Int’l. Studies of Mgt. & Org., vol. 32, no. 4, Winter 2002–3, pp. 67–86.

© 2003 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.

ISSN 0020–8825 / 2003 $9.50 + 0.00.

ROBIN FINCHAM

The Agent’s Agent

Power, Knowledge, and Uncertainty in
Management Consultancy

Abstract: The existence of so many metaphors for the management consultant

(e.g., as performer, as witchdoctor) betokens the fundamental uncertainty of con-
sultancy work. This article suggests that the application of agency theory to the
client-consultant relationship may be a useful way of exploring and mapping this
uncertainty. The image of consultants as the “agent’s agent” (hopefully, not just
another metaphor) pictures consultancy as defined by an extended agency role:
The consultant is the agent of management, which is itself the agent of capital. In
seeing consultancy in this way, as a kind of extrusion of managerial power, at-
tention is drawn to its tenuous legitimacy in client firms, as well as to a kind of
parity between consultancy and management. The article highlights two central
aspects of uncertainty—power and knowledge—and explores these in research
conducted in large-scale firms like the Big Five. The data confirm the impor-
tance of consultancy as “relational work” and the subordination of consultancy.
Typical agency problems were mirrored in the limits of power tactics employed
in client firms and the difficulties of transfer between consultant and local mana-
gerial knowledge.

The management consultant role and occupational identity has always been
problematic and hard to determine. The uncertain organizational standing of the
consultant and the highly differentiated nature of the consultancy industry make
it difficult to produce concise and bounded conceptual labels. Indeed, one note-

Robin Fincham is a senior lecturer in management in the Department of Management

and Organization of Stirling University, in the United Kingdom. An earlier version of this
paper was presented in July 1999 at a critical management studies conference of the Institute
of Science and Technology at the University of Manchester, U.K. The author thanks the
three anonymous journal reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.

67
68 FINCHAM (UNITED KINGDOM)

worthy feature of the recent critical literature is the extent to which metaphors of
consultancy have been employed (see Clark and Fincham 2002 for a summary).
Apparently, in not knowing what consultancy is, we can only say what it is like.
For example, dramaturgical images of the consultant as performer, and consul-
tancy as a kind of manipulative theater, have been influential. These have
stressed the rhetorical skills of the consultant in creating new forms of conscious-
ness for the client-as-audience (Clark and Salaman 1996a; 2000). The consultant
as a type of magical figure, a shaman or witchdoctor, has been even more widely
used and emphasizes the surreptitious or insidious nature of the power of manag-
ers’ advisors (Clark and Salaman 1996b; Cleverley 1971; Fincham 2000; Mick-
lethwait and Wooldridge 1996).
Why such metaphors should attach specifically to consultancy is not at first
obvious. There is perhaps puzzlement about this complex cluster of occupations
that metaphorical explanation illuminates. “Consultancy” is not a single occupa-
tional or functional type, so there may be a need to employ symbols and meta-
phors to emphasize different facets of the work. Also, some wildly contrasting
statuses are typically attributed to consultants, who occupy niches all the way
from confidence trickster to respected professional; once again, metaphor may
suggest the kinds of sharpened and polarized images needed for expressing such
contradictions. Another factor may be that consultancy (or some of it) involves
colorful and dramatic activities (and people); and to account for it, storytelling
and emotive description are needed.
To move this discussion a stage further, this article puts forward a comparison
that is perhaps perilously close to being yet another metaphor. But the intention
is to develop an organizing concept that describes more accurately and fully the
complex dimensions of the client-consultant relationship. This is to suggest that
consultants, as “agents” of management, in some sense resemble managers who
are themselves “agents” of the owners of capital. This perspective draws an anal-
ogy with the principal-agent relationship, and allies itself with those who have
seen “consultancy” in relational terms (rather than as a static body of skills), the
key parameters of which are bound up in the links with managerial clients (Clark
and Salaman 1996a; Fincham 1999a). The image of management consultants as
“the agent’s agent” pictures consultant work as defined by an extended agency
problematic, and attention is drawn to a kind of parity between consultancy and
the activities and institutions of management itself.
Various aspects of this idea might be taken forward; but in focusing on con-
sultancy work, power and identity variables at the core of the managerial task
suggest themselves. Uncertainty, in particular, has long been seen as integral to
management, which revolves around skills that are social and political in charac-
ter. Correspondingly, any agent who takes up these tasks inherits this uncer-
tainty, adding to the quota of “agency problems.” In this sense, the consultant
role is seen as reproducing in heightened form the uncertainties of managerial
work. In the account developed here, two conceptual dimensions that underlie
 THE AGENT’S AGENT 69

