Global expertise,local convincing power: Management consultants and preserving the entrepreneurial city

Abstract

Chinese

The advice of management consultancies on urban policy is particularly influential in moments of crisis involving entrepreneurial principles. As global experts, management consultants appear as appropriate assistants for steering growth-oriented, competitive urban development. In order to show how consultants turn the urban into an entrepreneurial project to be managed, I discuss the literature on urban policy and consultants then examine the activities of private management consultancies in six German cities. Empirically, I first explore the specificities of urban policy advice given by globally operating consultancies (their methodological approach and the projectisation of the urban; global networks and comparative–competitive thinking; fast databases; reputation; externality). Second, I critically reflect on how the consultants’ advice is fundamentally reshaped by local actors in the process of policy making (through participation, appropriation, slowdown and politicisation). The paper thus critically evaluates the rise of expertise–policy relations and calls attention to mechanisms for patching the fractures of the entrepreneurial city.

Keywords

comparative urban studies globalisation governance local government management consultants policy

Introduction

Urban policy and management consulting are increasingly connected, even as the latter is typically a service for private enterprises. In the last two decades, management consultancies have begun to scrutinise urban and regional processes in order to develop a new field of expertise. For instance, since 2011 McKinsey & Company has operated a ‘Cities Special Initiative’ whose ‘aim is to help those in the public, social, and private sectors to make informed decisions about city development strategies, and to help them build the skills to implement those strategies’ (McKinsey, 2013: iv). Similarly, urban politicians seek quick and viable solutions for problems such as budget cuts or decelerating economic growth – problems that management experts for entrepreneurial strategies could potentially deal with most successfully. Furthermore, both management consulting and urban policy have gone global as research on the globalisation of knowledge-intensive occupations (Muzio et al., 2011) and on globally mobile urban policies (McCann, 2011) shows. Yet their direct interaction, as I will argue, occurs primarily in crisis moments concerning the entrepreneurial principles of urban development.

During crises, involving management consultants in urban strategic decisions has become common. McKinsey’s ‘Vision Mumbai’ (Banerjee-Guha, 2009), KMPG’s service review ‘Final Report to the City Manager’ for Toronto (Hurl, 2017), and Roland Berger’s ‘Concept for Investment Attraction and City Marketing’ for Halle (Saale) (Vogelpohl, 2017) are only some examples. The role of consultants as ‘transfer agents’ for mobilising urban policies (Stone, 2004), as well as the ways their expertise has circulated across urban places, have been frequently studied in recent years (Einig et al., 2005; McCann, 2011; MacLeod, 2013; Peck and Theodore, 2015; Prince, 2012). Yet questions as to why advice by management experts is sought by local decision makers and what the specific promises fuelled by globally trained consultants are remain largely unconsidered. This paper therefore discusses why urban decision makers particularly choose to endorse globally active management consultants.

The paper is based on a broad comparative study that examines the role of McKinsey & Co and Roland Berger Strategy Consultants in six German cities’ urban policies – examples showing that consultants frequently arrive on the scene when a moment of crisis becomes manifest. Conceptually, the paper links research on consultants as global experts for competitive structures with a globalised, entrepreneurial urban policymaking. Empirically, I show that consultants, as a solution for entrepreneurial crises, help to projectify the urban through methodical standards, to solidify competitive thinking through comparisons and networked knowledge as well as data sets, and to expect solutions through their prestigious name and external perspective. During the local process of policy implementation, however, the recommended policy strategies become appropriated, slowed down, and locally politicised. The policy input of consultants thus differs from an actual policy practice, but is capable of channelling the latter. The paper thereby contributes to specifying the role of globally referenced reasoning in urban policy decisions, critically evaluates the rise of expertise–policy relations, and calls attention to mechanisms for patching the fractures of the entrepreneurial city.

Management consultants and managing the entrepreneurial city today: Connecting concepts

Even though a strong influence of experts on policy decisions is usually regarded sceptically because of a presumed lack of democratic decision-making or missing neutrality (Kagi, 1969; Merrifield, 2014; Raco, 2013), a direct line from advice to policy decisions can rarely be identified. Empirical research on expertise–policy relations usually emphasises their complex and variable nature (Owens, 2015; Sturdy et al., 2010). The following literature review suggests a way through this complexity by emphasising the relations between management consulting as a specific type of policy advice and entrepreneurial urban policies as a shaky, yet still dominant, mode of managing cities. This conceptualisation does not aim to trivialise the complexity, but to locate it along the dimensions of globality, entrepreneurial principles, and expert-knowledge.

