No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Internationalization of Management Consultancy
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Management consultants of various kinds play an important role in the world of business, and within other types of organization. The Oxford Handbook on Management Consulting is a comprehensive overview of eminent thinking and research on management consultancy with contributions from leading international scholars.
The first section provides an account of the historical developments in management consultancy research, and how current thinking has evolved from prior work. The second section focuses on disciplinary and theoretical perspectives on management consulting, their diversities, areas of synergy, and parallel concerns. The following sections examine consulting as a knowledge business; the consultants in management fashion; and the relationship between management consultants and their clients. The Handbook concludes with an assessment of areas of future research and debate.
By bringing together a wide range of research and thinking on management consultancy across different disciplines, sub-disciplines, and conceptual approaches, the Handbook provides a comprehensive understanding of both current thinking and future directions for research.
The service sector is extraordinarily heterogeneous. Since exist-ing service classifications provide useful yet partial perspectives on this di-versity, this paper reconciles and integrates distinct service taxonomies into a coherent and pragmatic typology which follows three dimensions: demand orientation, knowledge-intensity and technology-intensity. A re-gional analysis of services employment in Germany captures the distinc-tive regional dynamics. Knowledge intensive services and business ser-vices are shown to follow different sectoral and geographical dynamics than operational and consumer services. In effect, our typology integrates partial classifications into a pragmatic service taxonomy which may be helpful for longitudinal and comparative regional analysis of the service economy.
This paper develops conceptual and empirical evidence for the importance of social practice institutions in the internationalisation process of management-consulting firms. Personal trust and reputation rather than price are examined as key mechanisms of foreign market entry and penetration. Empirical case studies in London, Frankfurt, and Madrid produce three findings. First, enduring client relations and client referrals facilitated most foreign firm entries and the majority of local client acquisition. Second, interview findings imply a critical assessment and reconceptualisation of trust and reputation. Empirically, goodwill trust and networked reputation are substantiated as particularly important transaction mechanisms. Third, a triangulation of interview and survey data reveals a causal relation between trust and reputation that enhanced a cumulative growth of social networks within the new host markets. This research points to the importance of social practice institutions for economic organisation and exchange across geographic distance.
This paper criticizes conventional internationalization theory of the firm and argues for a relational perspective in the
analysis of international expansion. Using in-depth empirical research from three European metropolitan case studies, the
paper demonstrates that social networks (i) are the most frequent cause of international market entry and (ii) they systematically
affect the organizational form of entry. A combination of qualitative exploration and logistic regression analysis of fieldwork
and survey data suggests that the internationalization of business services cannot be fully understood from firm-specific
resources alone, but it also has to take the context of external relationships into systematic consideration. The impact of
social networks on entry form changes over time. With increasing international experience firms face fewer constraints on
entering a foreign market through brownfield FDI. For economic geography, future analysis should focus more on the context
of inter-firm relationships in order to overcome some of the too mechanical arguments about the process of firm internationalization.
This paper updates some of the author's thinking on the eclectic paradigm of international production, and relates it to a number of mainstream, but context-specific economic and business theories. It suggests that by dynamizing the paradigm, and widening it to embrace asset-augmenting foreign direct investment and MNE, activity it may still claim to be the dominant paradigm explaining the extent and pattern of the foreign value added activities of firms in a globalizing, knowledge intensive and alliance based market economy.