'It Was Such a Handy Term': Management Fashions and Pragmatic Ambiguity

This article builds on constructs that authors have labelled "strategic ambiguity", "interpretative viability", "umbrella constructs", and "boundary objects", and suggests that these constructs all articulate a central concern for collective action and the role of ambiguity therein. It characterizes as "pragmatic ambiguity" the condition of admitting more than one course of action, and elucidates and operationalizes this new construct. Drawing on the sociology of translation (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987),-super-[1] it argues that pragmatic ambiguity is both the result and the resource of a collective process of "intéressement" occurring during the rise in popularity of a new management approach. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006.