The literature on management consulting

Only since the 1990s has management consultancy prompted a great deal of attention in management research. Until then little had been written on this service sector, probably because it was not yet recognized as a mainstay in the economy. Management research, organization studies, and industrial sociology had primarily concerned themselves with larger industries and corporations, and the management consulting business was still too small to be recognized as an industry with considerable influence. Only a few authors, for example Hagedorn (1955), Higdon (1969), and Havelock and Guskin (1971), had begun to recognize the role of consultants in the transmission of business techniques. Other early publications on management consulting were concerned with organizational development, a consulting approach to help clients help themselves (Schein 1969; Argyris 1970).

Throughout the 1980s publications in the sociology of professions (Stanback 1979; Stanback et al. 1981; Noyelle and Dutka 1988; and later Tordoir 1995) referred to management consulting as one of the service sectors toward which industrialized economies shift. It became recognized as an emerging profession in which formal professional qualification has given way to professional work independent of a formal professional background (Abbott 1988; Brint 1994). At about the same time, Greiner and Metzger (1983) wrote a first advisory book for consultants, and the International Labour Organization (Kubr 1986) issued the second edition of a landmark book on best practices in management consulting, to which prominent management scholars and practitioners contributed and which aimed to cover a broad range of aspects from both consulting and client perspectives.