Rethinking the role of management consultants as disseminators of business knowledge: Knowledge flows, directions, and conditions in consulting projects
Abstract
Consultants are seen as core agents in the dissemination of business knowledgethrough their relative expertise and/or rhetorical and knowledge management practices.However, relatively few studies focus specifically on their role in projects with clientorganisations. This paper examines knowledge flow in consultancy projects fromlongitudinal observation and interview research as well as a survey of clients andconsultants working together. Our analysis suggests that the conventional view ofconsultants as disseminators of new management ideas to clients is, at best,exaggerated and certainly misrepresents their role in project work. Firstly, it tends tooccur by default rather than by design. More importantly however, learning is oftenconcerned with project processes or management more than the knowledge domain ofthe particular project and occurs in multiple, sometime unexpected, directions.Furthermore, a range of enabling and constraining conditions for knowledge flow areidentified - not in a deterministic sense, but as a loose or partial structuring of knowledgein practice.