Management consultants have long been recognized as carriers of management knowledge and disseminators of management fashions. While it is well understood how they promote the acceptance of their concepts, surprisingly little has been said about their strategies to promote the acceptability of...

We classify the strategies by which management consultancies can create and sustain the institutional capital that makes it possible for them to extract competitive resources from their institutional context. Using examples from the German consulting industry, we show how localized competitive...

Purpose – Increasing complexity, fragmentation, mobility, pace, and technological intermediation of organizational life make “being there” increasingly difficult. Where do ethnographers have to be, when, for how long, and with whom to “be there” and grasp the practices, norms, and...