This article examines the performative work of consultants who facilitate public engagement (PE) processes in organizations. Using multimethod ethnography, I find that PE practitioners reconcile tensions between the logics they promote in two different ways. Viewed from one perspective, PE practitioners are agentive entrepreneurs, adeptly negotiating competing logics to reform organizations; viewed from another, they exert a great deal of energy performing rituals that integrate their challenger identities with their elite status as management consultants. Scholars have argued that such contradictions reveal institutional indeterminacy. I argue that the performance of democratic authenticity in PE is both politicizing and depoliticizing.I have a deep belief in ordinary people's capacity, without advanced training, to actually participate deeply in the questions that most matter to them. (Dialogic method inventor, National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation Conference, 2006) As the quote above illustrates, untrained citizens are understood to be worthy contributors to public dialogue, but the methodologies designed to elicit their involvement now require professional certification and training courses costing thousands of dollars. Participation, long a tenet of progressive causes and insurgent movements, is now firmly entrenched as a method of decision making in political institutions (Bingham, Nabatchi, and O'Leary 2005) and business organizations (Heckscher 1995). But participation is no longer a do-it-yourself proposition. As demand for more substantive and inclusive public participation processes has grown, administrators have turned to professional consultants skilled in managing public engagement (PE) and dialogue and deliberation (D&D) (Leighninger 2009;Lee 2011). Inasmuch as the democratic ambitions of these enhanced public participation processes would seem to conflict with their top-down administration by private experts, PE professionals embody an extreme case of contradictory demands on organizational actors.PE consultants' efforts to justify their management services as empowering interventions reveal the strategies they use to make sense of their positioning at the intersection of competing institutional logics. Logics, as understood here, are coherent systems of organizing principles that provide vocabularies of motive and guide action within market and state institutions (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012). On the one hand, under their profession's logic of democratization, PE facilitators are engaged in explicit attempts to make decision making more participatory, more equitable, more Tensions between democratizing and bureaucratizing logics can be as extraordinary (and as public) as the challenges facing participants trying to enact "leaderlessness" in large, diverse groups in the Occupy Movement (Leach 2013). They can also be as ordinary (and as privately painful) as an awkward moment when disadvantaged youth volunteers being celebrated for participating in an "empowerment project" a...