Abstract
How do junior management consultants learn to construct a professional service offer that their clients perceive as valuable? This question is of interest to organizational scholars of professional service firms, valuation, performativity, professions, identity, and human resources. It speaks to practice scholars adhering to a relational ontology (e.g., Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011), especially those interested in how value(s) arise(s) during the performance of practices (see Gehman, Treviño, & Garud, 2013). It is equally relevant for (institutionalist) scholars of professional service firms and professionals (e.g., Suddaby & Viale, 2011), and to organizational scholars of performativity (e.g., Gond, Cabantous, Harding, & Learmonth, 2016). Alaric Bourgoin’s (auto-)ethnography, written in French, offers a journey through a universe in which junior management consultants learn to develop professional service products that clients perceive as valuable. Bourgoin shows the reader how such intangible service products come into existence and gain value.
Bourgoin’s ethnography draws on three years of professional work experience as a junior management consultant. He engaged in participant observation and auto-ethnography, taking field notes, reflecting on his experiences, and analyzing his observations in real time. Inspired by grounded theory, he collected and analyzed data during five assignments. He took rough field notes, wrote up his emergent analysis, and crystallized case studies in a back-and-forth movement between analysis and further data collection. The result is a well-documented account of how junior management consultants, occupying a low power position, learn to generate a professional service offer that their clients perceive as valuable.
A core argument of this book is that management consultants are tightrope walkers (équilibristes). As Fabian Muniesa mentions in his foreword to the book, this metaphor casts junior management consultants as elite performers who pay acute attention to the extremely demanding challenges they face, frequently surpassing their own capacities and fears. The negative psychological consequences of such performances (e.g., insecurity, tension, stress) are also addressed. The metaphor of tightrope walkers also characterizes management consultants as artistic performers who dazzle their audiences with rhetorical eloquence, elements of visual and material arts, choreographic precision, and imagination. As such, their performances resemble those of many politicians and leaders. The book represents junior management consultants as professionals who learn to exploit to perfection the productive tension between the technical and artistic dimensions of their work in order to imbue their professional services and themselves with high (perceived) value. Bourgoin’s account of management consultants is far more positive than that offered by Annamaria Garden in her 2017 book Organizational change in practice (see Bartunek, 2018). Nevertheless, his portrayal of junior management consultants is by no means naive. He emphasizes the risky balancing act that junior management consultants engage in as they struggle to establish themselves as valuable for the client. Bourgoin gives voice to feelings of insecurity, powerlessness and anguish that junior management consultants experience as they literally put themselves on the line to develop a valuable service offer.
The book is organized as layers that gradually add complexity to the creation of value. In the introduction, Bourgoin presents his work as a contribution to a broader societal debate on the value of management consulting. He defines his object of study as the act of “giving value” (mettre en valeur) (pp. 138–143); that is, the actions that imbue a professional service offer with value from the perspective of clients. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to real-life situations that show some puzzling dimensions of management consulting that subsequently serve as reference points for an in-depth treatment of different practices that produce value. Bourgoin illustrates what it means to give value to a professional service offer and highlights some of the challenges and complexities it presents for junior management consultants. For instance, he points to relational dynamics through which junior management consultants learn to show respect, build relationships with clients, and become assertive in their professional interactions. Bourgoin tells the story from the perspective of junior management consultants, not that of their senior colleagues and clients.
In chapter 2, Bourgoin builds a theoretical framework of valuation that is anchored in a pragmatist sociological tradition, inspired primarily by Dewey and the work of Boltanski and Thévenot on justification (1991). Bourgoin also draws theoretically on a stream of research in economic sociology, which investigates the social construction of economic value (e.g., Callon & Muniesa, 2005), as well as on valuation studies, and performativity. He builds this compounded framework to motivate his own approach, which emphasizes the relational, practice-oriented, and situated nature of value creation. The complex theoretical structure could have been somewhat simplified by positioning his work as a contribution to a particular line of scholarship, although such a positioning might dilute some of the uniquely French flavor of his work.
The subsequent three chapters present three complementary sets of practices that imbue management consultant services with value. Chapter 3 is devoted to the act of formulating a commercial offer. The author shows in this chapter how management consultants proceed to formulate a distinct commercial offer and to articulate its added value for the client in measurable terms. He emphasizes the relational processes of trying out different arguments and tailoring the offer to the client, eventually reaching a state of temporary stability relating to the value of this offer.
In chapter 4, Bourgoin turns to the visual dimension, notably the crafting of PowerPoint slides. Bourgoin argues that a slide gains its performative effect through trial and error, becoming convincing once it demonstrates a relevant effect on the target, reflects the situational analysis, and is internally coherent. His account extends prior work on the persuasive features of PowerPoint slides (e.g., Gabriel, 2008) with a relational and situated account. This chapter is remarkable in its in-depth and dynamic account of how management consultants use verbal, visual and numeric communication to enhance the perceived value of their services. The chapter sheds light on the cumulative effects of using multiple modes of communication to ascribe value to management consulting services. The use of multimodality as an analytical approach contributes to the recent visual and material turn in organizational theory (Boxenbaum, Jones, Meyer, & Svejenova, 2018), offering methodological inspiration for future research.
Chapter 5 examines how management consultants account financially for their delivered services. This chapter shows how time is reported and justified, how costs are calculated, and how added value is measured and represented to the client. This topic resonates with prior work on calculative devices (e.g., Callon & Muniesa, 2005).
The last two chapters and the conclusion address the value attributed to management consultants themselves as an integral part of the professional service offer. Chapter 6 is devoted to how junior management consultants acquire competence, such as a high capacity for adaptation, productivity, rapidity, and formalization. Chapter 7 focuses on the relational processes of establishing authority, such as the ability to insert oneself in a social space and mobilize sufficient support and legitimacy to establish authority. The conclusion addresses how junior management consultants cope with the incessant requirements to construe themselves as valuable. Bourgoin emphasizes the ongoing struggles, which unfold in a fluid relational context and require junior management consultants to continuously reaffirm their own capacities and value.
These final chapters of the book stand out as remarkable. They expose the experiences of junior management consultants as they struggle to establish themselves as valuable. These experiences, revealed in part through auto-ethnography, raise questions that make this book relevant also to scholars of identity, professions, and human resources. Bourgoin’s (auto-)ethnography calls for reflection on the relentless pursuit of value-adding performances in the contemporary economy. He deserves applause for this backstage visit to management consultancy, which undoubtedly applies to other service professionals as well and which invites further inquiry and public debate.
With all valuable insights recognized, some scholars might have wished for Bourgoin to push further his conceptual development of valuation practices, theorizing to a greater extent his empirical observations and positioning his findings more clearly in relation to prior work. His work could also benefit from a transposition to relevant literature published in English. Further theorizing would align his analysis with criteria for journal publications, and make it clearer for the academic reader what he contributes exactly to which existing literature. Yet, there is beauty to his more complex, French style of theorizing, which opens multiple interpretive options and engages readers in thoughtful reflection without spelling out a narrow interpretation of multidimensional empirical observations. This style of theorizing is more suggestive than assertive. While this book may not provoke a conceptual revolution, it definitely provides readers with a very vivid and remarkably thoughtful and provocative exposure to the production of value in management consulting as perceived from both the inside and the outside of the performing actors. The book lends itself well to public debate, to discussions involving both scholars and practitioners, and to methodological seminars. It is a fascinating read, one that produces academic value and establishes Bourgoin as a tightrope walker also in the academic realm.