Introduction

Weiss, Antonio E.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-99876-3_1

Antonio E. Weiss²

370 Accesses

Abstract

In this chapter the major historical questions of research are considered, and placed within the context of current readings of the British state, business history, state power, and consultancy. A detailed reconstruction of all public sector consultancy expenditure since 1963 is presented, and the methods, sources, and analytical frameworks which are used to address the proposed research questions are shared.

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Notes

1.
E. F. L. Brech, A. W. J. Thomson, and J. F. Wilson, Lyndall Urwick, Management Pioneer: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 119.
2.
Ibid., 129.
3.
Management Consultancies Association, The Definitive Guide to the UK Consulting Industry 2009: Trends from 2008 and Outlook for 2009 (London: Management Consultancies Association, 2009), 42.
4.
National Audit Office, Central Government’s use of Consultants (London: HMSO, 2006), 5.
5.
Tom Clark, “Total Public Spending, 2008/9,” The Guardian; May 17, 2010. Accessed November 12, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/may/17/uk-public-spending-departments-money-cuts
6.
House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, Central Government’s Use of Consultants, (London: The Stationery Office Limited, 2007), 3.
7.
Brech et al., Lyndall Urwick, 123.
8.
See David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 109.
9.
David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford, The Trusted Advisor (New York: Free Press, 2000).
10.
Author calculations based on data returns in Management Consultancies Association archives, Endex Archives, Ipswich (hereafter MCA). Boxes 22, 23, 24.
11.
The former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey felt consultants working in the public sector were “making money out of suckers,” cited in Craig and Brooks, Plundering the Public Sector: How New Labour Are Letting Consultants Run Off with £70 Billion of Our Money, 24; the journalist Johann Hari called management consultancy a “scam” in The Independent, August 20, 2010; and political scientists such as R.A.W. Rhodes have claimed that consultancy has “hollowed-out” the British state, covered in Dennis Kavanagh, British Politics, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 53–63. Most recently, the journalist Jacques Peretti claimed management consultants were “cashing in on austerity” in The Guardian, October 17, 2016. Accessed November 28, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/17/management-consultants-cashing-in-austerity-public-sector-cuts. Peretti also starred in a BBC documentary on the topic: Who’s Spending Britain’s Billions?, October 18, 2016.
12.
Figures from Management Consultancies Association, The Definitive Guide to the UK Consulting Industry 2009, 11; For more on the “new elite” in British society, see: Mike Savage, Fiona Devine, Niall Cunningham et al., “A New Model of Social Class: Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment,” Sociology 47, 2 (2013): 234. Throughout this research, the terms “UK” and “British” are used interchangeably.
13.
This is acknowledged to have “taken-off ” since the 1990s. See Matthias Kipping and Timothy Clark, The Oxford Handbook of Management Consulting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 10.
14.
Rarely a day goes by when the work of management consultants is not reported in the popular media. For instance: Tony Paterson and Leo Cendrowicz, “Germany calls in US management consultancy firm for help with refugee crisis,” The Independent, September 22, 2015; Bjorn Crumps, “Retail Banks Are Pinning Growth Hopes on Technology,” The Guardian, October 7, 2014.
15.
Based on author-collated database of consultancy assignments. Sample outputs from the database are presented as tables throughout this book. It is hard to say definitively that every local authority has been supported by consultants as the data is incomplete; however, based on a sample, it seems extremely likely that this is the case.
16.
For pre-war social welfare see: Geoffrey B. A. M. Finlayson, Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain 1830–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). For more on the warfare state see Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970.
17.
See The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA): MH 137/427, “Health: management consultants’ work for minister”; TNA: MH 137/428, “Health: management consultants’ work for minister.”
18.
Ivan Fallon, The Paper Chase: A Decade of Change at the DSS (London: HarperCollins, 1993), ix.
19.
TNA: AN 18/1013, Privatisation: McKinsey report, “Building a commercial organisation for Railtrack.”
20.
Michael Barber, Instruction to Deliver: Fighting to Transform Britain’s Public Services, Rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 2008).