general uncertainty are highlighted. Both power and knowledge are seen as being
central both to management and to consultancy work.
The power/knowledge dimensions underpinning consultant activity incorpo-
rate a number of issues identified by researchers. First, in the context of manage-
rial agency, the power dimension can be seen as incorporating differing
perspectives. By focusing on authority mandated from capital (the corporate
agent’s power), the notion of power is located in a more structured and central-
ized type of framework. In contrast, if we consider how consultants seem to
shape the relationship with managerial clients, power as a play of strategic forces
—via alliances, strategies, and networks—is being stressed. Clegg (1989, 30) has
identified these two perspectives with those of sovereign power or the Hobbesian
perspective, and a strategic and discursive view, or the Machiavellian perspec-
tive. Both these “precursors of power” (Clegg 1989, 5) focus on a similar power
arena (primarily, state power), but form opposing perspectives. Hobbes formu-
lated a conservative view aimed at justifying established (state) power structures
in terms of the ethical uses to which power might be put. Machiavelli, on the
other hand, made no moral case about the uses of power, but focused wholly on
the gaining of power through strategies and deals, and playing the game of
power. His is necessarily a plural or “lateral” perspective, since no hierarchy or
ordered model of power is assumed; he spoke from a cynical or realist (some
would say “honest”) perception of power, rather than anything stressing the pur-
suit of some greater good. Clegg admitted to “a gulf or lacuna” between the per-
spectives and, indeed, his attempts at moving between them seem inconclusive
(1989, 36–37); he suggested a “revised” view of Machiavelli “interpreted
through a post-structuralist perspective” (although, since he regarded Machiavel-
li as an early post-structuralist, this is hardly convincing). The current research
similarly focuses on a strategic or discursive view of power, although a more
established power structure (or “sovereign” power) exists in the background as
management’s ultimate sanction.
Views of the power role of management consultants inside organizations have
veered between the extremes of consultants as puppets brought in to legitimize
managerial maneuvers, and as puppet masters who wield unaccountable power
behind the scenes (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 1996). The current analysis ex-
plores this issue in terms of the ways in which consultants relate to the power
game waged between internal groups. In particular, it explores what might be
regarded as consultants’ generic purpose, that of change management. As the
organizing narrative that consultants subscribe to (Czarniawska and Joerges
1996; Fincham 1999b; Tienari et al. 2001), change has a capacity to impose pre-
ferred forms of action and can be regarded as a key power indicator.
In addition, the contrasting forms of management knowledge that the client-
consultant relationship contains are in large part constitutive of the occupational
identity of consultants. The independent advice and problem-solving ability they
apparently offer are frequently seen as core to the role (Greiner and Metzger
70 FINCHAM (UNITED KINGDOM)

1983; Kubr 1996), so that a notion of “knowledge transfer” represents the main
prescriptive definition of consultancy. Here the application of external best prac-
tice within organizations is seen as the consultant’s competitive edge, and a clas-
sic asymmetry of knowledge between management and management consultant
tends to be assumed (Argyris 1970; Schein 1988). Much of the research on the
professional service firm (PSF), for example, is unconcerned about the processes
by which knowledge is constructed in client organizations; instead, knowledge is
narrowly defined as an abstract factor of production, and a “leveraging” assump-
tion is made whereby knowledge embodied in expertise, and frozen in propri-
etary models and methods, is simply rolled out in client firms using the cheaper
labor of junior staff (Grant 1996; Maister 1993). More process-based approaches
do consider socio-political skills as an aspect of how ideas spread through mana-
gerial communities. Process theories take account of strategies of implementa-
tion, the rules and routines of the PSF, and the deployment of different kinds of
knowledge (Blackler 1995; Morris and Empson 1998). But even here, while
knowledge is not seen as being leveraged unproblematically, concerns with the
organizational work undertaken in the dissemination of management knowledge
arise only at the limits of debate.
In contrast, the current analysis queries any assumption of a seamless transfer
of knowledge. It emphasizes more critical concepts like the persuasion of mana-
gerial clients to buy into ideas, and the image work performed by agents of dis-
semination like consultants. These are explored in terms of the contrast between
“market” knowledge as the basis of consultant influence, and the more localized
knowledge of clients and internal management. In developing this perspective,
the research draws on interviews conducted in global consultancy firms and the
so-called Big Five.1 These giant firms have obvious power/knowledge aspects.
They are deeply implicated in the strategies of large corporations and also effec-
tive in the spread of management ideas. These include widely disseminated
ideas, concepts that underlie seemingly transient fads, as well as proprietary
techniques and methods that rarely go beyond local settings. The research ex-
plores consultants’ images of their work and how these provide a deeper under-
standing of the nature of the client-consultant relationship.

Management and management consultancy

If we begin with the relationship with management, the picture of managerial

decision-making activity that emerges from pioneering researchers such as
Mintzberg (1973), Kotter (1982), and Stewart (1997) is that of a set of activities
(e.g., strategy, change management, leadership) that are diverse and prone to dis-
engagement. The core tasks of management are constrained by the real-life
socio-political nature of group and organizational processes. In his seminal work,
Mintzberg, for example, formulated a searing attack on the pretensions of ratio-
nalist theory. He stressed the social orientation and fragmentation of managerial
 THE AGENT’S AGENT 71

