It Takes a Village: Translating Management Ideas through an Ecology of Roles

Abstract

Although research has provided valuable insights into how management ideas circulate across contexts and undergo translation, the prevailing focus remains on the one-directional journey from idea suppliers to adopting entities. In contrast, we advance an ecology of roles perspective to capture the dynamic relationships between multiple actors and roles in the translation process. To develop our argument, we draw from a 10-year case study examining how the US-born management idea of the leadership pipeline was translated into a domesticated version in Denmark, which became widely adopted but also contested and renewed. In analysing this case, we show how the same actors assumed an array of interdependent roles that dynamically shifted over time to circulate the idea. We identify three characteristics of an ecology of translation roles: multiplicity of roles, morphing of roles, and reciprocal authorization of roles. By advancing an ecology of roles perspective, our study contributes novel insights to the expanding literature on translation and recent work on translation ecosystems.