Consulting University: A Reflection from Inside - Wiley Online Library

Financial Accountability & Management, 29(2), May 2013, 0267-4424

Consulting University: A Reflection from Inside BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA AND CARMELO MAZZA*

Abstract: This paper contributes to a growing literature on the role of management consultants in the public sector by examining a sensitive area of management consulting, as exercised by university faculty members and as applied to universities. It frames the development of management consulting as an idea that originated in universities, travelled first into the private sector and then into the public sector, from country to country, and was eventually applied to universities – with problematic effects.

Keywords: translation, management consulting, New Public Management, cultural circuit INTRODUCTION

It has been suggested that when ideas travel all over the world, they travel not only across space, but also across time. Thus the circulation of fashionable ideas can be depicted not by the metaphor of a circle but rather that of a spiral (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996). This means that the same idea, or rather what is perceived as the same or similar idea, may come back to the same place several times. It is never the same, because the very movement from one place to another means that the idea has to be translated again and again; but neither does the spiral hold the same shape – it can become bigger or smaller. Such is the case of management consulting. Its origins were located in universities: an MIT professor, Arthur Dehon Little, founded his management consulting company in 1886, and was followed by James O. McKinsey from the University of Chicago who started his business in 1910. One could say that the rest is history, but it is exactly the shape of this history that is of interest here.

*The authors are respectively, Professor at Gothenburg Research Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; and Professor at LUISS Business School, Roma, Italy. Address for correspondence: Barbara Czarniawska, Gothenburg Research Institute, School of Business, Economics & Law, University of Gothenburg, P.O Box 603, SE 405 30 Gothenburg, ¨ Ovre Fogelbergsgatan 6, Sweden. e-mail: [email protected] C

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CONSULTING UNIVERSITY: A REFLECTION FROM INSIDE

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In 2010 management consulting returned to universities, but this time not merely to recruit new employees, but also to consult them. This paper tells this story, showing first how the idea of management consulting arrived to public administration, and then how the idea launched by the two management fashion leaders, the USA and the UK, was translated in two European countries – Sweden and Italy – which are fashion followers. Sweden and Italy represent Northern and Southern Europe well, but they also serve as two contrasting examples of countries following the same trends in European public administration. Additionally, there is a wealth of comparative material concerning these two countries. MANAGEMENT CONSULTING COMES TO PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Management consulting grew in range and importance throughout the 20th century. The idea travelled to Europe, where one of its best known translations is known as the Tavistock Institute in London, which came into being after World War I, and re-opened in 1946 as the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, sponsored by Rockefeller Foundation and the UK government (Trist and Murray, 1990). The ‘company doctors’ acted as researchers and consultants, propagating the notion of ‘action research’. But being an action researcher, like being a reflective practitioner (Schön, 1983) is – and remains – a very demanding task, so it is not surprising that management consulting developed into a specialty, perhaps even a profession, of its own. It was during the 1980s and 1990s that management consulting became one of the fastest growing sectors in the USA and the UK. The Kennedy Information Resource Group estimated in 2001 that total management-consulting revenues worldwide were $62 billion a year, compared to about $3 billion in 1980 with about 80% of existing management consulting firms established after 1980 (Stewart, 2002). The crisis of 1993 damped the spiral somewhat, but it continued. Similarly, when the recession hit USA in April 2001, the consulting firms did not suffer. Neither the growing number of texts critical of management consulting has any visible dampening effect: . . . students seem unswayed by the naysayers and consider a consulting position to be the liberal-arts degree of the business world. ( . . . ) The elites recruit heavily at Chicago, where consulting is the No. 1 career choice for M.B.A.s, ahead of investment banking. Roughly 30 percent of 470 new hires from the GSB Class of 2001 took consulting jobs, with McKinsey as the GSB’s top employer, at 32 new hires and 19 interns. Boston Consulting Group was No. 5, and in the top 15 were Deloitte Consulting and Accenture (Stewart, 2002, p. 2).

The spiral thus regularly returns to universities to collect new generations of its carriers. It can be confidently predicted that the financial crisis of 2009 will have the same effect as the one of 2001. To take an example from the other C

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management fashion leader, the UK, and its public sector: it was estimated in 2010 that the government spent £1.5 billion on the hiring of management consultants (Fawcett, 2010). The new government decided to reduce these costs. However, according to Fawcett, an analysis of the Department of Communities and Local Government (CLG), which on its website has made public all payments to suppliers in excess of £500, revealed that a total of £73 million ( . . . ) was spent on consultancy services in 2009/10 compared with £35 million ( . . . ) in 2007/08. Hence, department expenditure had doubled and not decreased (Fawcett, 2010, p. 4).