What is management consulting? Ideal-typically, consultants provide information, support decision-making processes, and prepare strategies for daily practices. They build on their knowledge as well as on their experience and today provide services in diverse societal areas: for enterprises and economic associations; for political parties and politicians; and for public administration, universities, private individuals, etc. (Kipping and Clark, 2012; Resch, 2005; Saint-Martin, 2000). A clear definition of management consultants within this context is difficult because criteria such as ‘fee-receiving’ (Kagi, 1969: 47) or ‘external’ and ‘temporary’ experts (Nissen, 2007: 3) are often blurred in specific projects (see also Sturdy et al., 2010). Kipping and Clark (2012: 2) thus conceive the ‘advisory activity built on the client–consultant relationship’ as key for understanding management consulting. This activity is fundamentally focused on making processes more efficient and productive: two key entrepreneurial principles.

Today, the business of management consulting is a globalised one. On the one hand, key-clients – large companies – have globalised so that they also demand advice that is familiar with transnational and/or globally diverse markets (Beaverstock et al., 2015). On the other hand, management consultants contribute themselves to the worldwide dissemination of a competition-based market logic (David, 2012; Kipping and Wright, 2012; Resch, 2005). As such, they are also involved in the general entrepreneurialisation of non-economic sectors that seek to increase their efficiency and productivity as well.

One sphere that has been entrepreneurialised within the last two or three decades through international competition and the privatisation of services and infrastructures is cities: urban policies now commonly aim at growth and strength through efficiency and productivity (Cox, 2011; Leitner et al., 2007; MacLeod, 2011). And urban policies are, like management consulting, increasingly conceived as global practice, as research on policy mobilities have revealed in detail (McCann, 2011; MacLeod, 2013; Peck and Theodore, 2015). Though a potential relationship between management consulting and urban policies (as two areas that are likewise characterised by global standards and entrepreneurial thinking) may be obvious, this relationship is neither practically nor conceptually established: the dual role of management consultants as promoters and beneficiaries of entrepreneurialised urban policies is sometimes acknowledged, though rarely examined in detail and theorised. And practically, as I will empirically show in this paper, management consultants are not involved in entrepreneurial urban policies as a matter of course, but are primarily engaged in situations that interfere with these types of policies and that are perceived as local urban crises.

Frequent diagnoses of urban crises, accelerated since 2008 (Blanco et al., 2014; Harvey, 2010; Soureli and Youn, 2009), have increased both potential policy transfers (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000: 17) and the demand for quick solutions and, thus, advice. Management consultancies are one of the policy-relevant agents whose role gains importance in times of crisis, as they do not hesitate to offer a future vision of a prospering city in reply to urban crisis (Vogelpohl and Klemp, 2018). Strikingly, most urban policy papers that resulted from the consulting processes that I will discuss below develop a vision and are labelled ‘Hamburg Vision 2020’, ‘Berlin 2020’, ‘Essen 2030’, and the like. Consultants use these visions to shape concrete local projects (Peck, 2010). My examples also signify that there is not the urban crisis, but that an urban crisis may be perceived locally because of varying reasons such as decelerating growth or a deep dissatisfaction with the effects of an entrepreneurialised city. Peck (2016) already employs the term ‘late entrepreneurialism’ to claim that the entrepreneurial mode of urban policy is shaky. Yet, local decision makers search for new urban strategies in such situations while nevertheless maintaining a consensus of entrepreneurialism (MacLeod, 2011: 2632).

Policy effects of management consulting, often self-labelled as strategy consulting, are generally not well investigated (Sturdy et al., 2010), and this is especially true for the field of urban development. Whereas McKinsey’s strong influence on the US ‘Model Cities’ during the 1960s and Arthur D. Little’s frequent studies on transport are recognised by economists and historians (David, 2012; Kipping and Clark, 2012), the influence of such companies is widely neglected in urban studies. One of the most detailed studies on this topic was published in the late 1960s: the US political scientist Kagi noticed the increasing involvement of consultants in urban decision-making processes and hence analysed ‘the roles of private consultants in urban governing’ (Kagi, 1969). He identified four key roles of consultants: raising topics, absorbing uncertainties, connecting fragmented policy fields, and preventing critique (Kagi, 1969: 52ff). Today, with the rise of analysing urban policy mobilities, consultants are identified as one type of transfer agents for travelling urban policies (McCann, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2015; Prince, 2012) – but also here, a focus on management consultants is missing. Even in cases for which a strong influence of management consultants is well-known, such as the ‘Dortmund project’, which is famous in German urban studies and which was shaped by McKinsey, the consultants’ role is noticed, but not scrutinised – in contrast to the policy strategy and the effects it generates (Frank and Greiwe, 2012; Jonas, 2014).

