Abstract
“Perhaps ‘we are all consultants now’, or at least, becoming so” (Sturdy, 2012, p. 472)
Albeit not originating from Sturdy, Wright and Wylie (2015), the above quotation nicely summarizes the main thesis developed in Management as Consultancy and echoes the title of Grey’s (1999) article, some fifteen years ago: “We are all managers now.”
The authors explicitly pose the following research question: what might neo-bureaucratic management look like, how does it emerge and with what outcomes? The same answer is repeated three times: management consulting. They conclude that (a) neo-bureaucratic management has become almost similar to management consulting activities; (b) management consulting is a means through which neo-bureaucracy is diffused; and (c) neo-bureaucracy encourages work relationships, identities and careers typically found in management consulting firms.
The book comprises two parts. The first part is a theoretical reflection on neo-bureaucracy as an organizational archetype and as a new style of management (chapters 1 and 2). The second part is informed by 136 interviews in over 50 organizations ranging from multinational financial services, communications and manufacturing firms, to local and national government departments and health care institutions in the UK and Australia. These interviews document how both internal management consultants and what the authors call “consultant managers” (e.g., project managers, heads of business improvement, etc.) define their work and make sense of the difficulties that they face in their day-to-day activities (chapters 3 to 7).
We know, based on the work of Clegg (2012), Courpasson (2000), Farrell and Morris (2003), Vie (2010) and many others, that there has been a shift away from Weber’s bureaucracy: less rule adherence, fewer hierarchical controls, less standardization, and more flexibility, increased trust and more self-directed controls, to the point that some have begun using the phrase “post bureaucracy.” Yet, we cannot fail to notice that bureaucracies have not disappeared and remain a widespread organizational form today, in the public sector, obviously, but not exclusively. Bureaucracies have however metamorphosed into soft, light, hybrid, customer-oriented, autopoietic and selectively heterarchical systems of organizing. The authors of Management as Consultancy thus find it more relevant to speak of neo- (rather than post-) bureaucracies. Neo-bureaucracies, in their view, are organizations where traditional top-down, centralized systems of control are juxtaposed with areas of delegated autonomy, where functional teams coexist with multidisciplinary project teams, and where bureaucratic management tools and standardization processes do not preclude a certain level of improvisation.
The first two chapters provide a useful summary of recent research on evolving forms of bureaucracy and how they have shaped the evolution of managerial activities in certain ways, but these chapters also trigger new, unanswered questions. In the mind of the reader, management consultants (internal or external) are often asked to bring structure, standardization and rationality wherever there are confusion, bricolage and efficiency issues. While consultants’ own work may be coined neo-bureaucratic, one may wonder whether, paradoxically perhaps, their activities may lead to de-neo-bureaucratizing the organizational units where they are asked to intervene.
We are also left asking ourselves whether neo-bureaucratic management only equates to what managers do in neo-bureaucracies, or whether the managerial activities performed by non-managers in these organizations have become somewhat neo-bureaucratic too. The omission of managerial work in understandings of management was deplored by Grey (1999), and we don’t seem to have entirely overcome this difficulty here. Of course, there is little consensus on what management means in the first place, but Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, p. 79) suggest that “neo-management definitely remains management”; in other words, neo-management is still about controlling and supervising. Since the 1990s, however, neo-managers are expected to be intuitive, humanist, creative and visionaries. In Management as Consultancy, we realize that internal consultants almost perfectly embody this seemingly liberating (and actually highly anxiogenic) ideal diffused in the 1990s; we also learn what some of the difficulties and tensions about which Boltanski and Chiapello had only speculated actually look like in practice.
The empirical part of the book mainly focuses on internal consultants, about whom very little is known other than what the authors of this book, themselves, have taught us in prior studies. Both internal consultants and “consultant managers” seem to constantly navigate the paradoxes and tensions that characterize their outsider-within position in the organization. We learn that they come from a wide range of academic and professional backgrounds (information technology, engineering, human resources, accounting and the military) but that most are former external consultants, thereby forming what the authors call a consulting diaspora. They are mostly involved in change, project or programme management support assignments and are keen to espouse external consultants’ attitudes, vocabulary and tools, including the Six Sigma methods and jargon, which causes some to be nicknamed “the secret Six Sigma Society” by perplexed or amused colleagues. Their roles range from “organizational conscience,” “hand maiden” and “doormat,” to “fix-it person” or “fire fighter.” They refer to executives and operational managers as “clients” and work hard to show them their added value through evidence-based measures of efficiency enhancement, and post-intervention cost–benefit analyses. This commercialized view of relationships with line managers, combined with having an insider’s knowledge but an outsider’s perspective, contributes to exacerbating consultant managers’ ambivalent work identity.