21.
Gill Plimmer, “Bids to Run Prison Services Worth £100m,” Financial Times, December 12, 2013. Accessed October 10, 2014, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/03645db6-618e-11e3-916e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3FLrvRZQR
22.
NAO, The Role of Major Contractors in the Delivery of Public Services (London: The Stationery Office, 2013), 10.
23.
McKinsey & Co., Achieving World Class Productivity in the NHS 2009/10 – 2013/14 (Department of Health, 2009), 106.
24.
NAO, Major Contractors, 10; Rich Benton, telephone interview with author, September 29, 2014.
25.
Anthony Sampson, Anatomy of Britain (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1962), 1.
26.
Ibid., 202.; Though Edgerton has noted it was not mentioned that Ministry of Aviation was a large defence spender in Warfare State, 46.
27.
Anthony Sampson, The Changing Anatomy of Britain (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982).
28.
Anthony Sampson, Who Runs this Place? (London: John Murray), 2004, 121.
29.
Ibid., 129.
30.
Hugh Heclo and Aaron B. Wildavsky, The Private Government of Public Money: Community and Policy inside British Politics (London: Macmillan, 1974), 3–8.
31.
Ibid., 60.
32.
Ibid., 44.
33.
Ibid., 8–9.
34.
These influences are described in Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989), xvi.
35.
Hennessy, Whitehall, 1–5.
36.
Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Corelli Barnett, The Audit of War: The illusion and reality of Britain as a great nation (London: Papermac, 1987).
37.
Hennessy, Whitehall (1989) 11; 687–88.
38.
Ibid., 120.
39.
Peter Hennessey, Whitehall (London: Pimlico, 2001 edition), 577.
40.
Hennessy, Whitehall (1989), 263.
41.
Hennessy, Whitehall (2001), 414, 530.
42.
Jim Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline: Understanding Postwar Britain (Harlow, England: Longman, 2000), 25.
43.
Hugh Pemberton, Policy Learning and British Governance in the 1960s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004).
44.
Ibid.
45.
Edgerton, Warfare State, 5.
46.
Ibid., 192–3.
47.
Ibid., 112.
48.
Ibid., 83.
49.
Glen O’Hara, From Dreams to Disillusionment: Economic and Social Planning in 1960s Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 53.
50.
Rodney Lowe, The Official History of the British Civil Service. Vol 1: The Fulton Years, 1966–81 (London: Routledge, 2011), 49.
51.
Ibid., 36.
52.
Ibid., 86.
53.
Ibid., 46.
54.
Jon Davis, Prime Ministers and Whitehall 1960–74 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007).
55.
Michael Burton, The Politics of Public Sector Reform: From Thatcher to the Coalition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 112.
56.
Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, The Blunders of Our Governments (London: Oneworld, 2014).
57.
Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon, A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 80.
58.
Anthony Seldon. and Jonathan Meakin, The Cabinet Office, 1916–2016. The Birth of Modern Government (London: Biteback Publishing, 2016).
59.
Ibid., 218.
60.
David Runciman, “No Exit,” London Review of Books, May 23, 1996, accessed July 17, 2014, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v18/n10/david-runciman/no-exit
61.
Thomas Hobbes and Richard Tuck, Leviathan, Rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 120–21.
62.
Subsequent liberal theorists popularized this: the “night-watchman state.” Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000), 1999.
63.
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, ebook loc 321.
64.
Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, Ed. 2. (London: Macmillan, 1910), 125.
65.
S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting, The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1.
66.
Jose Harris, “Political Thought and the State,” in The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain, ed. S.J.D Green, Whiting, R.C., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15–41.
67.
For more on Hobbes and Bentham, see Quentin Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2008): 329–58.
68.
L. T. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State: A Criticism (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1918), 75–76.
69.
Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 66–67.
70.
Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 28.
71.
Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” The American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (1991): 77.
72.
Mark Bevir and R.A.W. Rhodes, The State as Cultural Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
73.
Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 18.
74.
Jens Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 149–81.
75.