Management consultants found their way into policy advice through debates on the performance of public administration. Also, in cities, increasing budget deficits and a lack of evaluation standards in public departments gave rise to entrepreneurial logic within administration under the banner of ‘new public management’ (Saint-Martin, 2000, 2012). Parallel to their involvement in internal restructurings of governmental processes, management consultants began to present themselves as policy experts and to establish political principles through print and digital media. Through intensified efforts at socio-economic research and forecasting, consultants pave their own way for paid consulting projects. Just as Saint-Martin (2012: 454) states ‘the book is a tool of the consultant’, one of the McKinsey consultants of the above-mentioned ‘Dortmund project’ published a book on the relevance of and methods for commensurable, effective, strategically planned cities (Weig, 2004). His book explicitly aims to transfer the new public management principles from public administration to the management of cities as a whole.

Such developments are acknowledged in greater detail at the level of the nation-state and of national policies. Whereas McCann (2011: 111) criticises research on policy transfer for focusing on nation-states, it was this branch of research that first emphasised the role of consultants in policymaking. For example, Dolowitz and Marsh (2000: 10) state in their seminal paper on policy transfer that the consultants’ role is ‘particularly important’ because they construct global best practices. And narratives of best practices eventually set standards for concrete policymaking (also Stone, 2004). In spite of the awareness of this kind of politically relevant knowledge production, the ‘academic literature on management consultancies and their role in politics and policy advice is still at its beginning’ (Pautz, 2012: 35). Even if the perspective is broadened beyond management consultants and directed towards other types of consultants such as planning experts, professional moderators, or scholars from applied research institutes, empirical studies on their activities and impact are rare. Focusing on planning consultants, for example, Parker et al. (2014: 537) observe: ‘Given the scale of involvement that consultancies now have in […] planning, it is remarkable how little scrutiny there is of their practices, motivations and influence’.

Consultants gain political influence if they succeed in making their specific knowledge count (Owens, 2015: 5); in most cases this means: count more than the residents’ or other stakeholders’ knowledge. Even though the seemingly clear distinction between lay and expert knowledge itself is problematic (Haughton et al., 2015), experts need to find ways to give importance to their specific knowledge. It seems that experts succeed in selling their knowledge in times of crisis, as Petts and Brooks (2006) observe a preference for expert knowledge when environmental problems are dealt with; however, they emphasise that both expert and lay knowledge are usually contested. Considering the rise of expertise in urban policies, these debates may inspire urban studies as well: understanding local conceptions of expert knowledge and confronting these with the complex policy process that follows experts’ input reveals whose knowledge counts for strategic urban political decision-making.

Management consultants in six German cities: The empirical context

My starting point for examining the role of management consultants in contemporary urban policy was the practical observation that politicians frequently involve management consultancies in the design of urban future strategies – and although the strategies themselves are sometimes investigated (e.g. Frank and Greiwe, 2012; Schubert, 2006), the process of strategy making, and therefore the influence of expert advice, rarely is. Within the German federal system, strategy planning is one of the foremost responsibilities given to city governments, as it determines the urban development framework for years. When looking at the various cases in Germany, it is obvious that consultants frequently arrive on the scene when a moment of crisis becomes manifest: an out-migration of an important local firm or the awareness of lagging behind other cities’ competition management, for example. Aside from the similarities of facing an entrepreneurial crisis and consulting a global management firm, these cities display several important differences. Therefore, I chose a sample of six case studies with specific similarities and differences in regard to the state of their consulting projects and their financing models (Vogelpohl, 2017, 2018). Table 1 gives an insight into the perceived crises, expectations, and impacts of the consulting projects examined here. Figure 1 displays these cases, indicates key visions as offered by the consultants, and describes their approaches to accomplishing these visions.

Table 1.

Reasons, expectations, and effects of consulting in the six cases.

City,Period of consulting	Crisis of the entrepreneurial city	Demanded expertise by local political actors,in direct quotes	Impact of the advice
Berlin, 2010	Low growth rates of gross value added; no distinctive competitive business sectors	Pro bono project; no explicit demand	Dialogue on urban future strategy; start-up strategy
Dortmund, 1999–2000	Shrinking steel, mining, and brewing industries; concrete event: out-migration of an important firm to another German city	‘After the degeneration of the steel industry we urgently needed to find a new way … And we needed a process that is not driven by diverse branch-specific egoisms, but that is focused – a strength that a management consultancy like McKinsey has.’ (DO11_admin)	Cluster-oriented urban development; new economic development department
Essen, 2012–2013	Shrinking energy industries; large communal debts	‘We live in a city with stark financial problems. And if you not only want to consolidate, but also to develop a city, you need a strategy. Behind that is the idea of a growing city, well, to enter the competition, for sure … Yet, we did not want classic clusters, but to put the people at the heart of the process. Roland Berger was commissioned to moderate this process.’ (E21_polit)	Urban strategy building on active citizens; new urban development agency
Goslar/ Osterode, 2010–2012	Lack of competitive economic structure after cessation of Zonal Border Area government aid	‘We have bad rates of gross value added and we needed to look at which areas we can improve the depth of that gross value added … Well, McKinsey is certainly capable of structuring such projects because the consultants have access to much knowledge – be it databases, be it experts.’ (GOS40_polit)	New interregional development agency; attempts for cluster-building
Halle/Saale, 2002	Shrinking chemical and mining industries; bad image; concrete event: defeat in a locational competition for a multinational concern	‘After the degeneration of the industry and the out-migration of people, the question was: how should the city proceed? The city always struggled with a concept, was hardly graspable … We said: “we need a 10-year strategy like Munich so that we know where to go”. And then we approached Roland Berger.’ (HAL26_polit)	City marketing agency
Hamburg, 2001	Shrinking harbour industries; diffuse competitive alternatives	Pro bono project; no explicit demand	Dialogue on urban future; facilitation of a ‘growing city’ strategy

