Unravelling the Experience of Consultants at Work: a Pattern of Role Enactment Beyond Compliance

Abstract

In this paper, we contribute to the study of the experience of consultants at work in two ways. First, we develop a framework of role analysis by identifying two core dimensions of consultants' professional role expectations in the literature: knowledge, whether technical or relational, and commitment, both in terms of behaviour and endurance. Second, we go on to apply this framework to 26 interviews of consultants and former consultants, from junior consultant to partner, working or having worked for 15 different firms, in order to better understand how they enact their role along all its dimensions and how it evolves over time. It allows us to spot two different patterns of role enactment: complying and negotiating and to understand their evolutions. Our findings shed light on the heterogeneity of consultants' behaviour, beyond compliance, and allow us to discuss the possibility of resistance in such elite environments.