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Management Consulting: A Guide to the Profession (4th ed.) Milan Kubr International Labour Office Geneva 2002 9044 pp. £50.00 (hardback)
Keywords Management consultants, Business analysis, Ideas generation
Review DOI 10.1108/09513550410523304
Consultants are everwhere. A survey revealed that 97 per cent of the UK and US's top 200 companies were using management consultants. During the 1980s, and continuing into the 1990s, management consultancy was one of the fastest growing sectors of many advanced economies. In 1980 worldwide revenues were estimated to be $3 billion. By 2002 this figure has grown to around $62 billion. The spectacular growth of the industry during this period is further evidenced by the fact that somewhere in the region of 80 per cent of firms operating in the industry were established after 1980.
This astonishing transformation indicates that the industry has come to represent a significant element of the new service sector or "knowledge economy" within many advanced economies. However, behind it many believe lies an increasing power over managerial thinking. Consultancy is intimately linked with new forms of "fashionable" management knowledge. Indeed, for many people, whether in their roles as employees or citizens, they will have come into contact with the effects of some kind of consultancy-led initiative. Alongside management gurus, the business media, and business academics, consultants have been attributed a key role as agents in the creation and...