One of the virtues of this book is that it vividly illustrates, with powerful interview quotes, some of the difficulties that internal consultants face, including the risk of losing their external viewpoint—“if you stay too long… you go native” (p. 149), the potential lack of recognition of their expertise by line managers—they do “stuff” but “nobody actually knows what it is” (p. 165), the fear of being the first dismissed in times of cost-cutting, and their lack of legitimacy, as no one can be a prophet in his own land. Their insecurity is also fuelled by their perceived need to protect internal clients from external management consultants and from other internal functions (e.g., coaching and mentoring teams, HR professionals) who don’t hesitate to poach on their turf.
Many of the distinguishing features of consultant managers discussed in this book are in fact shared by other employees in today’s organizations. Internal auditors, for example, who existed before the neo-bureaucratic turn, have also long been confronted with the dilemma of having to rely on senior management’s patronage in order to get things done, while trying to maintain a certain freedom of speech to justify their worth and credibility vis-a-vis operational managers. Moreover, autonomy at work is a privilege (but also a double-edged sword) that consultant managers have in common with almost all civil servants. The new public management doxa indeed dictates that increased autonomy is a necessary condition for increased accountability. Consultant managers’ reliance on a network of professional contacts that extends beyond their organization’s enclosure is not a defining trait either: with the spread of social media use in the workplace, most employees, from medical doctors 1 in hospitals to product designers in software programming firms, 2 cross organizational boundaries daily, interacting with outsiders while at work. Surely not all of them fit under the neo-bureaucratic manager category!
This book is a good reminder that management consultant is not a homogeneous group and that there are distinct classes of professionals within it, including internal consultants who deserve as much academic attention as their better-known counterparts in professional service firms. A wave of “organizational-professional conflict” (OPC) studies, in the 1980s–1990s, concerned itself with how professionals employed in corporations resolved—or sometimes failed to resolve—the dilemmas associated with being subjected to bureaucratic controls, on the one hand, and preserving their professional autonomy and freedom of judgment, on the other hand. However, recent sociological literature on the professions reveals a loss of interest in such in-house professionals. Management as Consultancy encourages us to revisit the surprisingly enduring tensions highlighted in OPC studies with fresh eyes. In theory, these tensions should have diminished, given the increased autonomy and flexibility permitted in neo-bureaucratic work settings. And yet, some of these well-known conflicts—e.g., routinized versus customized work; insider versus outsider identity; corporate versus professional allegiance; autonomy versus formal controls—are more intense than ever (chapters 6 and 7).
In the empirical chapters, the individual analytical lens tends to prevail over the organizational analytical lens (hence the perceived disconnect, sometimes, between the first and the second part of the book) and interview quotes are often mobilized in a way that almost silences consultant managers’ respective organizational contexts. To build on this original and stimulating work, future research might attempt to provide more nuanced accounts of how different styles of neo-bureaucratic management may coexist in contemporary organizations and participate, each in their own way, in the sophisticated orchestration of market, hierarchy and networked modes of control, which constitutes one of the most distinctive marks of neo-bureaucracies.
Christopher Lasch once claimed that “the new professionals share so many characteristics with the managers of industry that the professional elite must be regarded not as an independent class but as a branch of modern management” (Lasch, 1979, p. 234, emphasis added). More than three decades later, Management as Consultancy has eloquently confirmed the pertinence of this assertion, not from a political standpoint but from a practical standpoint, by illustrating the blurring of management and consulting careers in neo-bureaucratic organizations. If we agree with Clegg (2012) that the question of power was at the core of traditional bureaucracies and remains so in neo-bureaucracies, more research will be needed to understand the academic background and the career trajectories—including time spent in external management consulting firms—that allow certain managers to position themselves as part of neo-bureaucratic organizations’ power elite.