Why so? Stewart (2002) interviewed a director in the Chicago office of McKinsey’s Consulting; the director claimed that executives’ perception of management consultants has changed: ‘Seeking help is viewed as a good course of action,’ says McGrath. ‘Thirty years ago in company after company management had a machismo about tackling problems. Now seeking targeted help is much more acceptable’ (Stewart, 2002, p. 2).

Fawcett confirms this observation: A survey conducted by the Management Consultancies Association (MCA) in 2010 indicated that 72% of management consulting work carried out in central government is commissioned because relevant specialist skills were not available within the departments. One of the main reasons for using management consultants was to deal with difficult situations or crises (Fawcett, 2010, p. 7).

To return to the original metaphor, the travel and spreading of management consulting can indeed be presented as a spiral of a changing diameter (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 How Management Consulting Travelled Through Time

It is current practice to trace dramatic changes in the public administrations of western countries back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) and the government of Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990). Reagan ordered an investigation that produced the so-called Grace Report, which stated: C



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(1) that the private sector is far more efficient than the public sector and is the repository of all management wisdom, (2) that the public and private sectors are similar enough that the former can be dramatically transformed by techniques imported from the latter, and (3) that the reform efforts of the past have little to teach the present-day reformers (Downs and Larkey, 1986, p. 219).

Margaret Thatcher wholeheartedly agreed with this stance, and her government acted accordingly. This attitude was not limited to the USA and the UK, however; nor was it restricted to the tenure of these two leaders. It was Bill Clinton who launched the ‘Reinventing Government’ project in the USA (see e.g., Panozzo, 2000), Tony Blair who introduced the Best Value reform in the UK (see e.g., Solli et al., 2005) and Göran Persson (Swedish Social Democratic prime minister, 1996–2006) who privatized most of the state-owned companies in Sweden. The end of the 1980s witnessed the arrival of the New Public Management (Hood, 1991). New Zealand served as a role model, which was eagerly imitated by most western countries, just as ‘The Swedish Model’ was imitated in the 1970s. Italian reformers used the label of New Public Management (NPM) to introduce a wave of normative changes in administrative law between 1993 and 1999. It was based on a much earlier, rediscovered report by Massimo Severo Giannini (1979), a distinguished professor in Administrative Law and Minister of Public Affairs, who in the 1970s claimed that there was a need for profound reform in the entire organization of the Italian state. Public management replaced the term public administration. Although all dictionaries inform us that the two words are synonymous, the linguistic practice of recent decades has attributed ‘management’ to the private sector, and ‘administration’ to the public sector. The neologism public management was intended to attract attention to the fact that the public sector in western countries is committed to following the models coming from private industry.1 NPM became the name for the wave of drastic reforms undertaken in many countries, but bearing no relationship to the ideological direction of their governments. Olson et al. (1998) so summarized this phenomenon: This managerialist reform movement has been promoted on the grounds that the public sector was too large and cumbersome, organised on the wrong principles and in need of re-invention and institutional renewal ( . . . ) The result has been the pursuit of policies of restraint on public spending, the selling of public assets, the adoption of market models and the promotion of performance measurement, auditing and business accounting systems for a wide range of public organisations (Olson et al., 1998, p. 17).

New techniques aimed at better management were introduced and widely imitated around the world (Sahlin-Andersson and Sevón, 2003). In such small, open cultures as those of the Nordic countries, organizations frequently adopted labels, desires, and models of strategic thinking and organizing from abroad even earlier, often with the help of US-based consulting companies, but also through researchers in their own countries. In the 1980s, however, new ways of accounting, regulating, and evaluating public services began to spread widely C


