore the paradoxical situation of engaged managers undermining the implementation of new ideas. Second, we consider how attempts to use humour to aid translation may generate a variety of unintended employee translations. Third, we examine how the objects that management enlist to support translation can thwart change. It has been argued that ‘technological’ and ‘textual’ objects exercise agency through making humans act in intended ways. Into this mix, we add ‘cultural’ objects (in our case costumes) and argue that while they exercise agency, the outcomes they produce may hinder managerial designs.