Reengineering History: Social Resonances and Business Process Reengineering

Abstract

Reengineering has rapidly become the business buzzword of the early 1990s. This examination of the reengineering phenomenon sets out to consider the extent to which it is a new model for organizational change and offers some suggestions as to why it appears to have become so popular. It disputes some claims to novelty and internal coherence and argues that explanations for reengineering's popularity might be sought through an externalist rather than an internalist account. That is, that its popularity might best be explained not by considering the uniqueness or 'inherent' rationality of the ideas involved, an 'internalist' account, but rather through the ways in which the purveyors of reengineering manage, in and through their accounts, to construct a series of sympathetic 'resonances' or compatibilities, an 'externalist' account. These are construed to exist between their ideas and popular opinion, or zeitgeist, and also between the novelty of the ideas and the cultural antecedents.