In search of legitimacy: conflicting logics and identities of management consultants in public administration

ABSTRACT

Management consultants are often hidden and therefore understudied actors in public administration. Building on institutional and social identity theory, we investigate consultants’ identity work in search of legitimacy as knowledge providers in the public sector. We substantiate our theoretical reasoning with 43 semi-structured interviews with consultants and clients and extract four social identities of consultants, only one of which complies with what the literature commonly considers a management consultant in the public sector. Our study extracts new patterns of identity work and shows how they help actors in need of legitimacy to cope with the institutional complexity of public administration.

KEYWORDS:

• Consultancy
• identity
• institutional logics
• legitimacy
• new public management

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2021.1974713.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), Key Number VO 1604/10-1.

Notes on contributors

Julia Galwa

Dr. Julia Galwa was Doctoral Researcher in the research project “Legitimation of consultancies in different institutional contexts” funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). She is now consultant in the public sector.

Rick Vogel

Dr. Rick Vogel is Full Professor in Public Management at Universität Hamburg, Germany. His current research interests are public sector leadership, mixed governance, and institutional change in the public sector.