By Joel Best
Whereas fads resembling hula hoops or streaking are typically disregarded as foolish enthusiasms, tendencies in associations equivalent to schooling, company, medication, technology, and felony justice are frequently taken heavily, although their attractiveness and value is usually short-lived. Institutional fads comparable to open school rooms, caliber circles, and a number of character sickness are continually making the rounds, promising extraordinary new developments--novel methods of training interpreting or mathematics, higher tools of coping with companies, or better remedies for sickness.
Some of those developments end up to be lasting concepts, yet others--after soaking up amazing quantities of time and money--are deserted and forgotten, quickly to get replaced by means of different new schemes.
In this pithy, exciting, and infrequently funny ebook, Joel Best--author of the acclaimed Damned Lies and Statistics--explores the variety of institutional fads, analyzes the positive factors of our tradition that foster them, and identifies the main phases of the fashion cycle--emerging, surging, and purging.
Deconstructing the ways in which the program performs into our notions of reinvention, development, and perfectibility, Flavors of the Month examines the factors and results of fads and indicates methods of fad-proofing our associations.
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Extra info for Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads
Example text
They can challenge the takenfor-granted, argue that the familiar way we do things is simply wrong, and advocate something completely different. They can promise dramatic changes. To be sure, their proposals often will be rejected, and they will find themselves spurned as nuts, cranks, or quacks. But sometimes—sometimes—a radical new idea will take hold. History tells us so. Our society makes a place for innovators: it gives them a chance; it is more open to advocacy of change than are many other societies.
19 In this view, only those changes that can produce measurable improvements should survive. In short, our culture lets many new ideas get a hearing, rather than dismissing them out of hand. We grant the possibility that somebody could figure out a better way of doing things. We believe that change is inevitable, that progress is possible, that we should aspire to perfectibility, that revolutionary breakthroughs can occur, and that these improvements can be guided by rationality. 20 It discourages standing pat, and celebrates vision and imagination.
I chose these examples because we now have a little distance from them. Today, when we look back on the excitement about the epidemic of multiple-personality disorder, quality circles’ promise to transform American industry, or the wonders of cold fusion, these enthusiasms seem not just misplaced but strange and even silly. But we are less willing to label currently popular ideas as fads, even though an impartial observer might suspect that today’s fascination with, say, Six Sigma management techniques, program assessment in higher education, or standardized testing to achieve educational accountability may seem a little odd ten or twenty years from now.