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in the Nordic countries. And not merely in the Nordic countries. The 1990s witnessed a wave of reform in the Italian public sector, for example, aimed at the managerialization of both central and local governments and a more general adjustment of the public sector to the criteria of the private sector (Cerase and DeVivo, 2000; Lippi, 2000; and Panozzo, 2000).2 Management consultants played a critical role in this process. In the beginning, public sector organizations simply employed the same management consultants as were being used by private companies. In time, however, some management consultants began to specialize in public sector organizations. In Sweden, this was because the private sector had replaced public administration as a model of effective management in the 1980s (Czarniawska, 1985). Many of the early consultants were actually researchers. This profile of ‘academic-cum-consultant’ is built upon the long-standing practice of university professors teaching management topics and being involved in management consulting. Now, however, along with the reputation-based approach of distinguished professors undertaking consulting, a new approach has emerged: young researchers combining academia and consulting from the early stages of their careers and throughout their careers. This interplay, which could be clearly seen in public administration reforms,3 led to the peculiar consequences for university reforms that are the topic of our paper. We illustrate our reasoning with examples taken from Sweden and Italy – a Northern and a Southern European country, both imitators in the present wave of public sector reform. In the next section, we briefly describe the entry of management consultants into the public sector of both countries, then move to a description of a contemporary relationship between universities and management consultants in two sections that follow. In time, even university leaders felt the need to seek the consultation of management consultants, and this closing of the circuit may lead to a peculiar set of consequences, which are worthy of reflection. MANAGEMENT CONSULTING IN SWEDISH AND ITALIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: THE 1980s AND THE 1990s

It would be inaccurate, however, to claim that management consultants were absent in the Swedish public sector before the 1980s. The Swedish Ministry of Industry employed the Boston Consulting Group in the 1970s to help them in the planning of their industrial policies (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1988). But this was only the beginning. In time, planning was no longer the issue. In 1984, the Minister of Civil Affairs and his State Secretary organized a meeting with 20 consulting companies, the majority of which were privately owned, with some being subsidiaries of the state-owned Statskonsult AB (later disbanded). Representatives of other ministries and central agencies also participated. The aim of this gathering was to propose an inventory of consulting competence that could be used in works of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, on what was expected to be C



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a large government bill concerning the public sector (Premfors et al., 1985). The bill turned out to be a mixture of government ideologies of the time: managing the public sector along with a leading managerial philosophy, as propagated by most successful consulting companies. Premfors et al. (1985) interviewed public sector buyers about their motives for hiring management consultants. Their primary motivation, it emerged, was what the authors called organizational-political – a response comprising several reasons. One explanation was that the introduction of ‘independent’ expertise had become an effective legitimating device, while private sector had become a role model. Another was that the traditional public sector response to problems – expansion – was barred by a change in the economic and political climate. Finally, it has been claimed that a general overload of information (and this was before the Internet!) and an increase in required managerial expertise rendered executive jobs more stressful. Therefore: [p]rivate consultants offer an alternative that is extremely attractive to stressed decision-makers: a quick decision proposal for a variety of situations. Such an alternative comes much less often from researchers or from experts in other institutions within the public sector, who, at least theoretically, could also be of use (Premfors et al., 1985, pp. 11–12, translation BC).

They did become useful, but only after they learned to be ‘proper’ management consultants, meaning that they learned to translate the key concepts of the private sector: market- and service-orientation, profitability, and shareholder value. On the other hand, the growing demand induced private management consultants to deepen their understanding of the public sector. As the study conducted in the late 1980s revealed, there was general agreement on the commonality of management problems in both sectors: I am convinced that much of what one does in private industry is very useful in the public sector. This is because it is really a question of how people work together and how they work efficiently. And of getting incentives and being able to follow up things and controlling them and having the right type of organization and so on. It doesn’t really matter whether you produce health care services or cars (Consultant 04, from Czarniawska-Joerges, 1988, p. 98).

Private management consultants replaced not only the older public sector consultants (mostly planning consultants), but also ‘experts’ who had usually been recruited from universities: Experts put more investigation-type specialist knowledge into a presentation, but consultants go in and lead a process, placing both their competence and their time at the disposal of the participants at the appropriate point. They don’t inject so much expertise and they don’t write reports – they just see to it that things happen (Client 06, Czarniawska-Joerges, 1988, p. 103). In a public sector report, 80% is normally description, 10–12% analysis, and 7% some sort of action or strategy or proposal. We wanted to reverse this relationship, so as to have 2% description. It’s like a pyramid in which the proposal section and the

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action-oriented part should be the volume items (Consultant 02, Czarniawska-Joerges, 1988, p. 104).

