Knowledge narratives and heterogeneity in management consultancy and business services

• Main Authors: FINCHAM, Robin, CLARK, Timothy Adrian Robert, HANDLEY, Karen, STURDY, Andrew
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2007
• Subjects: Organizational Behavior and Theory; Organizational Communication
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/6254; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/lkcsb_research/article/7253/viewcontent/Knowledge_Narratives_Heterogeneity_Management_Consultancy_2008_pv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In the professional services, diversification into various types of business advice has implications for knowledge boundaries. This is a sector of changing jurisdictional patterns and periodic reconstruction. Firms like large law practices that feed services into corporate clients have been merging to provide global coverage (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2001; Suddaby et al., 2004). But new specialisms in areas like consulting and IT are even more dynamic. Patterns such as the growth in outsourcing and movement into management consulting accounted for stupendous growth of the global accounting firms. These changes have themselves been overtaken, as the IT and systems giants muscled into audit and consulting interests. Leading systems firms have taken over and merged with existing clusters of skills in a process seen by some as a historic wave in the evolution of the sector (Kipping, 2002; Kirkpatrick and Kipping, 2005).