Christopher D. McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80–110.
76.
Christopher Hood and Michael Jackson, Administrative Argument (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1991), 19–24.
77.
R.A.W. Rhodes, “The Hollowing out of the State,” The Political Quarterly 65, no. 2 (1994): 138–51; Herman Bakvis, “Advising the Executive,” in The Hollow Crown: Countervailing Trends in Core Executives, ed. Patrick Weller, Bakvis, Herman, Rhodes, R.A.W., (London: Macmillan, 1997), 84–125; Graeme Hodge and Diana Bowman, “The ‘Consultocracy’ the Business of Reforming Government,” in Privatization and Market Development (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006), ebook loc Chap 6.
78.
Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons (London: Penguin, 2007), 308.
79.
Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Powers of the State,” Archives européennes de sociologie 25 (1984): 185–213.
80.
Michel Foucault and Alan Sheridan, Discipline and Punish (London: Allen Lane, 1977).
81.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
82.
Mann, “The Autonomous Powers of the State,” 185–213.
83.
Even cultural historians such as David Kynaston are still bound by the electoral cycle. See: David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–1951 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); Recent studies of public sector reform continue to focus on political administrations. See: Burton, The Politics of Public Sector Reform (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). As Frank Trentmann has argued, this may well reflect the lack of “cross-fertilization” of disciplinary practices in British studies: Frank Trentmann, “Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics,” Journal of British Studies 48 (April 2009): 283–307.
84.
A reimagining of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ broad concept of the “public sphere” is influential here. For Habermas, a critical development of the modern European state was the emergence of “the bourgeois public sphere … a sphere of private people come together as a public [to discuss issues of state authority],” which eventually led to the “modern social welfare state” (Habermas was writing in 1962). By way of contrast with the “governmental sphere,” however, Habermas’ theory was largely disinterested in institutions and their influences. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), 27.
85.
David Marsh, Matthew Hall, “The British Political Tradition and the Material-Ideational Debate,” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2015, 4, doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-856X.12077; R. A. W. Rhodes, Everyday Life in British Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15.
86.
Ibid., 235.
87.
Hood and Dixon, A Government that Worked Better (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 38.
88.
Edgerton, Warfare State, 146.
89.
Peter Hennessy et al., “Routine Punctuated by Orgies,” Strathcylde papers on government and politics (1985), 6–17.
90.
T. R. Gourvish, British Railways, 1948–73: A Business History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 479; ibid., 368–74.
91.
Geoffrey K. Fry, Reforming the Civil Service: The Fulton Committee on the British Home Civil Service of 1966–1968 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 57–58; Charles Webster, The Health Services since the War, Volume II: Government and Health Care; the National Health Service 1958–1979 (London: The Stationery Office, 1996).
92.
Duncan Campbell-Smith, Follow the Money: The Audit Commission, Public Money and the Management of Public Services, 1983–2008 (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 48–50.
93.
Denis Saint-Martin, Building the New Managerialist State: Consultants and the Politics of Public Sector Reform in Comparative Perspective (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 72.
94.
Kevin Theakston, The Labour Party and Whitehall (London: Routledge, 1992), 113.
95.
Saint-Martin, Building the New Managerialist State: Consultants and the Politics of Public Sector Reform in Comparative Perspective, 94.
96.
Matthias Kipping, Saint-Martin, Denis, “Between Regulation, Promotion and Consumption,” Business History 47, no. 3 (2005): 459.
97.
Saint-Martin, Building the New Managerialist State, 30.
98.
Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, N.J.; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004).
99.
Saint-Martin, Building the New Managerialist State, 108.
100.
Sampson, The Essential Anatomy of Britain, 37; Heclo and Wildavsky, The Private Government of Public Money, 1–3; Ferdinand Mount, The New Few Or A Very British Oligarchy (London: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 176.
101.
Edgerton, Warfare State, 189.
102.
Brian R. Fry and J. C. N. Raadschelders, Mastering Public Administration: From Max Weber to Dwight Waldo, Third edition. (Washington, DC.: CQ Press), 46.
