Critical Consulting: New Perspectives on the Management Advice Industry - Book Review

Timothy Clark and Robin Fincham (eds.): Critical Consulting: New Perspectives on the Management Advice Industry.

2001, Oxford: Blackwell. 283 pages.

There is probably no industry about which the opinions are so divided as management consulting. To some, consultants are the avant-garde of the knowledge economy -- traders of change methods and solutions who have specialized in transferring knowledge between industries to bring some flexibility and innovativeness into encrusted organizational structures. Others are more skeptical about the consulting business and express concerns about the basis of consulting knowledge, the nature of management concepts deployed by consultants, or the rhetoric of consultants. It is this latter, critical view, that has evolved and flourished over the last ten years. Previously almost non-existent, the body of literature has grown to cultivate a view that has now come to occupy an important -- in Europe, maybe dominant -- position in the academic research community on consulting. A summary of this state of affairs, as offered in the volume edited by Clark and Fincham, was indeed overdue.

The volume provides an overview and develops further this critical view on the advice business, and in so doing, brings together leading academics in the field. The scene of management advice has been set to encompass a broader concept than just that of management consulting, and the phenomenon of management gurus has been included as well. The parallel drawn between the consulting and the guru phenomena is derived from a particular root of the critical discourse on consulting, developed initially by Clark (1995): the component of rhetoric and persuasion.

In Chapter 1, Clark and Fincham introduce and familiarize the reader with the development of the critical discourse on the consulting and guru phenomena. They describe how the critical perspective has surfaced in the 1990s, due to the uneasiness among many researchers and some journalists about the, then predominant, congratulatory view on consulting, and how concerns about consulting rhetoric and the nature of the client-consultant relationship have emerged. Following this, the contributions are presented in three parts. Part 1, 'Setting the Scene: The Nature of Management Consultancy and Management Advice', provides an overview of the consulting business from psycho-dynamic, historical, regional and rhetoric-oriented viewpoints. In Part 2, 'The Contexts of Management Consultancy and Management Advice', containing five chapters, the advice business is explored from the perspective of consultants' rhetoric. Attention is also given to the guru phenomenon and to management trainers. Following this, Part 3, 'Cri tical Reflections on Management Consultancy and Management Advice', first takes up the theme of consulting knowledge and its contestable nature, and then moves the focus from management advice to the current state of academic research on consultancy.

The individual contributions argue as follows. In Chapter 2, Edgar Schein explores the client-consultant relationship from a psychodynamic viewpoint and outlines possible reactions and feelings of the client and the consultant to the consulting situation. Matthias Kipping (Chapt. 3) describes the historical evolution of the consulting industry. He identifies three historical phases (scientific-management consulting, strategy and organization consulting, and information-technology consulting) and hypothesizes, on the basis of evolution, that advice related to strategy and organization may decline as IT-based consulting is currently taking over the largest market shares. In Chapter 4, Peter Wood provides data on the regional development of management consultancy in the United Kingdom and argues that the distribution of consultancy coincides with uneven regional access to business expertise and diverging economic developments. Karen Legge (Chapter 5) draws on actor-network theory, identifies the different story- lines that consultants employ to sell total quality management, and argues that these stories are used selectively towards different groups, especially towards line managers, personnel managers, and accountants, in order to appeal to their covert agendas and to gain mutual support. Peter Case (Chapt. 6) presents results from ethnographic fieldwork, in the form of a recorded client-consultant workshop on virtual organizatio, and argues that consultants employ 'fantastical' illustrations of the technology they want to sell. Brian Bloomfield and Theo Vurdubakis (Chapt. 7) analyze a showcase presentation and workshop based on a consultancy's information-technological tool to map scenarios of a client firm's future. They argue that technological equipment is employed as a representation and substitute for the abstract concept of 'the future'. Andrew Sturdy (Chapt. 8) starts off with a critique of the rhetoric-based approach to the consulting industry and interprets his observations of four customer-service trainin gs in a more macro-sociological context of knowledge diffusion within broader social and economic structures, interests and identities. Sales-service training is put here into the context of the excellence movement, the perceived national (USA) identity of the customer-service culture, and employee resistance to these developments.