And so it went. On the one hand, competition in the field of management consulting became much sharper. By 1997, 13 consultancies of US origin accounted for 81% of the sales of the 20 largest consultancies in Sweden (Engwall et al., 2002). Still, these companies employed Swedes, including quite a few researchers who worked for them part time. Nevertheless, as Engwall et al. concluded, the linking of academic research and consulting became more complex over time. An earlier idea, according to which management consulting was a means of obtaining field material and funds for research, has been replaced by the idea that consulting must be market-oriented, and that this applies to both the public sector and private companies. If researchers wanted to continue consulting, they had to subordinate their research ambitions to the requirements of practical management. Although New Public Management has reached every European country, there have been differences in the way these general ideas have been translated into local contexts (see e.g., Olsen and Peters, 1996). As Gherardi and Jacobsson (2000) noticed, the ‘managerialization’ of the public sector in Italy, which began somewhat later – in the early 1990s – took a different form than it did in Scandinavia. These two editors of a special issue of Scandinavian Journal of Management dedicated to reforms in Italy contrasted the ‘legalistic’ Italian way with a more pragmatic Scandinavian one. Nevertheless, consultants played a key role in Italy, as they did in Sweden. Lippi (2000) took the claim of difference even further, showing not only that the managerialist reforms in Italy differed from those of other European countries, but also that the same reform looked different in different local governments. Thus he postulated that allomorphism was characteristic of the Italian public sector, in contrast to the usually assumed isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). Following Panozzo (2000), he took the introduction of management accounting (a rough translation of controllo di gestione) as an example. To cut a long and complicated story short, a legal decree issued in 1993 stipulated the introduction of management accounting in all 109 provincial administrations in Italy and in all of the approximately 450 municipalities with over 20,000 inhabitants (Lippi, 2000, p. 462). As it turned out, the majority of these organizations turned to management consultants for help, but even there allomorphism ruled: Almost three-quarters of the controllers interviewed had attended at least one training course, and 36% of them regularly attended conferences on the theme. But the training agencies, like the consultants, were a very mixed bunch. Apart from public bodies and the professional associations, only two large private agencies situated in centralnorthern Italy ran courses for public-sector employees involved in CdG [controllo di gestione]. Local administration tended to make use of the ‘expert next door’ – the locally available consultant, the small agency, the individual professional – rather than national training agencies and consultancy agencies (Lippi, 2000, pp. 472).

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Lippi distinguished three types of ‘interlocutors’ who provided assistance in the implementation of management accounting: counterparts in other administrations, software specialists, and business management consultants. He ended by saying ’Other figures appear to be of secondary importance, apart from academics who, as the purveyors of ‘expert knowledge’, may represent powerful sources of legitimacy’ (ibid). Indeed, a micro study of the same phenomenon (Pipan and Czarniawska, 2010) revealed an allomorphic but stable presence of academics in a consulting function. Between 1995 and 1996, in the Ministry of Finance (see Cerase and DeVivo, 2000, for a pessimistic version of this reform), the two consulting companies cooperated in conducting a study of central and local administrative practices. On the basis of their results, they constructed the first model of management accounting, called ‘uniform control’, to be used in various types of offices. There was a clash between two consulting companies, both of which employed part time researchers. The winner of the conflict continued to combat the resistance shown by some local managers. They were supported in their battle by a new ally, Scuola Centrale Tributaria,4 the educational institution in charge of providing ad-hoc courses to executives in the Ministry of Finance; it employs academics, and has introduced many courses on management accounting. In Genoa, a neighboring school of business offered its help to the municipality in 1996, but the management courses being offered did not convince the then-head of the accounting department, who decided against the alliance. In a later phase, however, an important external ally emerged in the form of a private research institute, which volunteered to lead the introduction of management accounting – a suggestion that was gratefully accepted. The institute has subsequently played an important role in redefining the identities of the actors involved in the reform; in introducing new, sophisticated technologies (and presenting them as inevitable); but above all, in translating management accounting into a set of concrete practices (Pipan and Czarniawska, 2010). In summary, we do not want to suggest that there is one uniform picture of the role of management consulting in the public sector. Several experiences in Sweden and Italy show how local adaptations of what purports to be the same reform resulted from different alliances taking place. These alliances produced specific connotations and contents of the practices to be implemented, thus filling the space freed by standards and rules. In particular, these alliances included universities and research centers, working with public administration organizations, creating space for academics-plus-consultants to multiply, and making room for young researchers next to the distinguished professors. There is no uniform role for researchers in this process. Their role depends upon the local alliances among consulting firms, public sector organizations, and academia. There is one commonality, however: the process of management consulting performed by researchers has a distinctive set of complications, as illustrated in the next section. C