103.
Alan McKinley, Chris Carter and Eric Pezet, “Governmentality, power and organization”, Management & Organizational History 7, no.1 (2012): 3–15.
104.
Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, 2nd ed. (London: SAGE, 2010), 24–30.
105.
See in particular: Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 1999); Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
106.
See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).
107.
McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession, 165–91.
108.
Matthias Kipping, “American Management Consulting Companies in Western Europe, 1920 to 1990: Products, Reputation, and Relationships,” The Business History Review 73, no. 2 (1999): 190–91.
109.
Michael R. Weatherburn, “Scientific Management at Work: the Bedaux System, Management Consulting, and Worker Efficiency in British Industry, 1914–1948.” Doctoral thesis. Imperial College, London (2014), 172.
110.
Ibid., 64.
111.
Edgerton, Warfare State, 146.
112.
Hugh M. Coombs, J. R. Edwards, and Hugh Greener, Double Entry Bookkeeping in British Central Government, 1822–1856, New Works in Accounting History (New York: Garland Pub., 1997); Dominic Wring, The Politics of Marketing the Labour Party (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); D. Alan Orr, Treason and the State: Law, Politics and Ideology in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
113.
William W. Allen, “Is Britain a half-time country, getting half-pay, for half-work under half-hearted management,” The Sunday Times, March 1, 1964, 15–16.
114.
“Another difficult time expected,” Financial Times, January 10, 1977, 1.
115.
David Craig and Richard Brooks, Plundering the Public Sector (London: Constable, 2006), 1–5.
116.
House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, Central Government’s Use of Consultants (London: The Stationery Office Limited, 2006–7), Rev. 2.
117.
“The management consultancy scam,” The Independent, August 20, 2010; “Masters of illusion: The great management consultancy swindle,” The Independent, September 17, 2009; “Public sector ‘to recruit 200 consultants on up to £1000 a day,’” The Daily Telegraph, July 5, 2010.
118.
Rosa Prince, “David Cameron attacks Labour’s ‘policy by PowerPoint,’” The Daily Telegraph, May 12, 2008, accessed July 17, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/1950578/Labour-Tory-leader-David-Cameron-attacks-Labours-policy-by-PowerPoint.html
119.
Less hostile but nonetheless part of this broader literature is Anthony King and Ivor Crewe’s history of major government blunders—see King and Crewe, The Blunders of Our Governments.
120.
National Audit Office, Central government’s use of consultants (London: The Stationery Office, 2006); House of Commons Health Committee, The use of management consultants by the NHS and the Department of Health (London: The Stationery Office, 2009); National Audit Office, Central government’s use of consultants and interims (London: The Stationery Office, 2010).
121.
An abridged version of the report by the Treasury interdepartmental working party, “Code of the Practice on the Use of Management Consultants in Government Departments,” is available in O&M Bulletin 21, no. 4 (HM Treasury, 1966), 173–184. The second report was Seeking help from Management Consultants (London: HM Treasury, 1990).
122.
Thatcher met an MCA delegation on March 10, 1982. “Notes on a meeting of the Public Sector Working Party”, 16 April 1982, MCA archives, box 34; John Major, conversation with author at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, November 26, 2010.
123.
Ian Watmore, telephone interview by author, February 12, 2014. See Appendix 1 for biography.
124.
Kipping and Clark, The Oxford Handbook of Management Consulting, 1.
125.
Ibid., 2.
126.
J. Johnston, “The Productivity of Management Consultants,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 126, no. 2 (1963): 237–49.
127.
Michael Ferguson, The Rise of Management Consulting in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 134.
128.
House of Commons debate, Clause 1. – (Research Councils), January 20, 1965 vol 705 cc283; TNA: T224/2045, memo by the President of the Board of Trade on “Consultancy Grants Scheme,” 1969 [exact date unknown].
129.
Hal Higdon, The Business Healers (New York: Random, 1969).
130.
Patricia Tisdall, Agents of Change (London: Institute of Management Consultants, 1982), 157.
131.