work, and argued for its similarity across “all levels of management from chief
executives to foremen” (Mintzberg 1973, 25). Bryman (1984) similarly stressed
the “retreat from rationality” in the analysis of managerial work and suspicion of
ideas of comprehensive knowledge.
In broader institutional terms (important for the parallels between manage-
ment and management consultancy), management has evolved from a general-
ized overseeing or controlling role into an assemblage of functions and
occupations (Glover and Hughes 1996). The authority mandated from capital
now resembles an extensive agency function that has spread over an elaborate
and differentiated structure. This measures and distributes the work of labor,
while the basic control function is subsumed in central processes of strategy and
decision making. Professional, supervisory, and technical hierarchies overlap
and intermingle with strictly managerial functions (Abbott 1988; Armstrong
1989). From this view of management, the corresponding image we derive of
consultancy is that of an equivalent structure “out” in the marketplace. The nar-
rower activity of management consultancy represents a generalized function
feeding into organizational processes such as advice on new strategy and change
management, while other specialist consultants (in engineering, science, infor-
mation technology, finance) possess a more differentiated range of skills.
The parallel forms of institutional activity help to define the nature of the con-
sultant-client relationship. Here, for instance, Kipping’s (2002) historical ac-
count makes the intriguing point that, from its inception, management has sought
external advice and looked to consultancy as a decision-making partner. It was
the uncertain nature of the managerial task that, in the first instance, created the
demand for consultancy, and created it very early on. Kipping has pointed out
that, contemporaneous with the birth of large-scale organizations (and manage-
ment) in the last quarter of the nineteenth century came the emergence of Taylor
and the early “efficiency experts” as the founders of consultancy. Thus, the evo-
lution of the consulting industry was intimately connected with the development
of management’s dominant practices and ideologies, and consultancy itself “can
be understood as a kind of reflection of prevailing managerial problems and defi-
nitions” (Kipping 2002, 29).
Implicated in this model is the ultimate dependence of consultancy on the
evolution of management. Some researchers have argued the opposite of this po-
sition, and have emphasized action-based factors—the industry’s burgeoning
growth and consultants’ famous “persuasiveness” in selling solutions. The con-
sultant discourse has been seen as a powerful “system of persuasion” effective in
defining managerial identity (Alvesson 1993). Consultants have been pictured as
insinuating themselves as indispensable sources of new management knowledge
(Bloomfield and Danieli 1995). However, to stress uncertainty at the heart of
managerial work does not automatically mean we ought to regard consultants as
managerial saviors. An alternative view holds that the growth of consultancy and
increased demand for business services is not explained by dynamics within the
72 FINCHAM (UNITED KINGDOM)

consultancy industry. Rather, it reflects changes in the environment in which

managers operate. As Ackroyd and Lawrenson (1996) suggested, discontinuities
in the supply of managerial skills require increasing inputs of business services;
and the growth in demand for the skills of change management has altered the
perception of need within organizations, rather than the supply from consultants.
Others also have challenged any view of the omnipotent consultant. Sturdy
(1997a; 1997b), for example, argued that the consultancy industry is vulnerable
to the constant need to find new business, and that consultants are prey to the
same kinds of insecurities and apprehensions that afflict managers.
From this basic picture, managerial task uncertainty can be seen to revolve
around a set of social and, in particular, power/knowledge processes. Some have
suggested that management is fundamentally a political process and that “power
and politics” are all-consuming forces, not just part of some jointly rational en-
terprise (Pettigrew 1973). The centrality of power in management denies any ra-
tional or purely technical basis to decision making so that, wherever tasks are
outsourced, uncertainty will leak into the consultants’ side of the relationship.
Hence, in Jackall’s (1988) seminal study, management is pictured as a type of
bureaucratic spoils system, and consultancy as having a parasitical relationship
to the corporate group; new knowledge is traded within these power relation-
ships, and consultants constantly experience the pressures of having to come up
with ideas with which to feed the corporate machine.
A knowledge dimension is also central to these debates; for, while conven-
tionally consultants are seen as the possessors of solutions to managers’ prob-
lems, a number of more critical studies of management consultant discourse have
stressed the limits of knowledge (Starbuck 1992). Consultants may bring certain
skills to the table, like an awareness of the market or knowledge of fashionable
ideas and techniques, but they possess no secret solutions (though, of course,
their rhetoric might try to suggest otherwise [Fincham 1999b; Jackson 2001]).
Neither management consultant nor manager possesses formalized or codified
knowledge, nor are they likely to “develop” any.

Agency theory and consultancy

As already suggested, the relationship of management consultancy to manage-

ment is susceptible to analysis by agency theory, and the client-consultant rela-
tionship can readily be seen as a type of agency relationship. Agency theory
points out that the basis of this relationship is the set of rights transferred by the
principal to the agent, who is bound by a formal or implicit contract to represent
the principal’s wishes and interests (Eggertsson 1990, 40). However, any naïve
reading of the contract is unrealistic (agency theory tells us) because the interests
of agent and principal are never identical; even if they were, there can be no
guarantee that the two actors have identical information, or would interpret it the
same if they did (Rowlinson 1997, 29). The theory avoids reductionism and de-
 THE AGENT’S AGENT 73

terminism by stressing the agent as a human actor with an “agency” of its own
(Clegg 1989, 17).
Agency theory helps to confirm several aspects of the management/manage-
ment consultancy relationship. First, the problematic alignment of interests be-
tween principal and agent suggests the importance and the nature of a power
dimension. While this is no life-or-death struggle for authority, there are con-
flicts which revolve around different constructions and definitions, and around a
power game of strategic forces waged within decision-making networks. Unlike
other basic socioeconomic relationships—say, the employment relationship,
where the employer is compelled to control labor tightly—agency problems arise
because the agent is relatively free and can exercise choice. Similarly, in the cli-
ent-consultant relationship, problems tend to occur not because of any willful
misreading of the client’s interests but, for example, because of consultants’ need
to establish legitimacy; they often need to “take over” the problem from the cli-
ent, which can mean defining it differently (Bloomfield and Danieli 1995; Fin-
cham 1999b).
Furthermore, the fact that the basic character of the agency problem is that of
representation suggests common understandings and, hence, similar sets of
knowledge between principal and agent. This is also distinctive from another key
socioeconomic relationship, the professional-client relationship, where the pro-
fessional has a monopoly of knowledge; the agent instead needs relevant knowl-
edge and skills to interpret how the principal would act. This tends to restrict the
agent’s value added to the application of shared knowledge, and the supply of
practical abilities, in dealing with the often recalcitrant real world on the
principal’s behalf.
The question of dependency is also clarified by agency theory, where clearly
the agent is the junior partner in the relationship. To be sure, the thrust of agency
theory is to point out that the realities of delegation and representation mean that
the agent is no slave to the principal’s interests. But still, there is no doubting the
basic asymmetry. The agency concept points out the tenuous and marginalized
nature of the agent as intermediary. If we think of typical agent figures (such as
the estate owner’s factor or, in military hierarchies, ranks like sergeant major)
these take on the problems of representing their principals, even doing their dirty
work, while their own status remains in question. Such figures will be recruited
from the “lower” social grouping, the better to represent the principal’s “higher”
interests; but acceptance by the higher social group (a landed class or officer
class) rarely happens. This perspective usefully transfers to a case like manage-
ment consultancy, and enables us to see beyond notions of the achievement of
consultancy, or the omnipotent consultant. As noted above, the process of
knowledge transfer from consultant to client may emphasize the former’s influ-
ence; yet alternative perspectives have stressed the limitations of consultant dis-
course and consultancy as an uncertain and insecure business.
To add a final few points, although agency theory tends to work from the one-
74 FINCHAM (UNITED KINGDOM)

