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...

During the past years, the use of management consultants has increased significantly, giving managers repeated experiences of both hiring and working with them. In an effort to understand the managers’ use of management consultants, this paper sets out to investigate managers’ conceptions of...

This paper addresses the question of how management consulting services are evaluated in client organizations. By building on an interview study with organization members in two client organizations and drawing on discourse theory, the current paper shows that clients seldom perform formal...

The aim of this study is to investigate how the quality of management consulting services is evaluated ex ante by public contracting authorities. Building on an explorative document study of 96 invitations to tender for management consulting services published in 2008-2012, seven different...

Seeking to benefit from higher levels of purchasing maturity, many organizations strive to formalize their purchasing practices. Why these practices are not adopted by certain organizations or for certain types of purchases is less well understood, however. It has been argued that the purchasing...

Management consultants are often described as accumulators, generators and disseminators of knowledge in the business world. Little research has however been devoted to the extent to which and the processes by which organizations hiring management consultants learn. This issue is addressed in...

Current literature on organizations often argues that firms are becoming increasingly dependent on knowledge residing outside their own boundaries requiring organizations to increase their entrepreneurial abilities and make their boundaries more flexible and permeable. This paper reviews the...