Bellwether

Bellwether is a novel by the American writer Connie Willis, published in 1996, and it sits somewhere between romantic comedy and science fiction.

Sandra Foster works for a research corporation, where her subject is fads: where they come from, how they spread and why sensible people adopt them in crowds. Bennet O'Reilly works for the same company on monkey group behaviour, which he approaches through chaos theory. A misdelivered package and a series of small disasters bring the two of them into contact, and their overlapping interests lead to a joint project that involves sheep, which are apparently the ideal animal for studying what causes a group to move in one direction. The research is repeatedly interrupted by office politics, funding problems, a management fad that sweeps through the company and the ordinary accidents of doing science with living creatures, and their working relationship develops while neither of them is paying it much attention.

Willis writes comedy of ideas, and the novel's joke is that the study of how everybody else follows a trend is being carried on by two people who cannot see the one forming between them.