Consulting for a cause - a case study on management consulting with a societal agenda

Management consultants are increasingly being used to assist companies in important decisions. Yet, little is known about consultancies’ own agendas. Furthermore, resource scarcity and increased stakeholder demands pressure companies to alter the way they have been operating. An emerging trend within CSR are sustainability innovations, which simultaneously create new business for companies while solving global social or ecological problems. The aim of this study is to explore the phenomenon of consulting with a societal agenda within the context of sustainability innovations. The literature review examines how consultancies’ own agendas, the creation and dissemination of management ideas and the client-consultant relationship has been characterized in academic literature. Based on the theoretical findings, a framework is built to guide the analysis of the empirical material. The empirical part of this study is conducted as a single case study with embedded subunits. The case company is a consultancy that has an outspoken societal agenda of changing the way client companies do business to simultaneously generate incomes while solving societal issues. The empirical focus is two-fold. At the level of the whole consultancy, the aim is to understand what characterizes consulting with a societal agenda and whether this type of consulting differs, in any ways, from how consulting promoting a management idea has been described in academic literature. Moreover, in order to concretize the study, a second empirical focus is kept at the level of the subunits – the consulting initiatives of the case consultancy – with the aim to explore in what ways the societal agenda manifests itself at project level and discover factors enhancing and hindering its advancement. The main contribution of this study is a characterization of consulting with a societal agenda. Noteworthy is the openness of the agenda and the co-creation of projects. Consultants with a societal agenda use similar rhetorical strategies as consultants promoting management ideas. Furthermore, a number of factors enhancing or hindering the advancement of the societal agenda are identified. The results of this study provide both researchers and practitioners with insights into consulting with a societal agenda as previous research on both management consultancies’ own agendas and consulting within in the context of sustainability innovations is scarce