CSR and the consultancy sector – what is offered, and by whom?

Commercialized professionalism on the field of management consulting

“…(e.g. Furusten and Werr, 2005). Services like these are also increasingly offered by already existing service organisations, such as auditing firms, who have added them to their traditional service portfolio (Grey, 1998; Hellman, 2005).…”

“…Despite the obviously considerable demand for these types of services, they also represent areas of expertise that are difficult to define and measure. It is, for instance, hard to know – even after a service has been delivered – what it was that was actually bought (Furusten and Werr, 2005). How organisations can first demand a service such as this and then entrust someone to deliver it, is a mystery.…”

“…to deal with innovations in the areas of IT, recruitment procedures, staying up‐to‐date on the latest management techniques, or may lack experience of handling complexities such as the internal working environment, quality assurance procedures, ethical and environmental certification, or lobbying and PR issues, etc. Although the meaning of the concepts professionalism, professional, experts and expertise can be debated, in practice at least, it would seem that when someone is convincing in his or her role as an expert, this person is likely to be legitimized to play the role of expert in this particular setting (Furusten and Werr, 2005, 2009). This suggests that how they are perceived is important in the construction of management consultants as professionals.…”

“…The industry of management advisory services in general has grown rapidly in the last two decades (Greenwood et al , 2006), and this is no doubt evidence that contemporary organisations experience a great need for the kind of services these experts provide. Why we trust them is not as clear‐cut, however, as most of us often lack the specific knowledge required for certain situations (Furusten and Werr, 2005). Along with worldwide organisational trends such as outsourcing and re‐engineering in the past decades, employing such services emphasises the fact that handing work over to external specialists is now an established way of dealing with complex situations in organisations.…”

“…In the management advisory services industry, however, this is not the case. Services of this kind are often described as intangible and hard to define (Clark, 1995; Kubr, 1996; Furusten and Werr, 2005, 2009). Defining the need for these services, measuring their output, and post‐delivery assessments of whether they had any real impact, are also difficult.…”