to-one relationship as the unit of analysis, it also recognizes multiple principals

and agents, and relational chains and hierarchies; principals may be agents in
other relationships, and agents principals (Rowlinson 1997, 31). Patently, this is
the case with the client-consultant relationship, where the principal (the manage-
rial client) is itself an agent of capital. As we have stressed, as managerial struc-
tures have differentiated, the forms of control that stem from ownership have
been mapped onto a complex of occupations and specialities, which has given
rise to problematic forms of control within organizational hierarchies (Alvesson
and Willmott 1992). When these are outsourced to a new agent (the consultant),
fresh uncertainties revolve around the attenuation of power.
This conceptualization suggests that the client-consultant relationship repre-
sents a kind of “extrusion” of managerial authority. Management itself is based
on attenuated forms of economic power, while the legitimacy of consultancy can
be seen as superimposed on the original mandate from capital. Consultants oper-
ate at the outer reaches of corporate power, which is the only ultimate source of
legitimacy. Theirs is an authority stretched to its limits, and their legitimacy in
client organizations becomes a problematic linkage with the corporate group that
engages them.

Research and methods

The global consultancy firms from which the current research drew its respon-
dents broadly fall into three groups: the so-called Big Five accountancy-based
firms (see note 1), the very large information technology (IT) and systems-based
firms (such as EDS and Cap Gemini), and the strategy firms (like McKinsey and
Boston Consulting). These groupings overlap considerably because, as Kipping
(2002) has pointed out, in the modern era of consultancy the high-status end of
the business, that of giving strategic advice, has ceased to be exclusive. Modern
integrated IT-based systems (like process reengineering and enterprise resource
planning) have become vehicles for strategizing, and firms that specialize in
these activities compete for work.
Large-firm management consultancy is not suggested as being representative
or somehow typical, but an element in a complex industry structure. As already
indicated, consultancy imitates the differentiation of management; the industry
as a whole supplies a vast range of business services, and consultants undertake a
highly diverse range of work. Consequently, no claim is being made that our
argument regarding consultants’ relationship to client management necessarily
holds in circumstances where, for instance, a consultant is engaged in more rou-
tine business services (such as the provision of counseling or the outplacement of
human resources services), or where more clinical “process consulting” is being
practiced. Nevertheless, consultants in firms like the Big Five deal with large-
scale changes (such as mergers-and-acquisitions or the introduction of new IT
systems), and these firms have made the central functions of strategy and change
 THE AGENT’S AGENT 75

management their special province. They trade in management knowledge that

reflects widely applied ideas and techniques, and they devote major internal re-
sources to generating this knowledge.
Methods were based on interviews and case material. Taped and transcribed
interviews, as well as documentary and other case data, were collected primarily
in one Big Five firm (ten interviews), with smaller numbers coming from two
other Big Five firms and one of the large IT consultancies. Interviews lasting
between one and two hours were conducted at varying hierarchical levels, from
consultant through principal/managing consultant, to director (though not with
partners). Sixteen interviews were conducted in total, of which nine were with
consultants, three with principal/managing consultants, and four with directors.
Hence, staff engaged in day-to-day project work were included, as well as groups
involved with bringing work in and dealing with bigger clients. For the former,
the skills included project management, IT, and human resources (HR), repre-
senting some of the main forms of expertise mobilized in project teams. The
schedule of questions focused on the main issues of the theoretical framework,
including how consultants managed the relationship with the client, how they
dealt with tensions emerging over the lifetime of projects, and the importance of
change management.
The accounts that respondents provided were grounded in their experiences
and perceptions of work. Clearly, the research relies on the consultant perspec-
tive, while the lack of a client perspective may be a worrying omission, espe-
cially given the centrality of the client-consultant relationship for analysis.
Nevertheless, we suggest that interviews as a particular type of research conver-
sation provide a window into the consultancy discourse that can be used to ex-
plore an issue like the client relationship. The “story” assembled from these data
may be narrower or more doctrinal than would be the case were other responses
included, but the data still provide the rich text needed to explore the whole of
the interaction arena, particularly where the reading of the data constantly seeks
to explore their symbolic and rhetorical content.