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UNIVERSITY CONSULTS PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: A ROAD TO PURGATORY

The following excerpts have been taken from a study of Italian public sector organizations and their consultants (Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003): I teach industrial economics and the economics of competition in the Faculty of Economics. I know that you, too, come from an academic environment, so I hope you understand what I mean. I study mathematical models, use regression analysis and apply econometric models, but upon entering the office of the client all I’m interested in are organizational behaviors and coordination and control systems. I call it schizophrenia; I know that this is a way of earning a living, but for how long can I go on like this? (An interview from Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003, p. 267).

The complaints and the problems were not limited to a personal feeling of schizophrenia: they were visible in the interactions among the academic consultants, their bosses, and their clients. One field of conflict concerned the use of paid time: I’ve seen your most recent publication in the [scientific journal]. Congratulations! I’m sure you worked day and night to get it. I hope, however, that when I saw you here every afternoon at the computer you were working for our project. Right? (Fieldnotes from Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003, p. 275).

The non-academic consultants considered it necessary to emphasize the difference between themselves and their academic colleagues, obviously to their own advantage: Consultants are la crème de la crème of management science. We consultants are able to turn ideas and time into money, as companies turn products and services into money. Academics are only able to talk; we do the real stuff! That’s what we are paid for (An interview from Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003, p. 278).

The contrast between the consultants and the researchers is a staple diet of professional reflection in both academia and consulting. Who is doing ‘the real stuff’? And where does it position an academic who is also a consultant? Sometimes up, sometimes down: Here is Z. He’s our genius. He’s able to contribute to a solution for any problem. However, be careful; he’s an academic, so he could study your behavior and then make a book out of his reflections. So, your bad attitudes could be known through international books! (Fieldnotes from Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003, p. 284).

Such an introduction can become a two-edged sword, as Czarniawska (2001) learned to her dismay when she was presented to a group of managers in the public utility she was studying, as ‘the professor who came here to tell us how we should reorganize our company’. The situation becomes doubly complicated if the clients are also academics. The sarcasm and aggressiveness in the following exchange may be exceptional, but the conversation illustrates a process that often takes place: C



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- Well, I am only your consultant, Dr Client. I adjust to your indications. Even if I don’t understand the indications, I adjust anyway. - And you are right on both accounts, Consultant. You should think like I do for two reasons: because I am paying your consulting hours and therefore I take away your right to think independently, and because I am always right (Fieldnotes from Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003, p. 285). In our earlier analysis we suggested that consultants – summoned in order to create a change-conducive liminal space in work organizations (van Gennep, 1909/1960; and Turner, 1966), are themselves submitted to a liminal condition. Arnold van Gennep, the Dutch anthropologist who introduced the concept of liminality in relation to rites of passage, paid little attention to the condition of those who organized the rites. It seems, however, that there has recently been a growing number of professionals who accept liminality as an ever-present condition. Not only do they move between proper organizations (university, consulting company) and those in a temporary state of liminality (public or private), they consider moving in and out of a stable state. In this context, however, the academic consultants seem to find themselves in a double liminality. Whereas the other consultants move between two worlds, they move between three, and can be accused in each of them of belonging to another (it is not unusual, as Engwall et al., 2002, have pointed out, that consulting is currently seen as a demerit in academia). The three worlds may all be autopoietic systems, as Luhmann (1989/2005) suggested, denying the possibility of any communication among consultants, their clients (in this case, the public sector), and their supplier (university). A peculiar condition is therefore that of an academic-cum-consultant having a university as a client.5 Moving between a university and managerial practice can prove trying, as the opening quote suggested. Consulting companies are more likely to be able to maintain the liminal condition while softening its adverse consequences. But even consulting firms cannot protect consultants from a very special liminal condition: advising how to manage an organization called business administration department or management school at a university. ADVISING THE UNIVERSITY: FROM PURGATORY TO HELL

Although the public sector in most European countries undertook a reform process driven by a transnational move toward NPM supported by political and economic rationales, there was nothing like a New University Management movement in place. Instead, criticisms of management principles as applied to universities had been raised long before these principles had found concrete application (see e.g., the harsh media debate about Oxford University recruiting a Vice Chancellor from outside academia – and Oxford!; Lipsett, 2007). The same criticisms resonated in Khurana’s (2007) book, in which it was suggested C


