SSE Working Paper Series in Business Administration,
Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: 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 evaluations of consulting projects. Instead, the projects are evaluated informally. The findings from the empirical analysis indicate that this informal evaluation takes place through different types of talk, in which the projects and involved actors are given a discursively constructed worth. The paper contributes to the informal evaluation literature by shedding light on how the informal evaluation is carried out and how the worth of management consulting projects are discursively constructed by clients using frame-talk and mythopoetic-talk. It also highlights the importance of regarding the informal evaluation not only as an individual activity, but rather as shared among groups and socially, politically and contextually influenced. The paper also contributes to the management consulting literature by nuancing the hitherto homogenous picture of clients, and giving insights into the mechanisms behind why some projects are perceived by clients as more successful than others.

Keywords: management consultant; client; informal evaluation; worth; discourse; talk

36 pages, October 1, 2014

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