Political processes in client organizations

In reporting the data, the power dimension of the client-consultant relationship,

as indicated above, is central to agency theory, and a range of political behavior
was evident—how consultants identified the basic contours of the political map,
how they built their power base and formed alliances, how they sought to man-
age change and sideline rivals—while the limits of power tactics in driving orga-
nizational change were also present.
The impossibility of separating out “politics” from consultants’ work has been
stressed by a number of critical researchers (e.g., Bloomfield and Danieli 1995).
Prescriptive models of consultancy are more of two minds about acknowledging
power elements—although interestingly, with consultancy’s need to implement
76 FINCHAM (UNITED KINGDOM)

change, the notion of interest groups getting things done via power tactics is no
alien concept, even here. The models developed by some practitioners to de-
scribe exemplary cases suggest rather sophisticated political skills and relatively
elaborate team structures and change agents (e.g., Hammer and Champy 1993).
The present research indicated that consultants actually did “model” their
work in power terms, if in relatively simplified and less rigidly differentiated
ways than has been suggested. The basic perceptions of a political game and the
drawing of a political map were strongly in evidence. Consultants were alive to
the need for internal allies and models that defined the roles of different change
agents. These were important tools that alerted consultants to figures who may be
drawn into coalition. Contacts with internal champions, who had the ability to
effect change and the command of detail necessary for implementation, were ea-
gerly sought.
Being able to find the right people to move a project forward meant locating
managers who were committed and who tied their own careers into projects. One
consultant, for example, had the public sector in mind, where his firm had been
notably successful in deriving business. The emphasis there on market testing
and competitive tendering had created an aggressive breed of manager—“the
guy who wants to make his name by stripping out 60 percent of the cost”—who
represented a highly attractive coalition partner.
A more general guise of these power-related aspects of the consultant role
involved the notion of the “business process,” which has been seen as a key ele-
ment of consultant discourse (Fincham and Evans 1999). Identifying business
processes and finding a “process owner” were common references to a typical
organizational power figure. Consultants tended to focus on senior figures, but
they also knew that power could reside outside the hierarchy, as business pro-
cesses cut across functional boundaries and managerial roles. In practice, for an
internal manager to become a process owner meant that they needed to overreach
formal power divisions. In order to drive change forward, a functional head had
to be found who could exercise influence across two or three departments—
someone who, as one consultant put it, would be “first among equals and pull
rank when you go into process innovation.”
Sensitive political antennae could also tell you who not to form coalitions with.
In certain cases, this meant the avoidance of internal groups whose organizational
position and skills were such that they could imitate or supplant a consultancy role.
Keeping the information technology function at arm’s length was frequently con-
sidered important. This was interesting, as almost all pundits regard IT as a vital
element of organizational change—but this is precisely what would make it a rival
in project management terms. Some consultants went out of their way to stress that
projects should not be technology driven, and parodied IT as a mere service, far
removed from the business areas where real possibilities for cost saving lay:
You are missing a trick or two if you don’t use any IT. But far too many of
these initiatives are put in the hands of the IT director. IT directors are in the
 THE AGENT’S AGENT 77

support side of the organization. I am keen to find the guys who make it hap-
pen. The guys who have a vision of the future, of the markets and customers.
(Managing consultant)
That said, the constraints of an agency role, and ultimate dependent status,
meant the link to the client rarely translated into straightforward authority in the
client organization. Consultants did not see themselves as real power brokers or
central political actors. They were aware of their own lack of any political base in
the client organization, and that they were lacking the long-term commitment
synonymous with a true political role. They knew that in any heavyweight politi-
cal contest they were potential victims, brought in to deflect blame. In particular,
a central part of the power game involved corporate support. High-level sponsor-
ship represented the basic link with the principal, and without it the consultant-
as-agent was reluctant to embark on projects. Having powerful individuals or
groups on one’s side was crucial in maintaining a level of support—particularly
in the case of cost cutting and job losses, which (fairly obviously) could be ex-
tremely difficult to get the internal groups to accept. Significantly, though, hav-
ing a powerful sponsor behind a project signaled the avoidance of politics more
than an engagement in the power game. Tapping into the formal authority struc-
ture, in effect, offset consultants’ limited abilities to engage in political behavior;
it obviated the need for too much “stakeholder management” or having to per-
suade groups to buy into proposals:
You have to steer a middle line, and I would say that nobody is ever a hundred
percent successful. It’s one of the most difficult parts. You have to be sensitive to
the politics. You sometimes have to manipulate them to make them work your
way. So if you are trying to win favor for a solution, you might pick and choose
whom you lobby and how you lobby them, depending on where the balance of
power lies or, you know, where the support for your solution lies. In a big change,
there is an impact on people’s careers, people are lobbying for position against
one another in the change; they want to come out of it well, they want promotion,
they want a seat on the board, or something like that. (Principal consultant)
As a result, consultants, though unable to avoid internal politics, implied that
they fought shy of any real engagement. While they made use of tactical behav-
ior and identified people who could push projects forward, this was always
within a constrained political game in which their role was that of sense-maker
and facilitator, rather than central actor.

Power and organizational change

As also suggested above, one of the most important political arenas for negotiat-
ing the client-consultant relationship was that surrounding organizational
change. Construction of the “change narrative” was highly specific to the nature
of consultant work and identity, for in every sense change is the raison d’être of
78 FINCHAM (UNITED KINGDOM)