Figure 1.

Map of the six case studies on urban strategies supported by management consultancies.

The visions generated by consultants point to globally oriented urban strategies: they imagine competitive and widely popular cities. Consultants' approaches stem from their activity as global experts: McKinsey is a global management consultancy with around 9000 employees in more than 100 offices worldwide, and Roland Berger is a consultancy with around 3000 employees in 50 offices worldwide. The global character of the consulting practice is the focus of this paper because this feature was identified as crucial in the interviews conducted. The empirical base for this analysis consists of interviews with 46 individuals. For each of the six case studies, I interviewed politicians, employees from the local municipality, most of the consultants involved, people who worked with the consultants, individuals who now work in projects that resulted from the consulting process, and critics of the projects. The interviews lasted between 30 minutes and 3 hours and covered the contemporary historical background of the city, the consulting project itself (its commission, content, and procedure), and an evaluation of the project. For this paper I cross-analysed in great detail all interview sequences that mention the words ‘global’, ‘world’, and ‘worldwide’, coded the statements, and re-contextualised these sequences within the interview as a whole. The results are (a) the five significant features of global expertise, as described in the next section, and (b) local responses and critiques of that global advice, presented in the section after next.

Specificities of globally operating management consultants in urban policy

McKinsey and Roland Berger have a media profile and a reputation for providing advice backed up by multi-case experiences. In the interviews, the global aspect of these companies often shows through when interviewees talk about (a) the company’s size, (b) different capabilities of urban political institutions on the one hand and of external experts on the other, or (c) the practicability of the proposed solutions. Overall, the interviews demonstrate that the consultants mostly impact the style of urban policymaking and have much less influence over substantial policy decisions. The following section discusses the five most often mentioned features of consulting by a global firm, beginning with the most frequently exposed feature.

Methodical know-how and the ‘projectisation’ of the urban

… analyses, then project ideas grounded on those [analyses], then operationalizing these project ideas. Like with business plans – a tool kit which business developers usually do not know and that they [the consultants] applied like in their usual consulting activities. (DO13_admin)¹

This quote from an officer in Dortmund’s public business development agency highlights the consultants’ methodical know-how: how to manage and streamline processes is the most often mentioned innovation that consultants introduce into urban policymaking. The words ‘process’, ‘process management’, or ‘procedural things’ appear in nearly every interview. In this context, ‘process’ does not refer to the framing of the urban as a constant process of becoming, in the Lefebvrian sense of a dialectical logic (Lefebvre, 1969). It refers rather to practical policymaking itself: political decisions for selecting priorities, and administrative operations for structuring and realising these priorities. Furthermore, the methodical know-how to manage processes is mentioned so often in the interviews not only because it is innovative for the local officials to proceed in a very straight and systematised way; it is also judged as a comparatively permanent effect – compared with some concrete project ideas that the consultants deliver as well, but which are rarely realised.

Whereas methodical know-how is generally very well respected as a way out of the entrepreneurial crisis, urban officials in particular express critiques, or at least reservations, concerning the lack of qualification to suggest substantial new urban policies. For example, a business developer in Halle complains that the consultants did not put forth any new ideas, but instead only transformed existing ones into a systematic approach that was very nicely presentable. The contrast between the major impact of introducing methodical know-how and the minor impact of introducing concrete ideas for projects (such as setting up a health cluster or organising start-up competitions) exposes the character of the consultants’ influence on the urban. The change that consultants actuate is the concept of the urban as a project – a project that gets a catchy title and appears manageable if certain standardised steps are followed: analysing the status quo, declaring a vision (mostly one of a growing city), defining goals, identifying three or four lead projects for each goal, etc.

