When an audience turns over every few years, the same material can be served to it again, because almost nobody remains to notice the repetition.
TV Tropes named it from children's television, which can recycle plots, jokes and lessons because its viewers age out every few years. Organisations with high turnover show the same pattern: management ideas return under new names about once a generation of managers, and the lessons of one financial crisis are forgotten by the next, the pattern Reinhart and Rogoff called 'this time is different'.
In practice
- A school gives the same assembly on the same theme every September, and each year's pupils hear it for the first time.
- A company rediscovers a reorganisation it abandoned eight years earlier, after everyone who ran the first one has left.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is turnover: the audience's memory resets while the producer's does not. Another is that producers change too, and rediscover old material as new.
- In its favour
- Consistent with research on management fashion cycles and with Reinhart and Rogoff's history of financial crises.
- Against it
- Audiences are never wholly new, and repeat viewers, fans and long-serving staff often do notice. Organisations can keep records that break the cycle, as research on organisational memory describes.
- Standing
- Compare management fashion and organizational memory.
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- Theories of what stands between an event and its audience