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Purpose – This chapter traces the creation of a market for strategy by management consulting firms during the second half of the twentieth century in order to demonstrate their impact in shaping debates in the subject and demand for their services by corporate executives.

Design/methodology/approach – Using historical analysis, the chapter draws on institutional theory, including institutional isomorphism. It uses both primary and secondary data from the leading consulting firms to describe how consultants shifted from offering advice on organizational structure to corporate strategy and eventually to corporate legitimacy as a result of the changing economic and regulatory environment of the time.

Findings/originality/value – This study provides a historical context for the emergence of corporate and competitive strategy as an institutional practice in both the United States and around the world, and provides insights into how important this history can be in understanding the debates among consultants and academics during strategy's emergence as an academic subject and practical application.

Contemporary working life highlights the challenge between exploitation and exploration both on a general and a more individual level. Here, we focus on the latter, and connect the critical debate regarding self-management to March's exploitation/exploration trade-off, as this forms a useful theoretical frame to understand how employees make sense of their self-management efforts. The employee is subjected to an individual responsibility to understand and manage an exploration of the self while handling the norms of self-exploitation that a self-management culture creates. Through an empirical study of a large group of management consultants, we explore how they perform and make sense of self-exploitation and self-exploration through three specific discourses: the discourse of workload, the discourse of aspiration, and the discourse of fun. Through these, the consultants try to identify optimal amounts of work, play, and ambition, all while handling the trade-off between self-exploitation and self-exploration. We show how this keeps failing, but how it reappears as a necessary condition for avoiding future failures. In all three discourses, the trade-off therefore presents itself as the problem of as well as the solution to self-management.

This chapter focuses on the circumstances under which active clients in universities construct external management consultants as actors. Much research focuses on how consultants legitimize decisions and trends in business organizations, but we know little about how consultants become legitimized as actors in other organizational fields. In the academic field, clients are embedded in a variety of organizational settings embedded in different institutional logics, which determine their sense making. By analyzing how consultants are legitimized, the authors contribute to a better understanding of the organizational preconditions that support the construction of an external expert as an actor. By focusing on IT and strategy consulting in academia, further, the authors discuss the role of competing institutional logics in legitimization processes and the importance of intra-organizational communities.

In consultant–client relationships, relationship longevity can create significant cost advantages and operational efficiencies for both client and consultant. At the same time, each party may also be motivated to look for new perspectives and opportunities by switching to new relationships. However, the benefits of replacing one consulting relationship with another are mitigated by switching costs: the costs associated with the act of changing the relationship itself.

This chapter explores the concept of switching costs by examining various types of costs, the ways these costs have been conceptualized in the literature, and how these costs may impact the nature and continuity of consultant–client relationships. The chapter will end with a series of hypotheses and suggestions for a research agenda to further develop our understanding of this important phenomenon.

Due to impressive market growth over several decades, consulting can today be regarded as an influential industry. In spite of this success, consulting is confronted with prejudices, which, to some extent, can be linked to difficulties in the evaluation of consulting services. By guaranteeing certain qualification levels, professionalism is generally considered useful for reducing this kind of uncertainty. In this chapter, using a German case as an example, we analyze professionalization efforts among consultants. We argue that these efforts will never be successful if the classical concept of professionalism is applied. However, seen from the perspective of the “new professionalism” that concentrates on work behaviour, consultants qualify as highly professional.

This paper illustrates a story of “rise and fall” of a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) project in a Sri Lankan firm. The “rise” was due to a series of attempts made by CIMA (SL) for popularising BSC practice among business leaders and local consultants, and the “fall” was due to professional rivalry between engineering managers and accounting personnel and the decline of interest on the part of the owner-manager. In relation to these two opposing phenomena, the paper shows how and why the firm first receives the BSC project as a useful management system device, and later, how and why the management tends to undermine the use of BSC. The argument advanced is that the popularisation of BSC is part of a project of accounting knowledge diffusion which comes through the broader globalisation process, but the failure in sustaining BSC is due to the upsurge of professional rivalry and the rise of alternative management fads and the owner-manager's inclination to look at financial matters, rather than a BSC, as a basis for the appropriation of surplus. The underlying public interest implication is that even though globalisation project seems to be functional and positive, it provokes contradictions and resistance when new accounting knowledge is diffused from the centre to the periphery.

Originally developed by the Japanese firm Toyota in the 1950s, the core innovation of lean production is to reorient all organizational activity around continuous improvement and the elimination of waste. We use the case of lean production in two healthcare organizations to explore the process of translating management models into new environments (Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996; Mohr, 1998). We draw on insights from organizational sociology and social movement theory to understand the strategies of actors as they attempt to overcome opposition to model transfer (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009; Friedland & Alford, 1991; Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986). We examine two attempts to export lean production to healthcare organizations: Riverside Hospital, a research and teaching institution, and Lakeview Associations, a managed health provider. We use these cases to illustrate two ways that management models can get lost in the process of institutional translation: model attenuation, and model decoupling.

The “resources, dynamic capabilities and competences perspective” (Sanchez, 2001) has challenged firms to apply these concepts to improve their competitive position. Management consulting firms may assist clients in these efforts. However, the roles that management consulting firms fulfill in these processes can differ considerably and are under-researched. Therefore, insight in these different roles and the impact of these roles on clients’ competitive positioning in their industries is required. The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework that highlights the importance of distinguishing both roles and the implications for management consulting firms and for their clients. We illustrate the framework by elaborating on the relationship between both roles and the strategic renewal context of client firms. We conclude by pointing out the increasing importance of the competence leverage role of management consulting firms and how this development might contribute to a more hypercompetitive context for their clients.

This chapter presents a case which illustrates how the external management consultant may function as an organizational anthropologist and provide insights and alternative strategies for human resource professionals and leadership faced with high toxicity levels. The long-term failure to timely detect toxins and intervene in a destructive conflict results in the spread of dysfunctional behavior in the case company, pointing to leadership negligence and malpractice. The deeply entrenched “no emotions allowed” culture evokes massive turnover and plunging motivation and productivity. The case concludes with specific recommendations for avoiding or repairing a toxic workplace culture.