consultancy. In big-firm consultancy, in particular, consultants’ power over the

change process often focused on their capacity to induce the client into taking on
a major project. The benefits for the client lay in the promise of significant com-
petitive advantage via cost reductions and strategic positioning; but for the con-
sultant, the drive to discover areas where big improvements could be made had
huge advantages. In terms of our central analogy of the agency relationship
stretching across the organizational boundary, radical change could be seen in
terms of narrowing the gap with clients; this was because large-scale projects
meant the promise of continuing work (as well as large-scale fees), and tended to
mean “closer” and more substantive client relationships. For consultants in the
bigger agencies, this represented a move up-market, and meant less competition
for new work (fewer “beauty parades”).
Certainly, in recent years the ideas of structural organizational change and
root-and-branch redesign have gained in prominence. Techniques that are radical
in scope (like enterprise resource planning) and depth (like re-engineering) are
tailored to persuade client companies into risking sweeping changes. For ex-
ample, a vital tool that was part of the consultant’s arsenal of “soft” techniques
was that of the “vision” of change. The first task in any new program (and the
first discrete stage in many change models) was to “confirm the vision.” Owner-
ship of a broad perspective on change defined it as a quintessentially top-down
process, and helped to retain the initiative in the consultant’s hands. In the imple-
mentation teams, where brought-in experts worked alongside internal managers,
it helped consultants to set boundaries around the managers’ knowledge and to
control the groups that might have a claim on knowledge:
You would have to include your customers and suppliers in a very carefully
orchestrated way. To make sure you didn’t give somebody a sneak preview of
the vision. That by asking them, “Do you want this?”—if they went to press in
the state it’s in now, all hell would be let loose. . . . You’ve got to think, “Well,
who of my customers and suppliers do I trust to help me refine this?” And then,
when the organization is ready to release that refined vision, it’s in control of
the communications strategy. (IT/process consultant)

In this sense, “visioning” served the distinctly rhetorical purpose of anticipat-

ing client resistance. Consultants contrasted radical versus incremental change as
a kind of rhetorical pairing that differentiated full-blown process innovation
from more modest levels of improvement. Continuous improvement tended to be
disdainfully equated with low-level efficiency gains, whereas true innovation
meant dramatic advances and step-by-step changes. Indeed, in the more muscu-
lar versions of their role, incrementalism served as a kind of comparative meta-
phor that enabled consultants to project radicalism while, at the same time,
devaluing internal managerial knowledge. Because internal managerial groups
use most of the tools of change (e.g., benchmarking, value analysis), the consult-
ant can obtain little leverage here; but the radical approach provided a distinctive
 THE AGENT’S AGENT 79

claim on knowledge. Consultants could claim meta-skills that internal managers

almost by definition could not possess—the synthetic skills of managing projects
across functions and of importing knowledge from outside the industry. The situ-
ation of companies playing catch-up was consciously targeted by many consul-
tancies; firms that were off the pace of competition, or which could be defined as
missing some vital innovation, were represented as an idealized client.
OK, you’re below your competition now, but if you adopt a process of continu-
ing to get better, he’s also doing the same. Although you might be continually
improving faster than he is, it would take you bloody ages to catch up. What
you need is a step jump. And then, after a period of consolidation, another step
jump. (Managing consultant)
However, for consultants, the uncertainties and dilemmas of their own posi-
tion were never far away; and while some relished the role of change agent, oth-
ers more readily acknowledged that the pain of implementing major projects
diminished their chances of being taken on. The ability to produce a series of
small improvements could help to establish confidence that the consultant could
deliver. This represented another instance of misaligned interests between the
client-as-principal, and consultant-as-agent. The stark choice was often that of
client resistance to fully integrated change, versus a progressive scaling down of
the original vision. So while the enterprise-wide solution might have been the
preferred option, in the final analysis consultants often settled for something the
client was comfortable with.
I see, increasingly, a trend for going through the evaluating and visualizing
phases of change management, coming up with a design and a business case, and
choosing not to implement. We discover what they [the client] say is, “Right, we
are just going to implement this little bit here, and this bit there, and then we will
stop and think,” and so the change project that is undertaken is not at all what we
had conceived. And given that we are trying to earn a fee, it is usually a disap-
pointment and a failure in our terms, because we didn’t get as big a project as we
wanted. . . . They are doing the thing they need to do to guarantee success, which
is small bits of change which they can deliver safely, whereas what we would
have been trying to encourage them to do was major change, altogether, at once,
with a higher chance of failure. (Principal consultant)
The radical/incremental dilemma thus represents a neatly encapsulated version
of the agency problem. Client uncertainties about the scope and scale of changes
were paralleled, on the consultant’s side, in ambivalent attitudes toward the kind
of change initiative that should be promoted. Radical change might be “better”
for the consultants’ interests, while the client may see things differently; but the
consultant might interpret this as in the client’s interests, as well. Ever the prag-
matists, consultants were not irrevocably tied to their visions of change, nor
averse to taking advantage of short-term opportunities. Indeed, the self-same
consultants who were advocates of radical transformation could quickly change
80 FINCHAM (UNITED KINGDOM)

tack, and start declaiming that it was never their intention to reinvent the busi-
ness. Thus, incremental change and the radical option are polar opposites in one
sense, but could be part of the same set of tactics.