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that management education had played a role in the rise of unethical cynicism at the corporate level. Unlike the New Public Management agenda, apparently well specified by now, New University Management is still searching for its destination. It currently oscillates between the intellectual practices described by Lamont (2009) and the ‘business message’ spreading such myths and ceremonies as productivity rise, efficient resource allocation, customer orientation, and rankings. The ongoing reform process is filtered by local history and global myths (the Anglo-Saxon universities’ excellence in Italy, internationalization in France, and so on), and local constraints – primarily cuts in public spending on university education (Mazza et al., 2008). Academia is therefore a liminal space onto itself. But how do university professors behave when approached by management consultants, and vice versa? The following excerpt from the fieldnotes of a participant observer in a Swedish university demonstrates that the situation is rife with tensions: I am in a meeting of the Graduate Education Committee of the largest department in my School. I represent another small department, but I am here because we offer graduate education together. The last point of an unusually long meeting is a presentation by two consultants, engaged by the School to prepare a future reorganization of the department, in cooperation with people from the department. The committee consists of eight professors and two graduate student representatives, and a secretary. Two of the professors present at the committee meeting have participated in the preparatory work. After having seen a couple of PPTs, I feel angry; these are insulting my intelligence. Eventually, I remember that the whole thing does not concern my department. I calm down and decide to turn it into a fieldwork opportunity. There are two consultants: a man and a woman in their early forties. As fits the Swedish model of equality, it is the man who pushes the buttons of the computer, while the woman is doing most of the presenting. They are standing. In their introductory words, they admit to have graduated from our School. Indeed, their whole presentation resembles nothing more than a presentation of students waiting to be graded. Their body language signals uncertainty; they stand long after the presentation is over, until I ask them to sit down (I am sitting closest to one of them). The woman sits down; the man remains standing. In my vocabulary, what they offer are several new labels (new roles) and a heap of platitudes – no metaphors whatsoever. The PPTs are poorly done; no fancy pictures or effects, apart from a surprising photograph of a big eye under the title ‘Department’s Mission’. Department as Big Brother? Caustic remarks begin, but are addressed to the group rather than to the consultants. Under ‘Mission: Economy’, the PPT says that the financial resources should be good; I suggest that having ‘poor finances’ as a mission would be more original and could even earn some money for the department. Another PPT has a list of ‘objectives’, and under them several circles entitled ‘effects’. Professor A asks if there is no list of means to tie objectives to effects. No, there is none.

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Next, the consultants present a long list of problems derived from a SWOT analysis. It is noted by Professor A that no strong characteristics are mentioned, and that the weak characteristics are standard; people do not communicate enough and there is too little research money. I butt in, explaining that SWOT is a Protestant invention, whereby one must immerse oneself in one’s weaknesses, in contrast to the Catholic strategy, as represented by Drucker, which advocates concentrating only upon strong characteristics.

These feeble attempts at wit by me and the others, are met by the consultants with smiles, but no comments. Other professors offer sarcastic remarks or serious comments and questions, the latter answered by the two professors who are seen as partly responsible. One of the few comments addressed to the consultants is by Professor A, who points out that most of the suggestions concerning resources would be adequate for a company, but not for a university.

The consultants leave – greatly relieved, it seems to me. The secretary says that they confided in her once that, much as they have been working with many other departments at the university, this particular assignment is ‘a bit awful’ (wherein ‘a bit’ means ‘extremely’). The professors who participated in the preparatory work leave rather quickly, too. I say that I haven’t seen such a heap of empty phrases for a long time, and ask about the cost of the project, but nobody knows exactly. Professor B says that this is a clear path toward centralization and bureaucratization. In his opinion, the focus should be not on structures, but on processes: How can we work better or differently? We agree that the new structure is actually an old structure (the one that existed before the previous reorganization), plus additional levels and positions (Participant observation,6 BC).

