SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Business Administration
No 2005:4:
Between exploitation and control – Clients’ conceptions of the consultant-client relationship
Frida Pemer ()
and Andreas Werr ()
Abstract: 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 management consultants, as they are assumed to influence how
consultants are used and managed. Based on the study of ten managers, four
conceptions of management consultants, their roles and how they should be
managed were identified, representing four different kinds of buyers of
consulting services – the disappointed buyer, the trustful buyer, the
strong buyer and the instrumental buyer. These conceptions and their
relations to the three types of buyers found in the literature are
discussed, showing that the instrumental buyer is a “new” type with no
equivalent in the literature. The paper ends with a discussion of possible
explanations for the distribution of the conceptions over the ten studied
managers, where seven of them could be categorized as strong or
instrumental buyers, and what implications this may have on how management
consultants are used.
Keywords: Management Consulting; client; purchasing; (follow links to similar papers)
23 pages, April 26, 2005
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