This ‘projectisation’ of the urban, however, is not only a question of form. Even though Halle’s above-mentioned business developer would have liked to see new ideas and thus new topics for urban policy more directly, different forms produce different substance. First, by advising cities on urban policy, consultants extend their market beyond administrative reforms within public departments (‘new public management’, Saint-Martin, 2012) into policymaking. With the projectisation of policymaking, they introduce, accelerate, and stabilise the entrepreneurial logic of the urban because such projects focus on economic strengths and assume their trickle-down effects. Second, the entrepreneurial projects appear especially plausible through the consultants’ persuasive vocabulary and striking diagrams. This effectively undermines the complexity of the urban, impedes objections, and erases contradictions. This is what the McKinsey consultant who steered the Goslar/Osterode case means when he describes the dual nature of his team’s influence: ‘both procedural – let’s say, to get things through – and substantial – to make it, I’d say, comprehensible and fact-based so that it’s an objective choice in the end, just as objective as possible’ (GOS39_consult).

Networked knowledge and thinking through comparing

The second aspect of the consultants’ impact on urban policy refers to the worldwide and famous, sometimes infamous, firm-specific networks of consultants – both current and former (Germany’s Manager Magazin called it ‘the uncanny network’). The large management consultancies, especially McKinsey, have well established systems of fast communication, of access to former projects that might inspire a current one, and of retrieving preset Excel databases, PowerPoint charts, and the like. The consultants claim that it is this networked knowledge that enables them to predict future developments and to provide solutions for problems of any kind. The consultant in charge of the Hamburg project describes this as his firm’s advantage:

We just constantly do projects on every topic in every industry. You can check in the computer which studies have been done where. Then you call the people. Then you talk with them. I think this is the advantage of size. (HH32_consult)

The consultants’ ability to refer to international examples and to provide insights into policy processes taken from other locations gives them the appearance of having an experience-based internationality. Combined with the firms’ background in both the manufacturing and service industries as well as in the public sector, this networked knowledge is decisive in creating the credibility of global consultants: it turns them into potential experts in complex urban issues. Furthermore, this credibility enables access to and arouses interest from local elites, particularly local entrepreneurs. New types of urban networks become possible because, as Resch (2005: 15) finds, municipalities signal to the elites that they are engaging the same global experts these elites esteem. The official leader of the cooperation with McKinsey in Dortmund confirms the perspective:

[The international expertise] is certainly something that only a network of competence, of access to and analysis of databases which have this global scope may deliver. You cannot describe [this situation] without this access and without the contacts that were established thereby. (DO15_admin)

Contact with local elites is obviously one instrument the consultants have to solve the dilemma between maintaining the firm’s standards and adapting to local contexts, a challenge that comes with the globalisation of knowledge-intensive services, according to Beaverstock et al. (2015). The consultants are able to carry out their standard methodical programme and may fill it with their contacts’ ideas – and thus fill the gap between methodical know-how and the missing local political knowledge. So new local networks often do not include the broader public (Vogelpohl, 2018) but comprise only established decision makers. What emerges is an ‘old boys’ network’ (HAL24_consult).

With their frequent references to other cities, the consultants eventually introduce comparisons as a vehicle for standard solutions and best-practice thinking. Comparisons are used for two key reasons. First, the current state of the city is compared with that of other cities, for instance in terms of gross value added or number of start-ups, in order to underline a city’s underperformance and thus the need for action (McKinsey & Co, 2001, McKinsey, 2010; Roland Berger, 2002). Then comparisons are used to suggest solutions that have been successful in other places. Yet, such comparisons are also the main reason for criticising the work of large management consultancies and their influence on the urban policy. The local criticism adds to the criticism that focuses the comparisons’ effects on underpinning a competitive urbanism (Baker and Ruming, 2015; McCann, 2011), the view that the comparisons used are meaningless and only aim to shock and gain attention.

Simplifying the crisis through extensive and fast data

The third aspect of the influence of consulting on the urban is very closely linked to the first two: consultants work with extensive data sets that they partly take from their firm’s internal servers and partly gather from official statistics (for example, concerning economic development, population changes, or fiscal spending). This usually impresses local stakeholders. Local officials in particular emphasised how fast the consultants came up with comprehensive and already systematised data. ‘Overnight’ (GOS36c_admin) was often said, without exaggerating. Several times, they even added half-ironically that the consultants obviously do not need any sleep and that they work at a breathtaking velocity.

Overall, the routine of using big data sets is judged very ambivalently. To evaluate this, many interviewees use phrases such as ‘one has to say’ or ‘you have to admit’. These phrases reflect a general scepticism which could be partially tempered when the locals acknowledged that they could not have generated these data themselves because of staff shortages and lack of access to data sets. Local officials in particular usually appreciate that the consultants do not care for the usual divisions of duties as are common in the public realm. The scepticism could mostly not be erased, however. The most important concern of those locally involved was not a fear of standardised diagrams or solutions, but was a doubt about the usefulness of the data in and of themselves. Two short quotes illustrate this concern: One opposition politician in Berlin said that ‘maybe they put so much energy into the survey that they did not have any energy to care for the actual advice – or no time or no means, I don’t know’ (B09_crit); and a governing politician from Goslar summarised: ‘McKinsey did a fantastic job in presenting projects; they can convince. But regarding substance, one has to say that they basically gathered information, compiled it, dressed it up and that was it’ (GOS35_polit).

