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Who Put the Con in Consultancy? Fads, Recipes and ‘Vodka Margarine’ David Collins Human Relations 2004; 57; 553 DOI: 10.1177/0018726704044309 The online version of this article can be found at: http://hum.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/57/5/553

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Human Relations DOI: 10.1177/0018726704044309 Volume 57(5): 553–572 Copyright © 2004 The Tavistock Institute ® SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi www.sagepublications.com

Who put the con in consultancy? Fads, recipes and ‘vodka margarine’ David Collins

A B S T R AC T

This article assesses the merits of analyses that have called for a more developed and constructive engagement with the management advice industry. It argues that attempts to reconstitute academic interest in the advice industry will do little to improve our appreciation of the complex and mediated nature of management advice so long as these (i) remain tied to a debunking agenda and (ii) focus exclusively on the production of advice. Accordingly, the article refocuses attention on the consumption of management knowledge and on the users of advice. Directing attention to the users of recipes and cookbooks the article argues that a more constructive relationship with management practitioners awaits those who can conceive of the reasons, circumstances and processes that might translate business process reengineering (BPR) into total quality management (TQM) and ‘brandy butter’ into ‘vodka margarine’.

KEYWORDS

advice industry consultants consumption debunking fads gurus

Introduction

The recent critical literature on consultants has yielded a rich harvest from a well-manured field of enquiry. The question we must now ask is whether the acreage requiring cultivation on this topic is bigger than 553 Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com at University of Essex on September 15, 2009

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the area covered so far and whether further tillage and fertilization will yield a worthwhile harvest. (Heller, 2002: 260) Richie: Right, now Eddie, you scrape the congealed bits off the cutlery and lay the table. All right? I’ll get on with the brandy butter. [upends the bottle] Where’s the brandy? Eddie: Er, hic! Richie: Well that’s just effing marvellous, isn’t it? Eddie: Oh, hold your horses, Richie don’t panic. Because – brr-dd-dd-d-dbr-d-d-d-d-d-ddd – vodka margarine! [Eddie opens the lid of a margarine tub; they sniff and recoil.] Richie: That’s brilliant Eddie. Are you sure it’s flammable? Eddie: Well, I anticipated your concerns, so I spiced it up with a couple of cans of hairspray. Richie: That . . . is . . . brilliant! Well done, that’s sorted . . . (Extract from Bottom Series 2, Episode 5: Holy by Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall) Over the past 20 years we have witnessed a huge increase in expenditure on management advice (Management Consultancies Association, 2001).1 Reliable figures on consultancy expenditure are difficult to obtain, in part because ‘consulting’ in the managerial field is both a slippery and an elastic concept. However, contemporary estimates value the global market for advice at $64 billion (Brindle & Stearns, 2001) and suggest that the UK management advice industry was worth £7 billion in 2000 (Management Consultancies Association, 2000). While much of this expenditure on consultancy services is undertaken by large private sector companies, governmental authorities and agencies also account for a very significant proportion of total industry spending in the UK (Management Consultancies Association, 2000; National Audit Office, 2001). Given the nature and extent of this patronage, it is perhaps unsurprising that the activities of the advice industry have become a matter of concern for parliament;2 for academics (Brindle & Stearns, 2001; Clark & Fincham, 2002) and for journalistic commentators (Micklethwait & Wooldridge, 1997; Thackray, 1993). Indeed, within both academic and journalistic circles it has become commonplace to suggest that much of the expenditure on management advice is either wasted or just downright wasteful (see also National Audit Office, 20013). Accordingly, both academic and journalistic contributors have called for a serious engagement with the actors and agencies, shaping the contours of our lives. Reflecting on the manners and mores of this industry, a number of these