The educational circuit has closed: those whom we taught management teach us management. The first reaction is automatic: ‘Who taught them this stuff?’ Searching for answers moves one from obvious attempts at re-attributing blame (‘Certainly not I. I wonder who it was?’), through a more general reflection (‘Is this what we teach them at School? No wonder we are blamed for causing the financial crisis!’), to a furious ‘How dare they?’ (‘they’ standing for either the university president who started a big reorganization project in the whole university, or the dean who suggested changes in the Department, independently or under pressure from the president – we were not sure who exactly stood behind the idea). So, yes, we were given our own medicine, and we did not like it. Apparently, only consultants in finance take without protest the medicine they prescribe for others, claims Karen Ho in Liquidated (2009), her ethnography of Wall Street. Karin Fernler (1993) reported that management consultants interviewed in her study were upset by the very idea that they should apply their advice to their own company. Teaching the clients (public sector organizations) to become customer-oriented, the company never adapted to any of their clients’ demands. Their program sold well (see also Brunsson, 2006, pp. 71–72). C


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CZARNIAWSKA AND MAZZA TIME FOR A GENERAL REFLECTION?

Perhaps this meeting was not representative; but it is certainly not unique. Management wisdom, as propagated by business schools (Hedmo et al., 2005) and management consultants has reached every type of organization in Sweden: churches and theaters, kindergartens and hospitals. It hurts, however, only when it comes to universities. The irritated reaction reported here needs to be turned into real queries. The questions are at least three. First, is it really ‘we’ who taught ‘them’ that? If so, can we teach ‘them’ otherwise? Here, the historical examples quoted by Engwall et al. (2002) are of interest. It seems that in old times, when business and management professors rarely engaged in truly scientific work as it is currently defined (e.g., no international publications), they were delivering truly valuable advice to practitioners. Tavistock Institute serves as an excellent example. A more recent example of a successful intervention by consultant-researchers has been described by ter Bogt and van Helden (2011): an intervention into the budgeting process of a Dutch province, conducted in a truly Tavistock-like spirit. The scenes described above, however, indicate the possibility that while we pushed our theoretical reasoning to the heights of postmodern philosophy, our contacts with practitioners (however mediated) regressed to an exchange of platitudes. The second question reverses the perspective and asks if ‘we’ were irritated because we were fed nonsense or because we recognized it as the same nonsense we fed others? Brunsson (2006), referring to Fernler’s (1993) study of a consultant company that taught customer orientation without ever following this orientation themselves, concluded that ‘our rationality’ is always different from the ‘rationality of and for the others’. This split attitude is possible because of the distance: . . . it was the distance that gave the rationality and irrationality of others a meaning other than one’s own. From a distance, rationality was important to implement and the lack of it was a problem. But here and now, rationality was not important, with a-rationality or even irrationality being accepted or even regarded as good or necessary (Brunsson, 2006, p. 74).

In the case presented here, the distance couldn’t be maintained. The theorists of rationality met the proselytes of rationality in the role of organizational practitioners, and a clash was inevitable. The third question relates to ‘How dare they?’ Ought universities to be managed like every other public sector organization, or is the institution of collegial leadership more important than quick decision-making? Should university professors be saved from their own incompetence, for their own good, or should they be allowed to sink if they can’t swim? European universities are being reformed, ostensibly to become more like their US counterparts, but, claimed Mazza et al. (2005), and Michele Lamont’s ethnography (2009) C



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confirmed their opinion, the blueprint is actually the reformer’s imagined picture of how US universities are run. Nigel Thrift (2005) said that one of the truly new developments in contemporary capitalism is its ‘cultural circuit’, comprising business schools, management consultants, management gurus, and the media. Its discursive power is enormous, and still growing, as the circuit’s thirst for information technology, expertise, and all types of infrastructure is self-reinforcing. It is possible to see the non-virtual confrontation between management consultants and management scholars as potentially disruptive, and therefore, paradoxically helpful, if Luhmann (1989/2005) and Clegg et al. (2004) are right in claiming that consultants can only act as irritants to the system. A visit of management consultants to a university may serve to open Pandora’s box, from which all sorrows will fly, but hope may remain. NOTES 1 For more on New Public Management see e.g., Power (1997), Olson et al. (1998) and Christensen and Lægreid (2001). 2 Christensen and Skærbæk (2010) describe the same phenomenon as having occurred in the Danish and Australian public sectors. 3 On the management consulting in e.g., the UK public sector, see e.g., Lapsley and Oldfield (2001); examples from several countries related to the public financial management can be found in Humphrey et al. (eds.) (2005). 4 Now ‘Scuola Superiore dell’Economia e Finanza’ (SSEF). 5 We are speaking here of management consultants. Academics (and retired academics) often consult universities on academic matters. 6 This description was validated by the chair of the meeting.

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