Management consultants and the social function of procurement

IMPACT

Current procurement practices fail to deliver the accountability expected by the public for consulting expenditure and influence on government. This article offers a revised conceptual basis for the procurement of consultants, which the authors argue is an essential step to confronting this failure. Existing procurement practices must look beyond market transactions to include new approaches that bring oversight to the deeply-entwined relationships between these actors. These new approaches must be considered in more relational terms that give due weight to their function in the consultant–policy-maker relationship.

ABSTRACT

Recent increases in government spending on consultants have raised concerns about the ability of government to hold consultants to account. Attempts at reform have focused on strengthening procurement practices. These, however, rely on transactional forms of accountability. The authors argue, instead, that transactional approaches obscure relational dynamics between consultants and policy-makers, limiting the efficacy of current procurement paradigms. The article shows how procurement operates relationally as an initiation, a reification, and a performance of the new public management. This article contributes to the literature on ‘consultocracy’ by demonstrating how power functions through the procurement of consulting services.

KEYWORDS:

• Contractualization
• management consultants
• procurement
• public managers
• relationship marketing
• ritual
• social embeddedness

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge Professor Janine O’Flynn and Assistant Professor Andrea Migone for their insightful comments on previous versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the Australian Commonwealth Government under an Australian Postgraduate Award.