In this chapter we explore possible volatility in audience orientations in more depth by asking: How and why do audience members’ consumption orientations shift throughout the communication process? Drawing on interview data with management practitioners who have attended management guru lectures, we stress the need for a more dynamic understanding of audience responses that can account for the individual-level variability in consumption orientations. First, by showing how individual audience members’ orientations are not necessarily limited to a single category and cannot be considered a permanent state, our findings seek to move beyond conceptions of managers’ attitudes towards management gurus and their ideas as relatively static. In particular, we identify three forms of shifts (involvement-induced, utility-induced and alternating) in managerial audience members’ consumption orientation amongst individual audience members that may occur during the communication process. Second, we explain how these shifts are related to the individual audience members’ expectations and broader management knowledge consumption pattern.

This chapter discusses a number of broad and influential perspectives to studying audiences, explains differences and similarities in background as well as explores their main possibilities in understanding the flow of management ideas. In particular, we consider: (1) research in the field of conversation analysis which is concerned with understanding the way lectures and speeches may influence and transform audiences and in turn, how audience responses may affect speakers’ oratorical performances; (2) the ‘uses and gratification’ approach to studying media audiences which focuses primarily on the reasons and motivations for selecting specific media options and the way various audience activities relate to the nature of audience orientations; (3) more critical traditions of media research focusing on how audience members’ interpretations of media messages relate to their social backgrounds and (4) literature on fans and fandom which provides an important lens to advance understanding of how and to what extent audience members take the ideas beyond a mass communication setting and may even become producers themselves.

In this chapter we ask: How and why do audience members vary in the way they are attracted to a guru and the management ideas they are promoting? Using analyses of interviews with management practitioners who have attended guru lectures, the chapter indicates how a broader and more fine-grained understanding of consumption activity is essential in providing a more advanced view of audience differentiation and helps to better understand the success and impact of management ideas among a managerial audience. First, our analysis reveals four different key managerial audience members’ consumption orientations – the gratifications that individual member seek – (devoted, engaged, non-committal and critical) towards gurus and the management ideas they are promoting. Second, the findings show how audience members’ orientations are constructed in relation to their perceptions of different key audience activities (selectivity, involvement and utility) at different stages of the consumption process. Third, the chapter explains how, and to what extent, the use of these orientations relates to the design of the guru lecture and the audience members’ background characteristics.