These critiques manifest the consultants’ narrow conception of crisis along globally present parameters. Conceptually, the focus on data emphasises the measureable and thus marginalises all lived aspects of the urban as well as dilutes differential relations and the power geometries involved (Massey, 1991). Practically, it reinforces the exclusion of citizens’ voices in urban decision-making, something which is already produced through the new networks made between already-powerful decision makers. Addressing the Dortmund case, Jonas (2014: 2134) sees even an ‘“expertocratic” dominance’ through the use of slides and spreadsheets and states: ‘the “expertocratic” steps of matching, quantifying, interpreting and predicting were reserved to a privileged group of individuals whose members were frequently not even physically present’.

Prestigious name and high expectations for crisis management

The large international management consultancies are widely known. The names Boston Consulting Group, Accenture, and McKinsey sound familiar to many. This prestige – with both positive and negative associations – has several effects for urban policymaking influenced by these consultancies. The name of a firm alone serves as a door-opener. It provokes curiosity. Therefore, a broad range of public departments and people are usually willing to cooperate with the consulting project – not only officials and planners, but also entrepreneurs and representatives of civil society. The phrase used by consultants as well as by others is: ‘With the Mackies (or Bergers or another of the big firms), you can get an appointment with anybody’.

Another effect of the name is greater public attention. If, for example, a new urban strategy is to be announced and public support for it is being sought, reference to the consultants’ involvement supports public awareness. And a third effect of the prestigious name is the consultancy’s reputation, which makes them appear as one of the rare actors able to handle complex situations. The following quote from an officer in Dortmund’s economic development department, however, indicates the ambivalence of this effect: ‘The administration is not able to handle such a complex project’. But then he reflects: ‘The consultant once said to me that he had never learnt so much before – that the public sector was much much more complex than the private. And I confirm: It is much more complex’ (DO16_admin).

All three highlighted effects – opening doors, attracting attention, and handling complexity – can, however, be interpreted as having problematic characteristics as well. The large consultancies are also famous for being extraordinarily expensive, for essentially proposing cutbacks, for organising staff reductions, etc. That is why some interviewees said that the consultants are only a door-opener for those who have not yet worked with them, or: ‘We would like to continue the work [on urban policy], but only without the consultants!’ (GOS36b_admin). One recurring disappointment was that the prestigious networks raised false hopes. For example, in some of the cities, officials and politicians hoped to become connected to global enterprises that could potentially relocate to their city or at least open a local subsidiary. But this never came true.

The ambivalent evaluation of cooperating with a prestigious global firm points to general clashes between experiences, expectations, and practices that characterise such cooperation. The complex urban political procedures (between political coalitions, between departments, or together with the public) may sometimes trigger the demand for trained experts that help to manoeuvre through urgent decision-making. But whereas management consultants may be trained in complex restructurings of enterprises with relatively clear hierarchies, their expertise in policymaking is sparse. In cities, they are confronted with more extensive schedules and more diverse demands for participation, for example. Thus they eventually contribute to streamlining processes with the methodical know-how but rarely fulfil expectations for bringing the substantial change that their prestigious names imply.

External perspective and channelling local responsibilities

The fifth and last aspect of expert-driven urban policy is the external perspective which management consultants provide in contrast to the perspective of the locally involved. Even though the consultants sometimes live in the respective cities, they are perceived as external because of their employment in a global firm. According to my interviewees, the external perspective enables the consultants – in a positive way – to disrespect usual delineations of duties as well as traditionally perceived limits. Furthermore, their engagement is ostensibly not driven by particular local interests, thus their work seems unbiased. So, as many local officials mention, consultants represent a neutral third party. Another positively judged facet of this external perspective is the role of the provocateur: ‘Externals have more opportunities to say: “So, we will do it this way!”’ (B01_admin). Consultants seem to have the chance to ask difficult questions or give sharp remarks, also in an undiplomatic way without needing to fear long-term contestations or blockings. The downside of externality, however, is that the consultants are remote from local history and from local conditions, so they often cannot provide practicable ideas that are viable throughout a policy process – a problem that has already become visible in the other aspects of consulting-driven urban policy.

