Legitimizing business consultants A comparative analysis in universities and public administrations

Business consulting has been very successful and has spread into almost every organizational field of society. Today, business consultants are very important for the diffusion of trends in management. However, in organizational fields outside the economic sector, consultants face institutional logics and settings that differ remarkably from economic ones. These logics shape the expectations of clients and thereby determine whether consultants are constructed as legitimate actors in consulting processes or not. This paper analyses how consultants are constructed as legitimate actors by referring to sociological research on professions. Based on that research, the categories knowledge, power, and image are central for our analysis. By making use of these categories, the paper analyses and discusses how consultants are legitimated in universities and public administrations. Empirically, the paper focusses on narratives in interviews with clients and consultants in the two fields at hand. The paper contributes to the understanding of how consulting processes are shaped by different institutional settings in which universities and public administrations are embedded. Furthermore, linkages between sociological research on professions and sociology's new institutionalism are explored.