There are a number of domains where fads or apparently arbitrary orthodoxies emerge: clothing, music, food, art. To a certain extent architecture. Fandoms around books, or films, or comics. Theories of political economy. And management fads.
The common thread through all of these, as I see them, is that the underlying domain is complex, with an irreducible informational complexity, as well as rich and frequently highly significant interactions: the wrong clothes, accent, or music can get you laughed at, shunned, or killed, depending on the circumstances.
In the field of management, there's the need to communicate over a short order (hours, days, quarters) with a set of audiences (investors, stockholders, policymakers, employees), over dynamics which may not play out fully for years or even decades.
A significant problem is that at the levels of complexity being considered, there are systems of systems of systems -- if you're looking at a world-model view of cognition, understanding, and communications, then the problem is one of building up models of models of models, though to depths far more than three in many instances, and then communicating these effectively.
Quite frequently it's far easier to just follow the topical contours without a deep understanding. At the extreme case, you end up with cargo-culting, both figuratively and literally: aping the forms, structures, and actions of some system viewed as "successful", but with absolutely no understanding or attainment of the true dyanamics involved.
MBA culture is a part of that, and there have been a number of fads that have come along, typically with runs of ~5 - 20 years by my rough sense. I'm still planning on looking into this in more depth.
But the thought that the whole concept of a fad -- a temporary deviation from some base norm -- being a fundamental sociological dynamic with an information-theoretic underpinning strikes me as fundamentally sound.