In the descriptions of the interviewees, two general processes become evident. First, a mutual shifting of responsibilities becomes possible: both the locally involved actors and the consultants may refer to the influence of the respective other to legitimate the concrete organisation of processes and projects: ‘together with Roland Berger there were things and promises developed that were not actually doable’ (HAL25_admin) versus ‘we develop strategies, … but if something should happen, that depends on political will’ (HAL24_consult). Sometimes, the respective influence is used to justify difficult, maybe unsuccessful, processes and projects; and sometimes the influence – the global expertise in this case – serves to gain a greater power to convince locally. In this vein, an economic development agent from Osterode assesses:

So this is not from the first-person ‘me’ perspective and ‘we, we, we.’ Instead, you have comparative numbers and say: ‘So, this is “objective” (in quotation marks) now. […] That is something different from my own numbers.’ (GOS36c_admin)

Second, external expertise builds the ground for new local alliances – and exclusions. Practically, the consultants interview people who are, in their view, able to judge the city’s current state and its potential development possibilities. These individuals are usually political decision makers, important entrepreneurs, or opinion leaders from diverse societal areas such as economics, politics, education, religion, etc. After doing so, the consultants also set up new networks between the interview participants through inviting them to debate the new urban policy ideas in special media or dinner events. In some cases, these individuals are also chosen for a steering committee that accompanies the policy process. Consequently, already-influential decision makers get a stronger voice and known ‘local personalities […] provided input, in the sense of participation’ (E21_polit). In the shadow of these new local networks, however, the diversity of voices is often small and people who are not deliberately invited to participate have no chance to speak to the ongoing urban policy process (Vogelpohl, 2018).

Complicating ‘simple’ urban processes: Contextualising the consulting project

The more or less standardised methodological training of global consultants comprises the provision of ‘simple’ solutions for urban problems such as declining growth or austerity – ‘simple’ in the sense of easy applicability. The simplicity of the projects is not primarily characterised by the exact same outcome in terms of constantly offering the same solutions and advice; rather, it is characterised by the type of solutions and the type of methodical thinking: local problems are narrowed down to four or five fields (such as clusters), and for each of them, four or five projects are suggested as efficient solutions. Practically, the simplicity is often the entry point for critique of this global rationality; it will also structure the remaining section, in which I contextualise the consulting project within the practice of urban policymaking: I present four parallel and subsequent processes that mediate and complicate the consultants’ simplifying effects: participation, appropriation, slowdown, and politicisation.

But first a general note: the procedure of complication is induced by the polity structure of cities as well as by critiques. The former implies a concretisation of an urban future strategy into practical steps in public (planning) departments on the one hand, and an approval of the strategy within the local parliament on the other hand. In both these steps, oppositional voices and concerns are raised, leading to some of the suggested plans being reworked or even rejected. For example, this was the case with the idea of a theme park in Goslar/Osterode in order to strengthen the tourist industry, an idea quickly discarded in the local political debate (interviews GOS35_polit; GOS36b_admin). Both the tradition and the ambition to involve diverse actors are generally common for policy processes in Germany. This complex array of actors has even been identified as the reason for a comparatively late inclusion of consultants into policymaking in Germany (Kipping and Wright, 2012). The latter, the critique, diversified the strategy process and opened it to the public. Critics drew attention to the fact that consultants, through their method of number crunching and interviews, only brought existing ideas together; critics also emphasised that only a small elite of the urban population was part of the relatively quick consulting projects, which lasted between 3 and 16 months in the cases presented here (Vogelpohl, 2017).

Only in the city of Essen was a comparatively long and intensive participation process included in the consulting project itself. This had been a reaction to critiques from within the city’s planning department. Interestingly, this was made possible in a way counterintuitive to the type of financing for the consultants: whereas the studies for Hamburg and Berlin were pro bono, studies for Halle and Goslar/Osterode were publicly financed either by the respective federal state or by the city itself, the study for Dortmund was privately financed by ThyssenKrupp, a major enterprise in the city, and similarly, the study in Essen was funded by a local entrepreneurs’ interest group. In Essen, it was exactly the fact that a private interest group paid for the consultants that led to a longer debate on how the strategy process should be organised: the private sponsors wanted broad political support across all parties in the city council. This also supported the city planning department’s attempt to follow their usual qualitative urban development standards, which include a thorough participation process. Consequently, Essen’s strategy process was participatory. The consultants were relegated to acting only as ‘moderators and initiators’ (E17_other). However, the Essen case is exceptional in this respect.

Another process complicating the consultants’ determined advice is the appropriation of relevant topics. However different the individual examples may be, in all cases, nearly all local interviewees emphasised that it was not the consultants’ ideas that characterised the eventual urban strategies, but their own ideas or those of other local actors. By reclaiming the origin of the debated topics, the locals also claim the right to modify every suggestion: ‘Maybe it was not legitimate and not following the spirit of consulting, but we indeed made modifications on our own authority, simply for the sake of practical implementation’ (HAL27_proj). The moment when such appropriations occur during the policy-making process strongly depends on the interaction between the consultants and the locally involved. Sometimes appropriation is even the goal of the consulting process itself – again, in the cases presented here, this was particularly true in Essen, where from the beginning many people wanted the consultants only to moderate and organise. And sometimes the final urban strategies are appropriated in a slower, more decentralised process. In the course of this slower appropriation, the topics that are most relevant for urban development usually change substantially.