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Translating BPR into TQM

commentators have suggested that management’s gurus are enriching themselves at the expense of the business community (Hilmer & Donaldson, 1996; Micklethwait & Wooldridge, 1997) and at the expense of the polity more generally (Monbiot, 2001; Wolmar, 2002). In short, it has been suggested that the outputs of the management advice industry represent a self-interested exercise in commodification (Fincham, 1999), which distort the practice of management and the important and enduring practices of organization. Or putting this more plainly: a host of commentators have complained that there is more than an element of con in the activities of the consulting industry! Drawing inspiration from Heller’s (2002) rather bucolic analysis of the recent literature on management consultants, this article offers a critical reanalysis of the advice industry and its academic critics as we ask: Who put the con in consultancy? In addressing this question we suggest that (in Heller’s terms) further tillage and fertilization of the field concerned with consultants is indeed worthwhile. Yet drawing inspiration from the situation comedy, Bottom – a rather funny if lewd and often violent television programme – we suggest that it is indeed correct to question the methods used to cultivate the field. Analysing recent calls for a more searching (Heller, 2002; Salaman, 2002) and yet more constructive engagement (Abrahamson & Eisenman, 2001; Mohrman, 2001) with the advice industry, we question key elements of the debates and discussions, which currently till and fertilize the field of study concerned with gurus and consultants. Indeed, we offer a counterpoint to those recent contributions to the field, which have argued that academics should resituate the debate so that the users of advice might be engaged in a more constructive educational process. We suggest that such calls for practitioner re-education remain limiting because they fail to allow for local action and innovation, and so, fail to recognize the active and situated nature of the consumption process (Collins, 2003; Gabriel, 2002). Consequently, we argue that calls for practitioner re-education will do little to advance knowledge and understanding so long as these continue to represent managerial practitioners as ‘passive recipients’ (Collins, 2003) of ready-made consultancy products. In an attempt to challenge this account of the consultancy process we offer an alternative analysis, which focuses upon the complex and often surprising processes of consumption, which variously make, un-make and re-make the products of the advice industry. Observing that the practitioners who employ the products of the advice industry are often lambasted for their dependence upon mechanical or ‘cookbook’ approaches to management, we focus upon the users of advice as we invite readers to reconsider the implications of the cookbook motif.


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We argue that the normal application of the cookbook or recipe motif distorts our appreciation of the nature of consultant–client relations because it portrays the users of management advice as passive recipients of readymade and readily applicable consulting practices. Noting that cookbooks and recipes – whether these be culinary or organizational – tend to demand tools, knowledge and/or ‘ingredients’ that are seldom readily available to the user, we argue that there is a need to acknowledge the ways in which consumers tend (variously) to transgress, transmute or even transcend culinary and organizational recipes. Accordingly, the article is structured as follows. In the first section we review recent engagements with guru theory (Huczynski, 1993) as we argue that our understanding of the activities of the advice industry has been distorted by a debunking agenda (Collins, 2001). Analysing the outputs of this agenda, we note recent objections to it, which have called for a different and more constructive engagement with the practitioners who employ this advice. Although noting that these objections have certain merits, we nevertheless suggest that this agenda stops short of providing the (agrarian) revolution suggested by Heller because it (i) remains focused upon the production of knowledge and (ii) makes unwarranted assumptions about the consumption of consultancy insofar as it assumes that managerial practitioners actually do what the advice industry tells them to. Refocusing attention on the processes of consulting and on the complexities of the consumption process, we suggest that our appreciation of the activities of the advice industry has been undermined by a failure to acknowledge the processes that facilitate the translation of advice (Latour, 1987). In an attempt to illustrate elements of this translation process, we revisit one of the standard criticisms made of both the producers and the users of guru theory – that they are dependent upon organizational recipes and cookbooks. Re-examining both the users and the usage of management recipes, we suggest that the antics of two well-known comedy actors are instructive for our purposes. Thus, we argue that Edmondson’s and Mayall’s comic celebration of ‘vodka margarine’: •

•

•

reminds us of the staged and performative nature of both management and management consultancy (Collins, forthcoming; Jackson, 2001; Kieser, 1997); illuminates the virtues of a consumption-oriented or ‘paragrammatic’ (Gabriel, 2002) appreciation of the ways and means of managing; and so, obliges us to rethink our role in and our approach to management (re)education.


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The dubious virtues of debunking Debunking the fads and fashions of management has become something of a mass participation sport for academics (Collins, 2001). In this section we consider the merits of these academic commentaries and their attempts to debunk recent developments in management knowledge and practice. Any attempt to navigate a path through academic commentaries on the advice industry soon encounters a number of nodes or ‘obligatory passage points’ (Latour, 1987). Reflecting upon the nodes, which shape and define these commentaries, Salaman (2002) argues that academic interventions in the market for management advice have been guided by a key set of problematics. These problematics he notes have served both to inform and deform our appreciation of the ways and means of the advice industry. Thus, Salaman suggests that critical, academic inquiry into guru theory has been shaped by a desire to answer two, obviously troubling questions: 1

2

Why do managers select and purchase products from the advice industry, which objective analysis reveals to be methodologically and conceptually flawed? And sotto voce: Why do managers not select the elegant ideas and rigorous analyses produced by the academy?

Yet, while conceding that the ideas and tools of the advice industry do indeed display serious conceptual and methodological shortcomings, Salaman argues that academic commentaries on guru theorizing remain limited •

•

by an artificial and unhelpful dualism which pits the ‘truth’ of academic knowledge against the false, faddish, ephemeral and insubstantial representations of the world, produced by consultants and gurus; by a serious misunderstanding of the nature of organizational decisionmaking such that organizations are assumed to be rational (and managers are assumed to be altruistic) in their selection and use of advice (see Grint, 1997; Kieser, 1997 for exceptions).

This is not to suggest, of course, that academic commentaries on the advice industry are identical. They are in fact, far from being identical. Indeed, the field concerned with guru theorizing is perhaps most notable for providing a variety of routes to a common resolution of the initial questions noted above. Citing just a few texts, we might, for example, contrast Grint’s (1994) and Huczynski’s (1993) ‘externalist’ analyses of


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management advice with the more ‘institutional’ analysis of Abrahamson (1991, 1996). Equally we might contrast Abrahamson’s rendering of the consultancy process with Grint’s (1997) ‘internalist’ and Kieser’s (1997) ‘rhetorical’ account of guru theorizing. Building upon these more psychodynamic analyses we might, similarly draw attention to the more literary modes of analysis suggested by Clark and Salaman (1998) and by Jackson (1996, 2001) and Monin (2001). Despite differences in method and emphasis, however, a common thread, unites these critical, academic commentaries: 1

2

3

Each notes the collapsing life-cycle (Gill & Whittle, 1992) of management ideas (although some such as Huczynski (1993) do note the fundamental stabilities disguised by this focus upon change). While noting the persuasiveness of guru ideas, each is largely dismissive of the concrete outputs of guru theorizing. Thus while academic commentators have suggested that positive benefits seldom accrue to those organizations which follow the gurus, few can help but admire the wit (and gall) of the strategies, which management’s advisors employ to make their ideas appealing. In attempting to mock the outputs and decry the processes of guru theorizing, accounts of the advice industry tend to be couched as a quest for the truth about consulting and as a search for a true reflection of the nature of management.

Reflecting upon academic attempts to dismiss the outputs of the advice industry, however, Mohrman (2001) suggests that the agenda of the critical academic community has done little to quell practitioner demand for the services of the advice industry. While endorsing the idea that academia ‘can and should make a difference’ to the consumers of management advice, she argues that academics have failed to make significant interventions in the worlds and experiences of practitioners because they tend to talk at rather than with managers (see also Collins, 2004). This is a point echoed by Abrahamson and Eisenman (2001) who argue that management scholars will have to alter their rules of engagement if they are to challenge the predominance of the gurus. Accordingly, Abrahamson and Eisenman offer six overlapping strategies, which they tell us have been designed to allow academics to (a) re-enter the market for advice and (b) facilitate a different and more constructive engagement with the consumers of management consultancy. Of these, strategies one, two and six focus on debunking – the substitution of academic truth for consultancy distortion (see Collins, 2001) – whereas strategies three, four and five have a perhaps more constructive concern with


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communication and management (re)education. Thus the authors argue that management academics should: 1 2

3

4

5 6

Intervene in the knowledge market to highlight the non-progressive (or retrogressive) nature of (so-called) new products. Intervene in the knowledge market to reveal the motivations of the dispensers of advice. Thus they argue that academics should work with practitioners to reveal the commodified (and self-interested) nature of these (so-called) new developments in management knowledge. Intervene in the knowledge market in an attempt to educate consumers about the limits of the advice which is being peddled. This we might note is a strategy reminiscent of the anti-drugs campaigns employed by US authorities in the 1980s in that it is clearly designed to encourage managers to ‘just say no’ to the advice industry. Encourage a qualitatively different form of academic intervention by exhorting academic commentators to write in a manner that is acceptable to and accessible by practitioners. Enhance knowledge distribution channels to ensure that this lucid, yet scholarly form of intervention is widely disseminated. Retrain practitioners to demand more useful forms of advice.

In common with these attempts to resituate and reinvigorate academic concern with the guru industry, Salaman (2002) has also called for a rethink of the ways and means of consulting. Salaman’s contribution, however is perhaps more theoretical and certainly more sophisticated than those offered just above. Focusing on the problematics, which have shaped our appreciation of the gurus and their products he argues that it is important to recognize that there are few merits in the debunking strategies suggested by Mohrman and by Abrahamson and Eisenman. Thus Salaman notes that it makes little sense to separate the ‘truth’ of academic knowledge from the ‘falsehoods’, which it is asserted, reside within consultancy products. Noting that rhetoric is fundamental rather than supplemental to guru theorizing (see Kieser, 1997) he argues that we should consider the outputs of the advice industry not as being separate from the truth of the matter but as a means of constituting the truth of the matter. In this regard Salaman suggests that guru theorizing is worthy, not just of serious academic scrutiny (Jackson, 1996) but of a different kind of academic scrutiny: one which can acknowledge the complex ways in which consultancy practices serve to reconstruct and reconstitute both managers and the business of management (see also du Gay, 1996; Sahlin-Andersson, 1996). In common with Heller (2002), therefore, Salaman argues that


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although academic debunking has claimed to offer the truth about the advice industry, a more political mode of analysis reveals that the academic criticism of guru theorizing has in fact been guided by more than a simple search for verity. Indeed, Salaman argues that what appears to be an altruistic search for a truthful rendering of the management process might, in fact, be better understood as a war for the monopoly of management studies. In making this point, Salaman’s analysis carries echoes of Latour’s (1987) account of the practices and processes of scientific endeavour. Reflecting upon the processes, which make our understanding of science and scientific endeavour, Latour argues that academies (whether scientific or social scientific) inscribe rather than merely reflect the nature of reality. Indeed, Latour warns us that scientists – like Balkan politicians – must enrol others in their programmes and must protect these manifestos from ‘cross-border’ incursions if they are to acquire and retain a loyal following. Thus Salaman echoes a Latourian analysis when he suggests that the debates surrounding management’s use of consultants should be understood in political terms as a turf-war designed to secure sole access to the users of management advice (see also Collins, 2001; Heller, 2002). Yet, despite this political reading of the advice industry and its critics, and despite a focus upon the rhetorical construction of truth(s), Salaman’s own attempt to resituate academic interest in the advice industry tends to revisit and reproduce the standard arsenal of debunking because it: • •

retains an ambition to educate managers in the truth of managing; and tends to inflate the capability of the enemy, massed on the borders of management studies because it fails to allow for the constructive agency of local users of management advice. This is a point we pursue in the following section.

The enemy without and the enemy within? Taking a political view of the nature and processes of scholarly endeavour it has been suggested that critical academia is engaged in a war with the advice industry.4 Furthermore it has been suggested that, as academics, our ability to challenge ‘our enemies’; the gurus, has been hampered by rules of engagement, which restrict our ability to take the conflict to the enemy. In an attempt to draw up new rules of engagement Salaman, Mohrman and Abrahamson warn us (as Sun Tzu might) that we must take steps to understand our enemy and his/her modus operandi. Thus Mohrman and Abrahamson and Eisenman suggest that there is a need to win back the ‘hearts and minds’


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of the management natives when they warn us that the advice industry has been successful in its cross-border incursions because we have failed to build alliances with and educational programmes for local practitioners. However Salaman’s analysis disputes the efficacy of this programme of native education and pacification. Indeed he warns us that such simplistic attempts at the re-education of practitioners will achieve little because these are based upon a gross misunderstanding of the ways in which managerial advice becomes solidified as a useful form of knowledge (see also Collins, forthcoming). Thus, Salaman suggests that recent calls for the re-education of practitioners will achieve little because these retain a simple debunking agenda, which suggests that academics enjoy privileged access to the objective truth of management. While agreeing that there is, indeed, the need for a more purposeful and strategic intervention in the advice industry, therefore, Salaman argues that to achieve this we must over-turn the debunking analyses of both Mohrman and Abrahamson and Eisenman. Countering the thrust of these ‘hearts and minds’ campaigns, therefore, he argues that the management advice industry has set up permanent camp on ‘our territory’ not because it has the ability to obscure the truth but because it has a persuasive and substantial rhetoric, which works to reconstitute both managers and the business of management (see also Jackson, 1996; Kieser, 1997; SahlinAndersson, 1996). Yet, while Salaman is correct to question the value of the debunkers’ agenda, his own analysis remains problematic because in focusing upon the production of rhetorics he is, consequently, too ready to assume that managers actually do just what their advisors tell them to do. In focusing on the ways in which rhetoric acts to constitute reality, therefore, Salaman seems to imply that consultants are always and everywhere successful in their attempts to reconstitute the realities of managerial life. Yet empirical analyses of the consultancy process suggest that the nature of organizational reality is rather more obdurate than Salaman allows and in any case, often tends to precede rather than follow the consultants’ agenda.

Sympathy for the devil? Mohrman and Abrahamson and Eisenman have suggested that management consultants dominate their clients by employing tactics and strategies designed to obscure the true nature of business. Disputing the idea that consultants exercise an ability to obscure the true business of management, Salaman nevertheless suggests that consultants do tend to dominate their clients because he argues that managerial advisors employ the tools of


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rhetoric to create new worlds, new problems and new understandings for organizational members. Yet a number of studies of the advice industry dispute the rather linear and didactic account of customer–client relations, which is evident in this account of rhetoric. Indeed, as we shall see, empirical analyses of the consulting process seem to suggest that we should have some sympathy for the consultants who have been vilified and demonized in critical commentaries on the advice industry. In an empirical analysis of the growth and development of the literature on organizational culture, for example, Barley et al. (1988) suggest that Salaman is mistaken in his suggestion that gurus and advisors, more generally, enjoy an unfettered ability to shape and control the nature of reality for their clients. Indeed, charting changes in the literature on culture and cultural management, Barley and his colleagues offer an interesting analysis, which suggests that it is the interests of practitioner groups that have come to dominate the field concerned with culture and culture change. The influence that organizational actors exert on the practices of consultants is similarly evident in the genesis of business process reengineering (BPR). Thus, although Hammer (1990) has been at pains to suggest that BPR represents his creation and represents an entirely new way of doing business, it is clear that BPR actually emerged as a body of knowledge and practice when Hammer repackaged existing organizational practises and relabelled an existing Total Quality Management (TQM) initiative, which had been developed by Ford! Offering a more in-depth analysis of the processes of management consultancy, Sturdy (2002), perhaps more than any other commentator has produced an analysis that suggests we should be more sympathetic towards management consultants. Like Barley et al. (1988), Sturdy argues that academic criticisms of guru theorizing tend to misunderstand the ways in which consultants relate to their clients. Indeed, he suggests that in attempting to demonize guru theory, critics of the advice industry have produced an all-seeing and all-powerful representation of the management consultant, which is quite unlike the self-image held by members of the advice industry. Analysing the nature and processes of training interventions, Sturdy (1997, 2002) argues that this form of consulting is, when viewed from the inside, an ‘insecure business’ insofar as the profit motive (and the need for ‘repeat business’) obliges consultants to control their engagements with clients. Yet where Salaman seems to assume that consultants may easily secure control over their clients’ thoughts and actions, Sturdy notes that these engagements are, in fact, characterized by struggle. Discussing these struggles, Sturdy agrees with Salaman that consultants and gurus are involved more in the business of creating rather than obscuring reality. Yet going beyond


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Salaman’s account of the nature of consultant–client relations, Sturdy argues that consultants find client control problematic because they do not enjoy a simple, linear and didactic relationship with managerial practitioners. Accordingly, Sturdy suggests that critical accounts of the advice industry should make room for a more active user of consultancy products and for a more complex rendering of workplace relations. This is a point echoed by Czarniawska and Mazza (2003) in their analysis of the processes and rhythms of consulting. Acknowledging the anxieties and insecurities of consulting that have been identified by Sturdy, Czarniawska and Mazza introduce the concept of liminality as they attempt to pursue the processes, possibilities and frustrations of consulting. They note that as the temporary and paid collaborators of an elite organizational grouping, consultants tend to find themselves in a rather curious and often invidious position. As advisors to the organization, retained by its elite, consultants enjoy a licence to upset, unbalance and unsettle organizational elements. Yet this licence is held conditionally: it is a licence, which requires ongoing if not constant renewal. It is a licence continuously threatened with summary suspension when/wherever the advice fails to reflect the needs, interests, orientations and/or budgetary constraints of key organizational elites. Accordingly, Czarniawska and Mazza suggest that we should think of consultants and consulting in liminal terms – as bodies, and as bodies of knowledge that work within and between the margins of social organization. Viewing consultants and consulting in such marginal terms, they argue, allows us to gain insights into processes and experiences not readily apparent to those with a simple interest in debunking. Thus, Czarniawska and Mazza offer us a useful corrective to the all-seeing and all-powerful image of consultants because, like Barley and his colleagues, they highlight the ways in which consulting behaviours come to be shaped and reshaped by the (cumulating) predispositions of their clients and users. In a similar fashion, Sahlin-Andersson’s (1996) account of the ‘editing’ of consulting programmes and recipes draws our attention to the ways in which consultants both want to (see Kieser, 1997) and are, in any case, obliged to cede control of their ideas, tools and projects to local actors on the ground. In common with Czarniawska and Mazza therefore, SahlinAndersson suggests a liminal account of the processes and problems of consulting as she observes the ways in which the apparently controlling and didactic voice of the consultant is subject to the needs, whims, orientations and predispositions of a complex grouping of clients and users. Disputing the understanding that consultants and gurus somehow control or dominate their clients, Sahlin-Andersson argues that consultants are in the business of selling, not practices, but the representation of practices, disembedded from


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their origins. Consequently, she suggests that the viability and practicability of consulting programmes tends to turn, not upon the authority and expertise of the consultant, but upon the editing or translation of local actors. Over-turning the image of consultant as ‘dominie’,5 therefore, SahlinAndersson reminds us that the successful prosecution of consulting programmes turns not simply upon the consultant’s skills in the arts of persuasion, but upon the skill and imagination of local actors who are obliged to translate and re-embed the offerings of the advice industry. Taken together these accounts of insecurity, liminality and editing suggest that although Salaman is correct to question the analyses of Mohrman and Abrahamson and Eisenman his own account of the ways in which consultants and gurus create and inscribe reality remains limiting insofar as it disregards the complex processes, which mediate the consumption of advice in situ. Returning to our politico-military metaphor, we might suggest that in assuming consultants enjoy an unfettered ability to control managerial sense-making, Salaman over-estimates the power and appeal of the enemy without. Indeed, we might venture further that Salaman is focused upon this enemy without because he has been unable to free himself fully and properly from the enemy within – the core problematics, which he himself observes, have prevented academia from engaging the worlds and experiences of managerial practitioners. In the section that follows we suggest that these accounts of the dayto-day battles for meaning oblige us to rethink our approach to the education and re-education of practitioners. Correspondingly, we argue that any purposeful intervention in the market for management advice must acknowledge the consumption of management knowledge as a complex, mediated and social process, which turns upon the capabilities of actors and actions hitherto written out of attempts to debunk/resituate debates on the advice industry.

Consuming management In a deliberately provocative and polemical article, Miller (1995) argues that social scientists have, until quite recently, failed to acknowledge the central importance of consumption. In an attempt to overcome this neglect of consumption, Miller argues that the field of academic sociology must make an effort to free itself from a Victorian concern with ‘production’ as the source of authentic identity (see Moorhouse, 1991) so that ‘consumption’ might be revealed for what it is, an important (if overlooked), complex, mediated and political process. Glossing over the detail of this rather lengthy


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polemic, Miller argues for a materialist understanding of consumption that both recognizes the choices and the constraints, which shape consumer behaviour in its widest sense. Analysing both the producers and the consumers’ brands, Klein (2000) offers a critical analysis of recent developments in consumer behaviour. Analysing branded goods such as Nike and Hilfiger she argues that these ‘signature’ products are worthy of sustained study (and resistance) because they have a capacity to (re)constitute reality insofar as they make certain representations of reality, persuasive and/or attractive. In this regard, both Miller’s and Klein’s analysis of consumption have similarities with Salaman’s analysis of management knowledge insofar as each acknowledges that our realities are creations rather than innocent discoveries (Weick, 1995). Yet, Miller’s analysis of the consumption process goes beyond Salaman’s appreciation of the power of the advice industry, because Miller recognizes that brands – whether these be brands of underwear or branded forms of knowledge such as BPR – do not always and everywhere constitute the same realities. Surveying the rise of the Hilfiger brand, Klein (2000) introduces us to the intricate complexities of being stylish. Disputing the notion that most consumption is based upon emulation (see Kieser, 1997; Miller, 1995) and that ideas and artefacts are simply diffused (Latour, 1987) to a wider public, Klein argues that Americans have appropriated Tommy in a surprising variety of ways: Tommy Hilfiger started off squarely as white-preppy wear in the tradition of Ralph Lauren and Lacoste. But the designer soon realized that his clothes also had a peculiar cachet in the inner cities, where the hip-hop philosophy of ‘living large’ saw poor and working-class kids acquiring status in the ghetto by adopting the gear and accoutrements of prohibitively costly leisure activities, such as skiing, golfing even boating. (Klein, 2000: 76) This acknowledgement of the mediation and translation of ideas, products and tokens (Waters, 1995) has ready implications for the analysis of the advice industry. In situating management advice as a product, which implicates its producers and consumers in a complex, political relationship this account of translation suggests that although those with a mind to debunking have been wrong to present management advice as ‘unreal’, Salaman is equally mistaken in his assertion that management’s advisors enjoy an unfettered ability to create realities of their own choosing. Thus our reappraisal


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of the meaning(s) of style reminds us that consumers, including the consumers of management knowledge, need to be viewed not as victims of a corrupting and all-powerful agency, but as conscious, situated actors who may choose, for a variety of reasons to consume management advice in ways, which may tend to surprise if not confound those producers who, in other forms of analysis seem to exercise limitless powers over practitioners. This is a point recently taken up by Gabriel (2002). Analysing the consumption of knowledge, Gabriel offers a mediated account of the consumption process when he considers the nature and standing of (the much maligned) programmatic or recipe-based advice produced by consulting organizations and gurus. Reflecting upon the consumption of management knowledge, Gabriel argues that we misunderstand the nature and processes of managerial work when we assume that consulting products are applied in an unaltered or unalloyed form by management practitioners. Indeed, challenging casual usage of the ‘cookbook’ metaphor, he argues that users of cookbooks: do not passively follow the recipe books but select some of the recipes, discard others and combine yet others. They adapt the recipes to local conditions; they creatively introduce new ingredients in the dishes they prepare; and they substitute recipe ingredients for acceptable [or] desirable alternatives. At times they may lose faith in a particular recipe or in an entire recipe book, and get rid of it. In all these instances, consumers adapt objects to highly specific, often ad hoc uses, devising unique combinations and variations. (Gabriel, 2002: 140–1) In short, Gabriel suggests that we should consider cookbooks – whether culinary or otherwise – from the perspective of the user. In this regard, he suggests that we need to consider not what a product or service was designed to do. Indeed, he reminds us that we should remain open to the idea that users may derive utility from products and services in a variety of surprising ways. Thus Gabriel argues that what we view as recipes or ‘programmes’ are in fact better understood as ‘paragrammes’ – ‘basic stocks of ideas, routines, images and ingredients which may be selectively trawled lifted and adapted to the situation at hand’ (Gabriel, 2002: 143). Reflecting upon the translation of apparently generic tools, Pruijt (1998) suggests that consulting organizations tend to trawl for and selectively apply guru ideas. Thus he has observed that different consulting organizations (who stand between the most celebrated gurus and the enduser, and so, should be regarded as being both producers and consumers of


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management advice) have developed local variants of BPR designed to reflect both their expertise and the vagaries of their own niche markets. Similarly Valentine and Knights (1998) have also noted the existence of peculiar variants of BPR, which have been tailored by organizational actors working at the local level. Countering Sahlin-Andersson’s (1996) contention that practitioners on the ground enjoy only very limited freedom to edit or translate advice, Valentine and Knights observe that the local variants of BPR, which they assayed, effectively reverse the canon of reengineering insofar as they make use of matrix structures to deliver incremental forms of change. Nevertheless, in exploring the dynamics of organizational editing and translation, Sahlin-Andersson does give us the means to rationalize the existence of such local adjustment – however productive and sustainable. Reflecting upon the implementation of consultancy programmes designed to reform key elements of public sector organizations in Scandinavia, she offers an intriguing analysis of consulting in action (Latour, 1987). Based upon this analysis she argues that organizational ‘cookbooks’ tend to require editing because consultants seldom provide readily applicable recipes for managers to follow. Indeed, questioning the normal application of the cookbook motif, SahlinAndersson argues that practitioners of management are obliged to edit organizational recipes because consultants offer only skeletal and generic representations of organizational processes, disembedded from the contexts that bring them both meaning and effect. Drawing our attention to the complexity of the consumption process and to the situated nature of consumer choice, therefore, Sahlin-Andersson reminds us that the users of guru theory must struggle to derive utility from consultancy advice because this counsel is designed to be ambiguous, rootless, acontextual and incomplete (Collins, 2003). Both Sahlin-Andersson and Gabriel, therefore, cast doubts over the efficacy of the cookbook motif and the putative re-educational strategies promoted by careless application of this motif. In short, they warn us that those who would employ cookbooks must be prepared to work with and around the recipes therein. Thus they remind us of the discretion and innovation that is part and parcel of managing with the gurus. Returning to our inspiration – the situation comedy Bottom – it should now be apparent that the comedy actors, Edmondson and Mayall provide us with a memorable illustration of the ways in which actors are bound to manage with and around (organizational) recipes. In placing their characters in a humorous and exaggerated situation Edmondson and Mayall remind us (the innovative consumers of their work) that management practitioners are, in so many ways, actors: actors torn between conflicting orientations and desires. Yet beyond this, the (mis)adventures of these characters remind us


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that, when confronted with their advisors, management practitioners remain situated actors compelled to respond rather than merely to receive. Actors who may: • •

•

in certain circumstances choose to ignore (organizational) recipes; accept the outline of a recipe and yet elect to make editorial adjustments sufficient to produce, say, total quality management (TQM) from the BPR cookbook; confront local exigencies, which call forth new ingredients such that ‘vodka margarine’ – spiked with hairspray of course – becomes an acceptable substitute for ‘brandy butter’.

