ABSTRACT

Management consultants are often hidden and therefore understudied actors in public administration. Building on institutional and social identity theory, we investigate consultants’ identity work in search of legitimacy as knowledge providers in the public sector. We substantiate our theoretical reasoning with 43 semi-structured interviews with consultants and clients and extract four social identities of consultants, only one of which complies with what the literature commonly considers a management consultant in the public sector. Our study extracts new patterns of identity work and shows how they help actors in need of legitimacy to cope with the institutional complexity of public administration.

摘要

管理顾问通常是隐藏的，因此在公共行政中未被充分研究。基于制度和社会身份理论，我们调查了顾问的身份工作，以寻求作为公共部门知识提供者的合法性。我们通过对顾问和客户的 43 次半结构化访谈来证实我们的理论推理，并提取了四种顾问的社会身份，其中只有一种符合文献通常认为的公共部门管理顾问。我们的研究提取了身份工作的新模式，并展示了它们如何帮助需要合法性的行为者应对公共行政机构的复杂性。