Until the 1990s the top-tier strategy consultancies typified what was generally understood as management consulting. Their businesses had grown on two fields of advice: corporate strategy and internal organization/operations management. While they continued to expand until the economic slowdown hit many Western economies in 2001, they grew alongside the information technology developments of the 1980s and 1990s. During this period IT consulting emerged as a central and lucrative segment of the consulting market. In principle, the large accounting firms and the strategy consulting firms both had the opportunity to step into this segment. Only the accounting firms did so, however, and they recorded growth rates that exceeded those of the strategy consultancies (for details, see Suddaby and Greenwood 2001). From the mid-1990s to 2002 IT consulting accounted for the largest share of the consulting market. It is only since 2002 that IT consulting and operations management consulting have comprised roughly equal shares of the sector (FEACO 2005: 8), though operations management also involves a lot of IT-related topics.

In the field of strategic management, the difference between economics and sociology is reflected in the economics of strategy on the one hand and the “strategy as practice” approach on the other. The book by Besanko et al. (2000) represents the classic text for the economics of strategy. They build on the works of Chandler (1962) and Porter (1980) and provide the economic underpinning for firm boundaries, market analysis, and strategic positioning. By contrast, the more sociological strategy as practice approach (www.strategy-as-practice.org; Wit and Meyer 2004) looks at the processes underlying the making of strategic decisions in organizations, and at how actual firm behavior deviates from strategies that would be ideal according to economic theory.