Consultants, Confidantes and Consorts: A Genealogy of Consulting and Advice-Giving to Organisational Leaders

Abstract

This chapter reviews historical material about/by those we can construe as consultants or advisers to organisations in the pre-modern, following Foucault’s concept of ‘genealogy’ (Foucault 1984a, Rose 1999). Principally but not exclusively I consider individuals who advised the rulers and leaders of their time, employing ‘the counsel of manners’,¹ but who were not their employees. This provides me the nearest equivalent to management consulting in the public sector given the definitions explored in Chapter 1. I want to identify enduring discourses or important shifts in discourse which may illuminate current consulting interactions and the construction of consultant identities. I want to learn about women in these roles also. I am exploring the idea that consulting has existed for a lot longer than usually thought, stimulated by the rather ahistorical approach of much contemporary writing on consulting — and by my sense that at least public sector consulting has much older roots than the beginning of scientific management in the private sector, which is typically seen as the starting point for management consulting (Kubr 2002).

‘the greatest trust between man and man is the trust of giving counsel.’ (Bacon 1986:259)