Management consulting.

Including a lengthy, comprehensive introduction, this important collection brings together some of the most influential papers that have contributed to our understanding of management consultancy work. The two-volume set encompasses the breadth of conceptual and empirical perspectives and explores those key ideas that have helped to advance our knowledge of this intriguing area. The volumes are divided into a series of thematic sections, affording the reader easy access to a great resource of information. Professors Clark and Avakian have written an original introduction which provides a comprehensive overview of the literature

Capturing the competence of management consulting work

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to assess whether the effort of consulting firms and branch organizations to establish a shared and standardized methodology as a means to professionalize consulting and as a standard for training is possible and sensible. - \ud \ud Design/methodology/approach: A survey was conducted among Dutch management consultants, which explored their ways of working and their ways of learning. - \ud \ud Findings: The study shows that efforts to develop a shared and standardized phase-model methodology do not seem to be effective. Instead of following phase-models, consultants appear to be improvising bricoleurs, tailoring their ways of working to specific situations, and using broad, heterogeneous and partly implicit repertoires, which are built through mainly through action-learning. This requires another kind of methodology and another kind of training. - \ud \ud Research limitations/implications: The article gives a general direction for the development of a consulting methodology and the education of consultants. Further research on consulting practices and repertoires is necessary to explore this direction. - \ud \ud Practical implications: The paper concludes that the value of phase-models as a standard is limited. Therefore, branch organizations, consulting firms and corporate universities should not focus their professionalization and training activities on these standardized methods. - \ud \ud Originality/value: Little work has been done yet on the relation between professionalization, methods, and training in management consulting, and no earlier publication has studied this topic quantitatively

Knowledge production in consulting teams

The central thesis of this paper is that the production of knowledge in consulting teams can neither be understood as the result of an internal interaction between clients and consultants decoupled from the wider socio-political environment nor as externally determined by socially constructed industry recipes or management fashions detached from the cognitive uniqueness of the client-consultant team. Instead, we argue that knowledge production in consulting teams is intrinsically linked to the institutional environment that not only provides resources such as funding, manpower, or legitimacy but also offers cognitive feedback through which knowledge production is influenced. By applying the theory of self-organization to the knowledge production in consulting teams, we explain how consulting teams are structured by the socio-cultural environment and are structuring this environment to continue their work. The consulting team's knowledge is shaped and influenced by cognitive feedback loops that involve external collective actors such as the client organization, practice groups of consulting firms, the academic/professional community, and the general public who essentially become co-producers of consulting knowledge. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd

Managing Knowledge in Project Environments

Projects ought to be vehicles for both practical benefits and organizational learning. However, if an organization is designed for the long term, a project exists only for its duration. Project-based organizations face an awkward dilemma: the project-centric nature of their work makes knowledge management, hence learning, difficult

Differences a Day Can Make: Exploring the Effects of Abbreviated Intervention on Improving Financial Management for Youth-serving Organizations

This report by the management consulting firm CFAR examines the effectiveness of a one-day workshop and series of webinars offered to nonprofits by the consulting firm FMA as part of a Wallace Foundation initiative to strengthen the financial management of afterschool nonprofits. CFAR provides suggestions for the development of future training events to help nonprofits improve their financial stability and planning

The construction of global management consulting - a study of consultancies’ web presentations

Management consulting increasingly appears as a global endeavour as reflected in the increasing dominance of a few large, global management-consulting firms. However, features of the consulting service (e.g. its immaterial and interactional character) as well as aspects of management (e.g. its cultural anchoredness) highlight the locality of management consulting. In this paper we approach this tension between the global and the local by seeing consulting as involving the creation of generalised myths. More specifically, we ask the question: How do global consulting companies construct the viability and desirability of their services? Based on a view of management consultants as mythmakers, we study the argumentation on corporate web sites of four leading global consultancies in five different countries. Applying a framework based on the sociology of translation, we analyze the translation strategies used in making the service of global consultancies both viable and indispensable. We find that the need for consultants is to a large extent constructed through defining management as an expert activity, thus creating a need for external advisors possessing globally applicable expert knowledge. In this effort, the consultants ally with three widely spread rationalized managerial myths – the rationality myth, the globalization myth and the universality myth. We conclude, that global consulting firms are actively involved in creating and reinforcing the very same institutions, which are the prerequisites for their future success.management consulting; globalization; myth making

Constituting best practice in management consulting

This paper offers critical reflections on the construction and propagation of ‘best practice’: a concept which has become increasingly important in the business world and in civic life more generally. Focusing upon the activities of the Management Consultancies Association (MCA) we offer an analysis of the awards process instituted to applaud ‘best practice’ in the arena of consulting. Departing from existing academic representations of the advice industry which generally exclude this trade body from the analytical frame we consider the role which the MCA performs in the field of consulting. Situating the MCA’s attempt to constitute best practice within the work of Bruno Latour we argue that this construct depends upon the mobilization of an extended network of allies, advocates and spectators whose interactions have been written-out of academic analysis. The paper concludes by proposing the need for further research designed to explore, both, the heterogeneity and the porosity of the networks that construct, convey and applaud key knowledge products such as ‘best practice’

New Hampshire University Research and Industry Plan: A Roadmap for Collaboration and Innovation

This University Research and Industry plan for New Hampshire is focused on accelerating innovation-led development in the state by partnering academia’s strengths with the state’s substantial base of existing and emerging advanced industries. These advanced industries are defined by their deep investment and connections to research and development and the high-quality jobs they generate across production, new product development and administrative positions involving skills in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)

Innovation in consulting firms: an area to explore

Services are the most representative sector in developed economies due to their contribution to GDP and employment. Consulting firms are classified as part of the Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) and provide professional services to all types of organizations. Consulting firms usually innovate with their customers and suppliers in a nurturing environment for value co-creation. This environment is project-based, process-oriented and with intensive knowledge exchange among all stakeholders. Based on literature review, it has been found that despite the existence of frameworks for service innovation, none of them have specifically focused on consulting firms. Further implications on this issue are addressed for both academics and practitioners