Government agencies’ use of management consulting services in Sweden – an explorative study

The current paper investigates the use of management consultants in the Swedish public sector. Based on an analysis of the use of management consulting services in 55 Government agencies (GAs) in the years 2004-2011 the paper makes a number of contributions. First it confirms an overall growth of the use of consulting services in the public sector. However, it also shows that the use of consulting services and its growth are unevenly distributed across organizations, where GAs with a highly professionalized work force are less heavy users of consulting services than regular GAs. The study also points at temporal variations in GAs use of consulting services. Here changes in top management, especially the CEO, are identified as initiators of temporary reductions of the use of consulting services.