Silence, procrustes and colonization: A response to Clegg et al.'s 'noise, parasites and translation: Theory and practice in management consulting'
Abstract
The article by Clegg, Kornberger and Rhodes in March 2004’s issue of Management Learning is a refreshing and welcome contribution to an otherwise largely sterile, atheoretical and overly prescriptive literature on management consulting. However, and sadly, it stops very short of offering a critique and therefore generating substantially novel insights into this phenomenon. Also, and despite the authors’ assertions otherwise, it ends up celebrating consultancy as a privileged arena in achieving what is described as radical change, but what is, in effect, typically a reinforcement of existing power relations and of managerialism and its associated language.This response comes from a position that is, in many respects, empathetic with that expressed in the article. Consulting can indeed readily be seen as an activity through which theory serves ‘as a means by which practice can be interrupted and transformed . . . disturb(ing) organizational realities’ (p. 32) by creating ‘noise’. Moreover, this ‘parasitic’ process is not so much one of creating a new order as one of translation, which combines both ‘difference and repetition’ as it mediates linguistically between different ‘systems’, especially those of the client and consulting organization (p. 39). Indeed, others have presented a similar picture where consultants occupy what appears to be a special place in postmodern thinking— liminality (Clark and Mangham, 2004; Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003).