Best, Joel. Flavor of the month: why smart people fall for fads. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2006.

Summary: A series of clear, mild essays about the structure of institutional fads, with examples drawn from management, education, government, medicine, and finance, combining a lot of common-sense observations about the psychology of enthusiasts, leaders, followers, and non-adopters into a comprehensive description of the progress of typical fads. The analysis is surprisingly dispassionate; only on his Acknowledgments page does the author expose his contempt for institutional fads and fury with the waste of time and effort that they occasion:

I could not have -- and would not have -- written this book without the inspiration provided by various administrators at the three universities where I've spent nearly twenty-five years chairing academic departments. Department chairs attend many meetings at which the future is unveiled, priorities are articulated, and innovations are announced. Over the years, I have been assured that our university -- if not all of higher education -- was about to be transformed by affirmative action, the Pacific Rim, assessment, active learning, cooperative learning, distance learning, service learning, problem-based learning, responsibility-based management, zero-based budgeting, broadening the general education requirements, narrowing the general education requirements, capstone courses, writing across the curriculum, multicultural education, computer networking, the Internet, water (don't ask), critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and I don't know what else. I have gone on retreats; participated in program reviews; served on task forces; puzzled over mission statements; written five-year plans, three-year plans, and niche reports; and listened to proclamations from provosts, assistant provosts, deans, associate deans, and wannabe deans. I have been assured with tight-lipped seriousness: “This is not a fad.” Still, after all these amazing transformations, today's universities do not seem all that different than they were when I was a student. When I decided to write this book, I promised myself that I would not focus on higher education because I suspected that readers would consider the subject trivial, but I have to confess: that was where I discovered my topic. If I bear the scars of cynicism, I've earned them.

His answer to the question posed in his subtitle is that smart people fall for fads partly because a fad, in its early stages, exhibits the same growth pattern as a significant and useful innovation, so that it is difficult for people to distinguish them -- especially people who have a deep-seated but irrational faith in the perfectibility of mankind and in the idea of progress through radical transformation, but are weak on history and perhaps a little too much influenced by the social networks to which they belong.