Consulting-based urban policy is a fast policy, also in the sense of ‘silver-bullet policies’ (Peck and Theodore, 2015: xv) that are ready-made and globally moveable, but even more in the sense of quick analyses and fast decisions within only a few months (Kuus, 2015). This high speed, however, is significantly reduced when the time after consultants finish their work and local officials continue the process themselves is taken into account (Vogelpohl, 2017). This slowdown allows for a revision and more intensive integration of the advice into ongoing developments in the cities. Often, this also includes a broader participation of various groups from the urban public. This slowdown is a very important way to question and rework the experts’ view because the inclusion of various people and various voices into the debate takes significant time. Additionally, the diversification of voices also strongly depends on specific dates – as was the case in Essen, where the consultants first did not plan any participation and later wanted to realise the plans very quickly, even during the summer holidays. Only a slowdown made the participation possible.

Lastly, the consultants’ results are politicised through various channels: for example, the results are presented at local events, sometimes closed to the public, sometimes open; they are presented at press conferences and consequently debated in the local media; and they usually become a topic within the local city council. In short: a public debate begins. Certainly, the precise time at which this occurs – after the consultants have left the cities – does not provide conditions for bottom-up urban policymaking. Yet, this point in time is still before the consultants’ thoughts and advice (which are usually only on paper at this stage) become effective or materialise in any form. The thoughts and advice provided by the consultants are finally debated, particularly with regard to their effects on a diverse population. Eventually, they are either promoted or discarded: ‘They are used as inspiration, as exchange. To me, talking about ideas means to question: Can I champion the ideas or would I rather not?’ (E17_other). Politicisation is thus a critical step in examining and eventually complicating the experts’ perspective.

Conclusion

In times of challenging urban crises, advice for simple and fast strategies for new urban policies seems welcome. Management consultants are trained to provide such simple and fast strategies, and this seems particularly true for globally experienced consultants of large firms. With their routine approach of first dramatising a city’s performance based on data sets, then setting a vision of a prospering city against the status quo, and, finally, outlining a corresponding project management, they convince local decision makers that a novel urban strategy is needed. As shown, however, the relation between expertise and concrete policies is complicated. Three tensions filter through all features of global expertise and their complications. These tensions characterise expertise–policy relations on the urban scale and will thus structure the concluding remarks: tensions between global and local, between style and knowledge, and between exclusion and inclusion.

The global–local tension is rooted in the very purpose of the consulting projects: locally perceived problems are to be solved with the help of global expertise. Whereas the boundaries of these are generally blurred (i.e. as the problems are not only local but should be tackled locally, or as consultants may be locals and work together with locals), a distinction between global experts and local issues as well as persons is maintained during the consulting projects. This is particularly because the consultants’ global expertise and extensive networks grant them the appearance of being appropriate assistants for steering growth-oriented urban development. Their global character substantiates their local convincing power – and thus the local politicians’ power to expedite new urban future strategies.

The style–knowledge tension mirrors a general debate on consultants and policy advice: whereas some argue that innovation is key for the success of management consulting (Muzio et al., 2011), others emphasise that status and legitimation are at least as important as new knowledge (Sturdy et al., 2010). My analysis shows that management consulting actuates a new style of policymaking – a projectisation of the urban – but that it hardly delivers substantial new ideas and thus innovative knowledge. Even though a new style of policymaking comprises new methodical knowledge, the tension is due to the locals’ expectation that consultants will suggest applicable projects and not teach project management. With the focus on the style of policymaking, the management experts essentially facilitate the power to prioritise: ‘We introduce the expertise that comes from the private sectors. […] It is about important priorities that didn’t exist before’ (GOS39_consult).

The orientation towards a few priorities eventually points to the third overall tension, that between exclusion and inclusion. This concerns, first, the issue of who should be integrated into an urban strategy process. The new networks that thrive locally during a consulting process include individuals who are often not part of urban development processes; but all five aspects of global consulting that I found comprise an exclusion of a broad civic participation and of voices that the consultants have no interest in or have not thought about. Second, considering the content, urban development strategies usually try to respond to (sometimes contradictory) urban differences and to cope with the challenge of finding a practicable way to govern while satisfying the needs of a diverse urban population (Vigar et al., 2005). Consultants, however, try to single out those aspects of the urban that promise future growth and use these as key components for the urban strategy. Such a data-supported one-dimensional focus on strengths allows for (re-)establishing the logic of the entrepreneurial city as axiomatic. Negotiating these tensions in such a way that the global, a project style, and a selective inclusion gain priority without obviously understating the local, new knowledge, and differential perspectives is a crucial consulting mechanism to patch fractures of the entrepreneurial city.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank all interviewees involved in this research and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I thank the German Research Foundation DFG (grant number VO 2015/2-1).

Notes

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