Abstract:
The view that individuals and organisations create or enact their social worlds through
shared frames of reference, on-going interlocking routines and patterns of action is
increasingly underpinning academic research and offering practitioners new insights. At
the same time, now commonplace strategy consultancy services are rooted in the
rhetoric, if not the practice, of rational, technical analysis. This research explores the
influence of management consultants in helping managers to create as well as discover
the environment they experience and to develop and realise a strategic direction for
their organisations.
Grounded in four diverse case studies, the research offers a richer, inextricably
contextual and essentially social conception of consultants’ strategy interventions.
Consultants’ work is conceived as simultaneously embedded or set within, yet seeking
to achieve a separation from, existing organisational frames of reference,
commitments and routines. By creating and maintaining some degree of separation,
consultants facilitate a distinct enactment or experience of the world, and so influence
the strategic thinking and subsequent actions of managers. Efforts to achieve
separation are met by pressures to conform, and the ideas generated merge into the
wider organisational enactment. The research points to complex processes of reciprocal
influence, positioning and resistance between consultants and members of the
organisation which shape the nature and course of an intervention. It also sheds light on
the ripple effect interventions have through an organisation, on how new strategies are
diffused and fused within existing patterns of thought and action, and the process of
strategic change and transformation.
The theoretical framework developed, comprising the concept of embedded
enactment and two overarching dimensions of separation and absorption, provides a
new way of understanding and explaining consultants’ strategy interventions. The
case studies themselves describe some subtleties and nuances of interventions and offer
opportunities for consultants and managers to reflect on personal experiences.
