The Dialectics of Consultancy

Abstract In the growing literature on management fashions and consultancy, there is a tendency to focus on managers and to present them as vulnerable, in search of apparently technical solutions and/or existential security. By contrast, this article develops a critical and integrative model of consultancy as a dialectical, yet structurally and existentially self-defeating process. Primary data from IT strategy consultancy in UK financial services and secondary data from accounts of consultancy and organisational change in the UK and USA are selectively drawn on to highlight client resistance and the pressures and insecurities of consultancy. At the same time, emphasis is given to the historical role and mixed fortunes of consultants as agents of capital and to intra-management conflict and cooperation in the more recent transformations of managerial work and discourses such as that of IT strategy.