It Takes a Village: Translating Management Ideas through an Ecology of Roles (Elmholdt et al., 2024)

Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, the podcast where research ideas travel across borders, industries, and minds, each time taking on a new shape. Today, we unravel a fascinating study titled “It Takes a Village: Translating Management Ideas through an Ecology of Roles.” Published in the Journal of Management Studies, an FT50 journal renowned for shaping the future of business scholarship, this paper offers a fresh lens on how management ideas evolve. The authors—Kasper Trolle Elmholdt, Jeppe Agger Nielsen, Arild Wæraas, and Renate Meyer—take us on a 10-year journey following the “Leadership Pipeline” model, originally conceived in the U.S., as it morphs into a uniquely Danish version. But this isn’t just a story of top-down diffusion. Instead, the study reveals a dynamic ecosystem of actors—consultants, public managers, HR specialists—whose roles shift, overlap, and morph to adapt, contest, and renew the idea. These roles aren’t just isolated actions; they interact like an ecology, each influencing and authorizing the other in a delicate dance of adoption and resistance. The result? A powerful insight into the messy but beautiful process of translating ideas across cultures and sectors. Elmholdt and his co-authors invite us to rethink the traditional, linear narrative of management idea adoption—and embrace the complexity of how ideas truly circulate. Thank you to Kasper Trolle Elmholdt, Jeppe Agger Nielsen, Arild Wæraas, and Renate Meyer, as well as the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, for making this research open access and available to all. So, what do you think? If management ideas can be transformed through a web of evolving roles—what other leadership models might still be waiting to undergo their own metamorphosis? Subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify and explore deeper insights on our YouTube channel, Weekend Researcher. Reference Kasper Trolle Elmholdt, Nielsen, J. A., Arild Wæraas, & Meyer, R. (2024). It Takes a Village: Translating Management Ideas through an Ecology of Roles. Journal of Management Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13155 Youtube channel link https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher