The social homogenization effect of personnel selection
Given the significance of human resources for management consultancies, the consulting firms' renunciation of experts in the field of Personnel selection is an interesting fact in itself. While the human resource principles that have come into practice in many corporations wthin the last few decades may be on a questionable track from 1 Foucaultian perspective Townley 1993, 1994 , they are generally regarded as advanced and valuable for corporate performance. The consulting industry seems to...
Project organization and the pool concept of staffing
One of the well-known elements of a consulting firm's organizational structure is its project-based operation and pool concept of staffing. Consulting projects typically last between two and six months in strategy, organization, finance, and human resources in IT consulting the durations are often longer , and individual consultants are allocated to several consecutive projects every year so as to gain experience m a range of industries and corporate functions. While senior consultants...
The signaling effect of personnel selection
According to Bhide 1994, 1995 , Marvin Bower envisaged a professional model that demanded innovative brain power rather than business experience from management consultants. It was assumed that graduates from leading business schools had the intellectual superiority that Bower's concept of consulting required. The highly selective recruitment provided the consulting industry with a considerable touch of intellectual elitism, and this conveys a strong message to the business community...
The role of case studies in personnel selection
The origins of this selection tool are the cases used for teaching purposes by Harvard Business School HBS and other business schools. McKinsey started to hire from HBS when it founded management consulting as an activity to be performed by business school graduates rather than experienced consultants Bhide 1994, 1995 . The cases used for teaching purposes usually involve written information presented on many pages and require a few hours' or even days' work to elaborate a solution. For...
Info Jyp
Focus on cost considerations 1economics Mcchanisms external to the immediate exchange relationship Mcchanisms internal to the immediate exchange relationship Distinguishing and debating the four theories At this point, the differences and applications of the three theories need to be outlined more thoroughly. The scientific community is often split in its assumptions concerning the nature of business relations and human behavior, and this split is reflected in the use of theories. Typically,...
Sociological neoinstitutionalism
The only theory that the previous literature on consultancy has systematically drawn on is sociological neoinstitutionalism. For example, many articles in the volumes edited by Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall 2002 and Kipping and Engwall 2002 draw on Meyer and Rowan 1977 , DiMaggio and Powell 1983 , Powell and DiMaggio 1991 , or Tolbert and Zucker 1996 . Sociological neoinstitutionalism is based on the argument that it is belief in the efficiency of particular practices or solutions. lather than...
Transaction cost analysis of consultancy
Transaction cost theory provides the central framework for solving this puzzle. The question is in which cases and for which tasks is the externalization of analytical or management functions more efficient than an in-house solution In the case of outsourcing a task to a consulting firm the market solution , ex ante transaction costs occur as a result of searching for consulting firms, assessing their competencies, selecting between several firms, negotiating, and finalizing the contract. Ex...
Signaling theory versus embeddedness theory
Signaling theory and embeddedness theory may appear intellectually too far away from each other to be sensibly compared. Interestingly, however, both are rooted in observations of the_sam _topkL4eh markets. Granovetter's 1974 study of job market participants introduces the now common distinction between strong ties as direct trust relations and weak ties as rooted in rare encounters, mutual acquaintances, or mechanisms of recommendation. It gives center stage to the notion that weak ties can...
Why do consulting firms exist and grow The economics and sociology of knowledge
The era of strategy and organization consultancies commenced in the 1960s, when the demand for engineering-based advice on the shop floor diminished and the upturn in international trade and corporate expansion began to shift the demand for consulting services to the boardroom level Kipping 1996, 1997, 2002 . McKenna 1995, 2006 points out that the first wave of advice on finance, strategy, and organization was triggered by the Glass-Steagall Banking Act in the 1930s. From the 1950s onwards the...
Figures
1.1 Differences between the theoretical approaches 32 2.1 Global management consulting revenues, 1970 2001 42 2.2 Efficient versus inefficient use of consultants 48 2.3 Forecast demand intensity of tasks and 2.4 Acquisition volume as a percentage of average total stock market capitalization, 1968-1999 59 2.5 Ruef's model of consulting growth 65 3.1 Market mechanisms in management consulting 79 4.1 The consulting business cycle per annum growth rates, 5.1 The cost-effectiveness of internal...