Strategic Seduction? Information Technology Consultancy in UK Financial Services

In the UK, in both academic and popular media, there is a growing interest in the production, diffusion and consumption of managerial knowledge (or ‘fads’) and the rise of management gurus. This interest can be linked to a number of developments including: the increasing profile, number and apparently wide popularity of prescriptive management writers in the UK and USA; and debates about ‘globalization’, ‘knowledge work’ and discourse in late/postmodernity. The role of management consultants in the production and diffusion of, for example, strategic and marketing discourses is typically recognized as important. Indeed, there is a growing number of accounts seeking to outline and explain the historical and/or current influence of consultants and the ideas and practices they purvey at a general level. For example both Huczynski (1993a and b) and Grint (1994) outline the particular contexts associated with the emergence of families of ideas from Taylorism to Business Process Re-engineering, or BPR (see also Littler, 1982; Tisdall, 1982; Hollway, 1991). Another theme is the apparent transience of ‘new’ (usually repackaged) ideas and the irony of the continued demand for ‘solutions’ (Gill and Whittle, 1992; Huczynski, 1993b; Abrahamson, 1996).