Concluding comments This article began by posing a question: Who put the con in consultancy? We are now in a position to answer that question. The answer is that we – the academic community (in concert with the journalistic community) – have put the con in consulting because our attempts to educate and re-educate practitioners in the ways and means of the consulting tend to portray managers as the hapless victims of a malignant industry with a mission to obscure the real nature of management. In short: We put the con in consultancy because our limited and self-interested analyses conjured an account of practitioners as passive recipients of advice. In an attempt to move away from those forms of academic engagement which would present managerial practitioners as either dopes or dupes, we have attempted to outline a form of analysis that can recognize the ways in which practitioners (both managers and the managed it should be observed) may intervene in the advice industry to shape and reshape both the processes and the outputs of guru theorizing. In recognizing this we have an opportunity to resituate academic concern and connect with practitioners. Mohrman, as we have seen, has argued that there is a need to talk with and to relate to management practitioners. The analysis developed here offers just such a connection. Yet it goes beyond the relationship apparently envisaged by Mohrman and by Abrahamson and Eisenman. In focusing attention on the active users of management knowledge, the analysis offered here does what Mohrman has urged us to do: it takes the problems and dilemmas of managers seriously. Yet this analysis goes beyond the connections envisaged by Mohrman. Where Mohrman and Abrahamson and Eisenman argue that we should talk to practitioners so that we might re-educate them as regards the perils of the advice industry, our focus upon the active users of


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knowledge suggests that, as academics, we must first be prepared to learn from managers in the field. Yet our desire to avoid the pit-falls of debunking should not be taken as a suggestion that there is no room in this mode of analysis for a more critical review of the nature of management, nor does it suggest that there is no place for a critical account of the self-interested nature of this huge and growing industry. However, there can be no sensible inquiries into the advice industry until we have a feel for its nature and scope and until we commit to a more adequate means of explaining the ways in which this knowledge is produced and consumed. To this end we have outlined an analysis of the ways and means of consulting, which accords an active role to those who must make strenuous efforts to derive utility from organizational recipes. Thus, our article has sought to reveal and redeem those actors who must work to translate, edit and embed the representations of organization and management produced by the advice industry.

Notes 1

2

3

4

It is difficult to find a convenient shorthand expression, which recognizes the scope and diversity of the market for advice on management matters. Huczynski (1993) uses the term ‘guru theory’ in an attempt to capture the range and variety of products and producers. Kieser (2002), however, suggests that there is a need to separate ‘consultants’ from ‘gurus’, while Heller (2002) in the same volume collapses this difference by referring to ‘guru-consultants’. Clark and Fincham (2002) the editors of the collection, which includes the contributions from Heller and Kieser, acknowledge these differences and tensions to some extent as they employ the term ‘Management Advice Industry’ in their attempts to encapsulate the variety of producers and products that have become available thanks to the activities of academics and consultants. In this article, I have opted for readability in my attempts to describe this industry. Thus, I will normally use the terms ‘advice industry’ and ‘guru theory’ as my preferred shorthand for this contested area of business. An All Party Parliamentary Group on Management Consultancy did at one time exist to examine the activities of the management advice industry. However, the group is no longer in existence. Private correspondence with the last Chair of the group suggests that it collapsed because it (i) failed to find an adequate number of MPs interested in analysing and scrutinizing the advice industry and (ii) because the industry participants – the providers of management advice – felt that other more productive ways of communicating with key decision-takers were available to the industry. It is worth observing that, whereas academic and journalistic commentaries on the advice industry have tended to suggest that management’s consultants and gurus are to blame for this wastefulness, the National Audit Office report on Purchasing Professional Services (which was informed by the advice industry) suggests that the customers of the advice industry are to blame for much of the wasted spending identified. Collins (2001) suggests that this is an unusual war in that the advice industry failed to turn up!


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This is a traditional term in Scotland for a teacher. The term captures the didactic and authoritarian manner traditionally associated with teachers in Scotland. Happily, the term is now passing into history thanks, in part to changes in the recruitment and training of teachers.

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David Collins is a Reader in Management in the Department of Accounting, Finance and Management, University of Essex. His recent work has focused upon change management, ‘guru theory’ and the ‘guru industry’. Observing that academic theorizing has tended to focus upon the production of management knowledge he has refocused attention upon consumption and translation in an attempt to improve appreciation of the complexities of the (change) management process. David is British by birth and Scottish by the grace of God. [E-mail: [email protected]]
