FEATURE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE?
Masters of the universe? M
ANAGEMENT IS CHANGING. It is becoming less explicitly hierarchical and more market- and change-oriented. But this is not a simple move away from departmental silos and hierarchical control. Management might be less bureaucratic in some respects, but it is more so in others. It is neo-bureaucratic. This change has been happening for some time, through various mechanisms, such as flattening organisational hierarchies and the rise of formal management education. But one key
“ If management groups take
on a consulting identity, they risk becoming dispensable
way in which it is accelerating is by organisations internalising a model of management based on external management consultancy. We call this management as consultancy. This is achieved in three main ways. First, large organisations are increasingly recruiting former external management consultants into management positions, especially favouring those from blue-chip consulting firms. These highly trained individuals help promote change and a particular approach to managing, using analytical change tools and project working for example. Second, management groups within organisations such as those in information technology (IT), accounting and human resources (HR) are taking on consulting roles and identities. This was already the case with external accounting and IT firms who boosted their income through consulting services. But now the aim is to enhance or maintain occupational status internally by borrowing from the prestige of external consultants. As one re-fashioned HR manager claimed: ‘I’m not sitting behind a desk in an ivory tower, hidden… I’m very mobile, so if I need to be in another location, the car is under the building and I move, so I’m mobile and truly like a consultant.’ Of course, this can sometimes go wrong as there is stigma as well as status attached to the management consultant identity. The third way in which management is taking on a consulting form is the development and extension of what were once termed internal consulting units. These long represented the less
24 SOCIETY NOW SUMMER 2015 ”
Management consultancy is becoming the victim of its own success as managers in large public and private sector organisations take on consulting practices as their own. Professor Andrew Sturdy explains how new management resembles traditional consultancy
fashionable side of consulting although large organisations often found them effective. They are now changing, with new titles such as ‘programme management’ and ‘performance delivery’. They may still have a precarious existence, subject to the whims of new CEOs or waves of cuts. As one consultant manager we interviewed outlined: ‘we don’t actually have proper jobs. If they abolished us tomorrow, what would change?’ Despite such pessimism, these units can thrive for years and even if they are cut, they often re-emerge in different parts of the organisation. The result of these changes is an emerging group of consultant managers in large public and private sector organisations. They formed the focus of our research, one of the largest ever studies of management consulting. Drawing on data collected in the UK and Australia, we found various characteristics of management as consultancy, each giving rise to different organisational dilemmas. These included the traditional problems of control and co-ordination, but also new ones such as
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