Chapter 14: Materializing the Organization: The Role of Change Consultants in Processes of Objectification

Management consulting is commonly viewed as an intangible service (Clark, 1995; Glücker & Armbrüster, 2003; Werr & Styhre, 2003). Most consultants sell services that are inherently intangible such as advice, ideas, expertise, and change intervention. Accordingly, little attention has been paid to the more tangible aspects of consulting practice. This chapter explores the relevance of materiality for understanding change consultancy, based on an ethnographic study of consultants at work with clients on change projects.

During the course of fieldwork, I became increasingly aware of the dominating role the production of objects played throughout the change process. A great deal of the activity of the external change consultants revolved around producing objectifications that were given material form—value stream maps, brown papers, charts, graphs, flip-overs, power point slides, illustrations, and so forth. The change agents were in other words busy grounding the less tangible in the more tangible, thus effectively objectifying and materializing the organization and its problems, processes, and activities as well as the ideal future state. This approach was similarly reflected in the way a range of different client actors talked about what they experienced as valuable in working with the consultants to create change. One of the key aspects, for example, was precisely “documenting” and “proving” problems and “what is going on” in the organization. The consultants were not just objectifying their management ideas (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996), but more importantly the stories, processes, and activities of the client organization.