Gurus or Wizards? A Review of the Role of Management Consultants
Anna Canato2011, European Management Review
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Abstract
business. Yet few management studies explicitly focus on the consulting industry. What role do management consultant companies play, and do they contribute to clients' activities in similar ways? Can these questions be addressed using scholarly categories? This paper tackles this understudied topic through an analysis and elaboration of existing literature, which suggests new avenues for management research and offers fresh reflections for practice. In particular we develop a number of propositions, centred on the behaviours of consultants and the sources of consultants' competitive advantages, which inspire future investigations in an area relevant to both academics and practitioners.
Key takeaways
- This second set of papers does not focus explicitly on consultants, but it contains multiple suggestions and insights that apply to management consulting.
- As a first step, we engaged in a thorough review of publications focused on consultants and the management consulting industry.
- The review reveals that consultants appear to play four main roles for innovation: information sources; standard setters; knowledge brokers; and knowledge integrators.
- These consultants tend to build their experience by working persistently on a given project and moving to consulting projects that are relatively similar, with a consistent focus on a specific industry or specific type of consulting engagement (e.g., customer relationship management implementation).
- In very large consulting companies, we could also expect to see different roles in the course of the same project, thanks to the involvement of a different team of consultants.
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