Local and market knowledge

As suggested, the other key area of uncertainty revolved around knowledge fac-
tors. This section examines how relevant knowledge was collected and applied in
specific contexts, and how the problems of branching and fragmenting agency
relationships added to uncertainty. The emphasis here is not simply on knowl-
edge transfer as a one-way process, but also on knowledge arising in the rela-
tional context. The problems of integrating client management’s knowledge of
local practices with consultants’ wider experience had many implications for the
legitimacy of knowledge. For, while there is no defined body of knowledge that
consultants (as agents) have sole access to, they still need to claim superior ex-
pertise to maintain their value and competitive position.
The large consultancies are classic examples of the “knowledge-intensive
firm,” and they devote a large part of their resources to acquiring and articulating
the latest market knowledge. They gather knowledge from many sources—from
conferences and networking, academic specialists, and their own accumulated
experience in client firms. They also have powerful systems for storing knowl-
edge and making it available to engagement teams. All the Big Five utilize com-
pany-wide databases built around the firm’s techniques and methodologies that
codify the experience of individual consultants, and which are ready to be ac-
cessed for future projects. One of the firms studied, for example, made a particu-
larly strong play of exploiting “knowledge” in various forms. The claim for the
client’s attention was positioned around their database, which was vigorously
marketed as a “knowledge base” and repository of global best practice. This was
allied with various systems and organizational structures for pulling together ar-
eas of strategic knowledge and capturing new knowledge:
They usually start with a cluster of people doing special work with clients, and
that starts to become an industry-wide issue. And then we will start to speak to
experts and build that into our knowledge base, so it kind of grows. . . . So if we
have [project experience from] a client, it goes off to the USA, the USA then
looks at it and says, “Yes, that deserves to be on the depository,” or doesn’t.
And if we have a question we can look at the bulletin board and get expertise
back to help us answer that. So our systems that help us build knowledge even-
tually go to how we actually deliver ourselves to the client. From that we build
methodologies; because something might start as a bulletin board, but over time
it grows into methodologies, service lines, virtual communities, and finally be-
comes a competency center. (Director)
Claims to be importing best practice into client firms were founded on such
techniques and methodologies. Indeed, the whole approach to conquering the un-
 THE AGENT’S AGENT 81

certainties of organizational problems lay in the application of technical rational-

ism. However, squaring the technical elements with more “creative” aspects of
the work was an area in which local and market knowledge came into conflict
(and also presented a tough/tender dilemma similar to that which we saw with
radical versus incremental approaches to change). Consultants, senior ones espe-
cially, often preferred to be associated with more “intellectual” concepts, and
correspondingly shied away from specific tools and techniques. (They might
spurn particular methods, like re-engineering, in favor of wider notions like or-
ganizational learning.) In the day-to-day discourse, consultants attempted to
combine the creative and less rationalistic elements with harder techniques. A
spectrum of concepts like visioning and culture change were employed alongside
more mundane tools. Some confidently believed all this to be unproblematic.
These concepts could be inserted into the analytical levels of the database, which
would be used to deliver unimpeded progress to the stages of product develop-
ment and delivery. Others were less confident that they were being supplied with
a means to arrive at implementable solutions, and were less categorical about the
“subjective toolkit”:
There is the sort of creative toolkit as well as the totally analytical toolkit,
which is very much, fairly subjective, and that’s where our sort of facilitative
role comes in, which is about stretching people’s ideas, envisioning, coming
up with the outlandish idea that actually is going to be the one that works.
And it is hard to put a label on those techniques. I mean, you can, on those
tools, and there are sort of rulebooks, but at the end of the day I find it a much
more subjective toolkit. Some people are better at it than others. (Principal
consultant)

Thus, while market knowledge enabled consultants to appeal confidently to cli-

ents, the simple nexus of authority mandated from the corporate client was in
constant need of redefinition. Legitimacy of knowledge was a complex set of
strands woven together, and consultants’ solutions needed to be supported and
framed by internal managerial know-how. Consultants thus placed a strong em-
phasis on mechanisms for acquiring firm-specific knowledge. Getting access to
“the best people,” access to any strategic reviews that clients themselves had un-
dertaken, and the use of “strategic workshops” to keep senior people informed,
were all given high priority.

Context of knowledge transfer

Some of the most persistent narratives of consultant discourse were shaped by

the need to obtain local knowledge—for example, the view of the relationship
with the client, and whether it ought to be seen as a “professional” type of rela-
tionship. A naïve observer might think that the halo of professionalism would be
eagerly sought as a means of legitimizing consultants in the eyes of clients; yet it
82 FINCHAM (UNITED KINGDOM)

has also been pointed out that a professional monopoly of knowledge is hardly a
possibility in management consultancy work, and that consultant discourse has
no real ambition to construct any such reality (Alvesson and Johansson 2002).
Such was the case with respondents in this study, who were ambivalent about
professional status and interpreted professionalism to mean a static and asym-
metric flow of knowledge. They preferred to see the consultant-client relation-
ship in terms that allowed a mix of skills to converge in the project teams. The
preferred image was that of “working with the client” in partnership. This
brought them “much closer” to clients and meant that knowledge could flow
from client to expert (as well as the other way round).
The strategic workshops and project teams provided flows of information, but
the consultant’s role in them remained ambivalent. They had to remain egalitarian
in order to ensure knowledge flow, but they also needed to stay in control. The way
to square this particular circle was to take charge of the client problem and set the
broad agenda. Thus, the teams tended to be represented as a forum that provided
the opportunity to redefine client problems. Here consultants could claim a privi-
leged status for their knowledge and ensure they avoided problems they could not
solve. Being able to control and define the problems they worked on meant select-
ing appropriate projects, for which knowledge of the client firm was essential.
Another important context in which knowledge was applied involved know-
ing which business processes were suitable for redesign, and obtaining detailed
information about them. Consultants needed to be able to select projects that
contained the potential for success—processes that contained a large cost base
and where big improvements could be demonstrated, for example, or that could
be tackled using the agency’s proprietary techniques and methodologies. What
was the right business process to select? This was a question that consultants
juggled according to conflicting criteria. The central problem—that of uncertain
legitimacy in the client firm—meant that while they might wish to redefine and
expand their programs of work, they also had to retain credibility and rapport
with clients who were themselves under an extended hierarchy. Client managers’
were also seeking reassurance and were driven by the need to justify hiring con-
sultants to others. Their power and position might be equally influenced by con-
sultants’ performance as evaluated by others. This range of pressures had to be
reconciled in a precarious balancing act over the short and long term:
Almost through a process of elimination and discussion [with the client], you
start to identify, either those [processes] that are business critical, or those that
have such a huge cost base in them at the moment that it becomes obvious that
you have to look at that. And in most situations you will start with the one that
is going to give you the biggest improvement; because again, by going into
something like that and getting a success in that area—you might want to look
at a small one where you could get a large improvement, but you could get it
quite quickly, so you could demonstrate the success through that one and then
take on a bigger challenge. Others may realize that a process is so business
 THE AGENT’S AGENT 83

