The consultant-client relationship: critical perspectives on the management of organizational change

Article Abstract:

The management consultancy industry is attracting more and more attention. The critical literature in particular has questioned how a non-codified body of knowledge like 'consultancy' could become so apparently influential. The answering emphasis has been on the symbolic nature of consultant strategies and consultancy as a powerful system of persuasion. However, an emerging structural perspective has developed a rather different view, focusing on the limits of the industry discourse, and the constraints of a consultancy role defined largely by external forces. While it is useful to contrast the two perspectives - strategic and structural - they can also be viewed as complementary, and indeed a number of writers have been well aware both of the importance of consultant strategies and the context of consultancy work. In particular, they have explored the interaction between consultant and client, and called attention to factors like the countervailing power of client organizations and the uncertainty of the management task. The paper aims to contribute to this debate and draws on case studies of consultants' role in the management of organizational change - one of clients with considerable market power, and another of interdependency between consultant and client. The point stressed is that the consultancy process contains no 'necessary' structures (which may be implied by pairings such as the dependent client and indispensable consultant, or alternatively the resistant client and vulnerable consultant). Instead the consultant-client relationship is best regarded as part of an overarching managerial structure and a contingent exchange that assumes a variety of forms. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Management Consulting Services, Business & Mgmt Consulting, Client development, Consulting services

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Remember re-engineering: the rhetorical appeal of a managerial salvation device

Article Abstract:

This paper subjects a contemporary managerial doctrine, business process reengineering (BPR), to rhetorical scrutiny. Finding analytical inspiration from the writings of the American literary critic Kenneth Burke and adopting an anthropological attitude towards 'history,' it seeks to demystify the appeal of BPR rhetoric as represented in various published and unpublished texts. The analysis makes extensive use of 'sacred' motifs in order to gain 'perspective through incongruity' and expose the secular motives at work in BPR literature. An analogy is drawn between ethnographic examples of 'amnesia' drawn from the author's study of a computer installation and 'amnesia writ large' through BPR. On the basis of this comparison, it is suggested that BPR can be read as offering cathartic absolution of the collective guilt associated with information technology mismanagement. Any 'doubts' that a managerial public may be harbouring are rhetorically harnessed by BPR protagonists in their attempts to acquire secular converts. The popularity of BPR may now be on the decline but there will be other similarly instrumental agendas to replace it in the future to which students of management need to be alert. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Research, Corporate reorganizations

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The violent rhetoric of re-engineering: management consultancy on the offensive

Article Abstract:

Business process re-engineering (BPR) was a leading form of organizational restructuring from the later 1980s until the late 1990s. This paper seeks to contextualize its development and account for its particularly bellicose language by reflecting on its historical antecedents in the west and its contemporary competitors in the east. We suggest that one way of reading BPR is as a form of 'inverse colonization' in which US managerial discourse both assimilated and revolted against the growing domination of Japanese thinking and practice. We conclude with some speculative comments on related causes of the rise of violent managerial rhetoric. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Portrayals, Terminology, Violence, Rhetoric, Violence in literature

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