For the literature on consultancy more generally, see Timothy Clark and Robin Fincham, Critical Consulting (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2002); M. Kipping and Lars Engwall, Management Consulting: Emergence and Dynamics of a Knowledge Industry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession; Sheila Marsh, The Feminine in Management Consulting: Power, Emotion and Values in Consulting Interactions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Andrew Sturdy, Management Consultancy: Boundaries and Knowledge in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The published literature devoted to consultancy in Britain consists solely of Ferguson, The Rise of Management Consulting in Britain. The work on consultancy in Britain’s public sector comprises of one book (which is a comparative study of Britain, France and Canada and so is not even wholly dedicated to Britain) and two articles: Saint-Martin, Building the New Managerialist State: Consultants and the Politics of Public Sector Reform in Comparative Perspective, Kipping, “Between Regulation, Promotion and Consumption: Government and Management Consultancy in Britain”, and Christopher D. McKenna, “Mementos: Looking Backwards at the Honda Motorcycle Case, 2003–1973,” in The Challenge of Remaining Innovative, Steven Usselman et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 219–242.
132.
See Clark and Fincham, Critical Consulting.
133.
Alfred Kieser, “Managers as Marionettes?” in Management Consulting: Emergence and Dynamics of a Knowledge Industry, ed. Matthias Kipping, Engwall, Lars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 14.
134.
Highlighted in Walter Kiechel, The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World (Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2010), 243.
135.
Matthias Kipping, “Trapped in Their Wave: The Evolution of Management Consultancies,” in Critical Consulting, 38.
136.
Matthias Kipping, Kirkpatrick, Ian, “Alternative Pathways of Change in Professional Service Firms,” Journal of Management Studies 50, no. 5 (2013): 791.
137.
Ibid., 800.
138.
“US consulting industry grows strongly to market size of $55 billion”, June 13, 2016, Consultancy.uk, last accessed 27 October 2016, http://www.consultancy.uk/news/12172/us-consulting-industry-grows-strongly-to-market-size-of-55-billion
139.
Ibid; UK figures from author research.
140.
Walter Kiechel, The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World (Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2010), 12.
141.
Duff McDonald, The Firm: The Inside Story of McKinsey (London: Oneworld Books, 2014), 12; ibid., 73.
142.
McKenna, World’s Newest Profession, 80–110.
143.
Daniel Guttman and Barry Willner, The Shadow Government, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 14–24.
144.
“Numbers and Cost of Special Advisers”, House of Commons publications, 22 November 2007, col148WS.
145.
Paul R. Lawrence and Mark A. Abramson, Paths to Making a Difference: Leading in Government (Washington, DC.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).
146.
Robert J. David, “Institutional change and the growth of strategy consulting in the United States” in Kipping and Clark, The Oxford Handbook of Management Consulting, 77.
147.
Joe Flood, The Fires: How A Computer Formula, Big Ideas, And The Best Of Intentions Burned Down New York City (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010), 289.
148.
Guttman and Willner, The Shadow Government, xiv.
149.
McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession, 251.
150.
The MCA, since its formation in 1956, remains the only trade association for management consultancy firms in Britain. With strict guidelines for entry, member firms have represented between 55 per cent and 75 per cent of all management consultancy revenues in Britain during its existence. In the absence of any universally accepted professional qualifications for management consultants in Britain, the MCA has played a key role in perceptions of the nature of management consultancy in Britain. Another trade association for management consultants also exists—the Institute of Management Consultants, formed in 1962—although this represents individual consultants, not firms.
151.
MCA, MCA Annual Report, 1986, MCA: box 95.
152.
MCA Annual Reports, 1964 to 2013. Reports for 1964 to 1998 available in MCA: box 95. More recent reports accessed on visit to MCA offices on July 4, 2014.
153.
Fiona Czerniawska, “The UK Consulting Industry 2008: Trends from 2007 and Outlook for 2008,” (London: MCA, 2008).
154.