critical that they would want to tackle that straight away. (Consultant, general
management)
This touches on what consultants claim to offer clients. The fusion of local and
market knowledge enabled a filtering down of the latest global best practices.
Not only were consultants supposed to tap into what the “top organizations”
were doing and formulate this knowledge into portable techniques, but they also
claimed, crucially, to adapt these practices in client firms. Gaining local knowl-
edge meant that consultants could deliver implementation plans that clients per-
ceived as workable in their situation. An ability to “put best practice into a busi-
ness that’s got worst practice” meant understanding where the client was coming
from and interpreting practice, not just importing it.
Seeking out local knowledge meant connecting not to a single center, but to
several centers of ownership. This is the real-life problem, alluded to above, of
multiple agency relationships. For the consultant, there were clear differences
between “the client and the client company.” If cost-cutting and job losses were
involved—and several respondents suggested this was the reality behind most
projects—resistance from middle managers underlined the need for powerful
backing. Indeed, managerial resistance was almost inevitable, given that the or-
ganizational activities most under scrutiny were those where costs could be taken
out. In such cases, managers were “instantly on the defensive,” and unlikely to
share information or to present information for inspection to impersonal hatchet
men. For all the stress on partnership, consultants were only too aware of manag-
ers’ reluctance to give up knowledge. Indeed, the very construction of a “partner-
ship” rhetoric might be seen as a means for acquiring local knowledge that tacitly
admits managers are predisposed to be suspicious and hostile.

Conclusion

The idea of management consultants as agents of managerial power revealed

much about how they operate in client firms and about their relations with inter-
nal managements. Agency theory moves us away from notions of the manage-
ment consultant as a knowledge source or disembodied expert, and more toward
an emphasis on the client-consultant relationship as the context of knowledge.
The significance of chains of principal-agent relations suggested that consultan-
cy could be seen as an extension of management’s own agency function. Agency
theory also provides a useful corrective: Whereas much theory on consultancy
(both prescriptive and critical) stresses the strategic influence of consultants and
their role in bringing new knowledge to the client, agency theory is clearly about
the agent as a subordinate figure.
In particular, the “agency problem” of differences of interest between princi-
pal and agent indicates a predisposition toward power; in the parallel case, man-
agement consultants’ political role was defined by their isolation from centers of
corporate power. Consultants were guaranteed a level of support by virtue of the
84 FINCHAM (UNITED KINGDOM)

links back to more structural power bases and the scale of big-firm operations
(Hobbesian power), but they were trapped between the need for political alli-
ances and the lack of any permanent political base (Machiavellian power). While
much of consultants’ influence derived from techniques of radical change, the
truism that radical change is risky was played out across varied scenarios. Clients
apparently feared the impact and cost of sweeping changes, and consultants
struggled to persuade them to accept risk ,while producing proposals the client
was “comfortable” with.
Furthermore, the problem of representation (of the principal’s interests) high-
lights issues of expertise and knowledge. Consultants struggled to reconcile their
own forms of knowledge with managers’ organization-specific knowledge. In
the literature, most prescriptive accounts see this as unproblematic. The image of
consultancy as a form of “knowledge transfer” sees the consultant intervention
importing best practice from the marketplace and blending it seamlessly with
management’s own knowledge. However, in reality local and market knowledge
were much more complexly related. Consultants knew their knowledge could
only be “transferred” into well-prepared ground; they tended to be uneasy with
asymmetric “professional” images of their skills and mindful of the problems of
gathering in local knowledge. They focused their efforts on the kinds of flexible
relationships in which defensive managements might be relieved of their knowl-
edge of local practices.
Overall, the analysis adds to our understanding of the consultancy phenomenon
by providing a framework for expressing the uncertainty at the heart of manage-
ment consultancy. In the above account, the realities of structural dependence on
the client and consultants’ unease with roles that implied a monopoly of knowl-
edge were all evidence of an attenuated authority. This was mirrored in the disjunc-
tion between the persuasiveness of discourse and the constraints of the consultant’s
position. Consultants employed distinctive power tactics in client firms, yet re-
mained perennial outsiders; they represented management at its most “systematic,”
yet in the process revealed the limits of managerial knowledge. In this sense, con-
sultants operating far from the mandate of ownership and capital’s central authority
stretch that authority to its limits, experiencing it as tenuous and ambiguous.
This view makes allies of those critical writers who stress the dependence of
consultancy on corporate structures (and is at variance with a perhaps more influ-
ential view that equates “persuasive” consultant rhetoric with a position of domi-
nance). The idea of consultants operating at the outer edge of capital’s power
over work and organization suggests that consultancy is defined by limited au-
thority within the client firm, which reflects the uncertainties of the managerial
task itself.

Note
1. Recent developments with respect to the restructuring of the Big Five’s consultancy
practices are explained in the Preface to this issue.
 THE AGENT’S AGENT 85

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