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The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century. By Christopher D. McKenna. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xxi + 370 pp. Illustrations, figures, tables, notes, index. Cloth, $30.00. ISBN: 0-521-81039-6.
Reviewed by Neil Fligstein
The World's Newest Profession documents the rise of management consulting in the United States. Christopher McKenna's story contains a number of surprising twists on the origins, spread, and various mutations of the industry. It is a novel study that deserves the attention of business historians, management professors, and organizational scholars. In the book, McKenna takes up three related questions: First, what do consultants actually do, and why do firms decide to hire them? Second, to what degree did consultants try to formalize their knowledge and make themselves into a profession? Third, do consultants deserve to be labeled, as they sometimes are, "witch doctors" or "miracle workers"?
McKenna begins with what might be called a transaction-cost perspective. He points out that consultants are familiar with the best practices of firms in a given industry. He describes the hiring of consultants as the equivalent of a make-or-buy decision, whereby firms can choose either to create knowledge themselves or to buy it from others. By choosing the second option, they avoid having to sink managerial time into figuring out the best course to follow. Viewed in this light, the consulting industry would appear to serve a "functional" need.
While McKenna's summation of the industry's services includes the service aspect, he is more interested in the struggles of management consultants, and their firms, to legitimate their usefulness to clients and, in so doing, to expand their...