Skocpol et al., “On the Road toward a More Adequate Understanding of the State,” in Bringing the State Back In, 347–66; for Bentham’s views see Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” 325–70. As Jose Harris has argued, most Britons would agree with Bentham’s belief that the state is the government of the day. See Jose Harris, “Society and the State in Twentieth-Century Britain,” in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 67.
155.
A commonly accepted definition of the “public sector” is “any part of the economy which is either under government ownership or contracted to the government, or any institution that is heavily regulated or subsidised in the public interest.” From Norman Flynn, Public Sector Management, 5th ed. (London: SAGE, 2007), 2; using the public sector as a proxy for government activity may be the norm but it is still a contentious practice, as described in Joanna Innes, “Forms of ‘Government Growth’, 1780–1830,” in Structures and Transformations in Modern British History, ed. David Feldman, Lawrence, Jon, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 99. For a more general—and helpful—discussion of the problem of the public/private dichotomy see Simon Susen, “Critical Notes on Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere”, Sociological Analysis 5 no. 1 (2011): 38–42.
156.
Quoted in McKenna, World’s Newest Profession, 182.
157.
For more on this see Chap. 3.
158.
The reorganisation is discussed in ibid.
159.
See Chap. 4.
160.
Much of the work of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit is detailed in the memoirs of the head of the Delivery Unit, Michael Barber, who later joined McKinsey & Company—Barber , Instruction to Deliver; the work of outsourcing firms, by contrast does not yet have its own history—yet.
161.
Alcon Copisarow, letter to author, November 7, 2010. See Appendix 1 for biography.
162.
For more on power and authority discourses in consultancy see Marsh, The Feminine in Management Consulting, 243.
163.
Alcon Copisarow, letters to author, between November 1, 2010 and May 1, 2011.
164.
National Archives of Ireland (hereafter NAI): 2006/132/245. “Brendan Earley memo to Mr Olden, March 25, 1976.”
165.
See correspondence between Jimmy Robertson of the Scottish Office Computer Service and Leon Fuller of Arthur Andersen between 1976 and 1980 in National Archives of Scotland (hereafter NAS): SOE 5/66. “Review by Arthur Andersen and Company of Scottish Office Computer Services.”
166.
For more on reference texts, see Bibliography.
167.
Sampson, Anatomy of Britain.
168.
Alcon Copisarow, interview with author, Athenaeum Club, London, February 16, 2011.
169.
For more on oral history, see Paul Richard Thompson, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1992), xiv–xvi and Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
170.
Efficiency Unit, The Government’s Use of External Consultants: An Efficiency Unit Scrutiny (London: H.M.S.O., 1994), 1; ibid., 26. The lack of effective archival filing may not seem immediately surprising, but it is worth reflecting that the need to maintain a central register of consultancy assignments was explicitly stated in a 1965 memorandum by a Treasury working party, sent to all Permanent Secretaries, and one of the explicit tasks of the CSD—set up in 1968—was to maintain such a database.
171.
The MCA’s reaction to the report is chronicled in MCA: box 54. The Executive Director, Brian O’Rorke, was interviewed on “The World Tonight” on BBC Radio 4 on August 4, 1994. O’Rorke concluded that the “report is … basically criticising the government and saying although consultants do a great job it could be even better.”
172.
See for instance David Craig, Rip-Of f ! (London: Original Book, 2005).
173.
Bill Price, Keeper of McKinsey & Company’s archives, correspondence with author between October 1, 2011 and May 1, 2011.
174.
MCA member earnings are often quoted as representing the size of the UK consultancy industry in contemporary publications. See for instance Gill Plimmer, “Whitehall cuts consultancy bill by a third”, Financial Times, May 1, 2011, accessed April 12, 2015, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4dcc56c4-7433-11e0-b788-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3Sw4tZ5vq
175.
“Changes in the public service since 1967,” Parliament.UK, accessed August 18, 2015, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199798/ldselect/ldpubsrv/055/psrep07.htm

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Weiss, A.E. (2019). Introduction. In: Management Consultancy and the British State. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99876-3_1

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Print ISBN: 978-3-319-99875-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-99876-3
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)

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