TY - JOUR
T1 - Management consultancies as institutional agents
T2 - 2009 Academy of Management annual meeting
AU - Reihlen, Markus
AU - Smets, Michael
AU - Veit, Andreas
N1 - Best paper Award, Management Consulting Division, Academy of Management
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - 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 their services. In this paper, we elaborate a typology of strategies by which management consultancies can create and sustain such “institutional capital” (Oliver, 1997) that helps them extract competitive resources from their institutional context. Drawing on examples from the German consulting industry, we show how localized competitive actions can enhance individual firm’s positions, but also the collective institutional capital of the consulting industry as a whole, legitimize consulting services in broader sectors of society and facilitating access to requisite resources. These accounts counter prevailing imagery of institutional entrepreneurship as individualistic, “heroic” action and demonstrate how distributed, embedded actors can collectively shape the institutional context from within to enhance their institutional capital.
AB - 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 their services. In this paper, we elaborate a typology of strategies by which management consultancies can create and sustain such “institutional capital” (Oliver, 1997) that helps them extract competitive resources from their institutional context. Drawing on examples from the German consulting industry, we show how localized competitive actions can enhance individual firm’s positions, but also the collective institutional capital of the consulting industry as a whole, legitimize consulting services in broader sectors of society and facilitating access to requisite resources. These accounts counter prevailing imagery of institutional entrepreneurship as individualistic, “heroic” action and demonstrate how distributed, embedded actors can collectively shape the institutional context from within to enhance their institutional capital.
KW - consulting
KW - embedded agency
KW - institutional capital
KW - neoinstitutionalism
KW - institutional strategy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84858379676&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.5465/AMBPP.2009.44247397
DO - 10.5465/AMBPP.2009.44247397
M3 - Conference abstract
VL - 2009
JO - Academy of Management Proceedings
JF - Academy of Management Proceedings
SN - 0065-0668
IS - Meeting Abstract Supplement)
Y2 - 7 August 2009 through 11 August 2009
ER -