Management consultancy viewed from economic and sociological perspectives

Management Consulting: Towards an Integrative Framework of Knowledge, Identity, and Power

“…However, assembling the community of practitioners and 'academic consultants', the division's orientation has remained explicitly practical, and the structuring of the literature into a coherent field has not ensued. Research on consulting is still fragmented across disciplines (Armbrüster 2006a;Kipping and Clark 2012) and publication outlets . Our review shows that compared to the number of articles that focus on consulting as a setting -aiming to understand other complex organizational phenomenathe number of articles that study consulting in its own right has increased.…”

“…Most of these reviews provide a historical account of consulting research and represent the field by categorizing it along functionalist (prescriptive managerialist) and critical paradigms. In organizing the field along these lines, they risk reifying these paradigms (Deetz 1996;Willmott 1993), whereby historical classification becomes more necessary than the dissection of the differences and similarities of the underlying assumptions (for an exception, see Armbrüster 2006a).…”

“…These formal reviews provide a more comprehensive outlook of the field. They either demonstrate its theoretical diversity (Faust 2012; or point towards its theoretical potential (Armbrüster 2006a). These approaches could have moved the mapping of the field beyond the functionalist-critical divide; however, categorization along paradigms remains the norm in the field (see Cerruti et al 2019).…”

“…Following the exponential growth in the 1990s of the management consulting sector, which by 2018/2019 generated revenues of US$634 billion and employed more than 4.3 million people globally (IBISWorld 2019), academic interest in management consulting has increased dramatically, with a series of dedicated books, special issues, and a distinguished group of scholars contributing to the debates (Armbrüster 2006b;Clark and Kipping 2012;McKenna 2004;Sturdy et al 2015). The proliferation of academic research has led to a rich and fragmented field that is dispersed across publication outlets and preoccupied with a diverse range of topics encompassing a wide variety of theoretical perspectives (Armbrüster 2006a; Kipping and Clark 2012;Sturdy et al 2004). This richness and theoretical diversity drove our initial exploration of the literature and motivated our focus on the identification of dominant conceptual themes (e.g.…”

“…knowledge, identity) that span research paradigms. While theoretical diversity often enriches our understanding of a complex phenomenon, such as consulting (see e.g . Armbrüster 2006a), it may also simultaneously hinder discourse across theoretical boundaries (Deetz 1996; Lewis and Grimes 1999) and obscure overall contributions to the field (Rousseau et al 2008).…”