Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka hur språkanvändningen på en särskild kommunikationskanal, nämligen webbsidor, ser ut hos olika företag inom branschen för managementkonsulting. Studien gjordes på uppdrag av Madicon Communication AB vilket är grunden till att ett vidare syfte även var att undersöka hur Madicon med hjälp av språket och de likheter samt skillnader som framkommit kan positionera sig annorlunda i förhållande till andra företag i samma bransch. I denna undersökning studerades komposition samt frekvens av engelska uttryck, facktermer, upprepningar, pronomen och tilltal, informella och formella ordval och användning av versaler samt språkhandlingar. Resultatet visade bland annat att alla fyra företagen till stor del använder samma delar i kompositionen, men att det finns skillnader beroende på företagens inriktningar. Vidare använder de två tekniskt inriktade företagen engelska mest. Facktermer visade sig tydligt ha en väsentlig roll inom managementspråket då stor mängd påträffats i texterna. När det kommer till upprepningar och hur företagen valde att synas i sina texter kunde vi återigen se skillnad utefter företagens inriktning. Utifrån studiens resultat är endast Madicon det företag som följer riktlinjerna om att företag vinner på att låta både ett ’vi’ och ett ’du’ synas i texter på webben. Resultatet visade även att företagen håller olika grad av formalitet vilket möjligt gör att företagen uppfattas olika. Madicon använder i jämförelse med de andra företagen versaler mer frekvent. Utifrån att alla fyra företagen använde språkhandlingarna ’erbjudande’ och ’löfte’ i båda sina texter kan dessa tolkas som centrala.

Cette thèse explore la manière dont les acteurs développent un nouveau business model au sein d’une entreprise existante. Reconnu comme une source de performance pour l’entreprise, le développement de nouveaux business models requiert de profonds efforts des acteurs pour l’appréhension de leur environnement et la réinterprétation des mécanismes de création, livraison et capture de la valeur. Par conséquent, nous nous intéressons à la manière dont l’articulation entre cognition et action guide le processus d’innovation de business model. Pour ce faire, nous adoptons la perspective sensemaking afin d’examiner les processus de construction de sens des acteurs qui sous-tendent l’innovation de business model. Ce travail repose sur une démarche ethnographique pour l’étude du développement d’un nouveau business model au sein d’un cabinet de conseil en management. Les résultats montrent qu’au travers d’interactions sociales variées, les processus de construction et de destruction de sens des acteurs façonnent l’innovation de business model. Propres au contexte d’une entreprise existante, les activités initiales de la firme jouent un rôle ambivalent dans le développement d’un nouveau business model : tantôt le favorisant, tantôt l’entravant / This study explores how actors develop a new business model in an established firm. As a firms’ performance improvement source, new business model development require actor’s important efforts for their environment understanding and reinterpretation of value creation, delivery and capture mechanisms. Consequently, we are interested in how the articulation between cognition and action drives the business model innovation process over time. We adopt a sensemaking perspective to shed light actors’ meaning construction processes underlying business model innovation. We studied a new business model development process in a management consulting firm through an ethnographic stance. Findings show that through various social interactions, actors’ construction and destruction meaning processes shape business model innovation. Specific to established firms context, the company’s prevailing activities play an ambivalent role in a new business model development : sometimes favoriting it, sometimes hampering it.

Whilst utilization of management consulting services has become an integral part of the contemporary economy and functioning of many organizations, intangibility leaves clients unable to predict or objectively assess the values created in consulting engagements. According to scholars, attempts to counteract the principal-agent related risks of opportunism and divergent incentives are expected to increase following higher competition, consumer awareness and anticipated increased demand for performance-based pricing. Improved comprehension of means to evaluate consulting services should become increasingly significant not only for the management consulting firms with increasing needs to tangibilize value and prove “success” to a greater extent, but also for the purchasing organizations in both private and public sectors. The academic attention to the industry has been described as surprisingly low, and previous scholars urge for increased empirical data on evaluation practices in general, and for additional contexts and sizes of consulting firms, in particular. Accordingly, this study aims to contribute with empirical data and understanding of consultants’ reasoning and approaches through asking; How do small Swedish management consulting firms approach evaluation of their engagements in terms of client satisfaction and value generated within the client organization, and; what is the rationale behind the eventual evaluation approach(es) used? Based on a literature review on primarily the fields of; the management consulting industry, intangibility of knowledge-intensive services, and scholarly suggested evaluation methods, semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior managers, partners and CEOs representing ten small-sized management consulting firms in Sweden. The purposively sampled respondents were categorized based on relative size and relative service offering, enabling comparison between size and type of business. Thematic analysis of the interviews showed great similarities between firms, and that valuation approaches are commonly unstructured, situational and goal-oriented, focused on aggregated satisfaction, rarely including objective measurements, initiated by the consultant, conducted through dialogue and sometimes supported by questionnaires. It was concluded that the evaluation approaches are generally highly subjective and focused on capturing client perceptions. Discrepancies between respondents’ practices and scholarly suggested methods were identified, and analysis of variations concluded that smaller firms seem to have less developed evaluation approaches. The respondents’ rationales were described and categorized into; drivers, deterrents and obstacles. Potential catalysts for change, including price sensitivity, client demand and performance-based pricing were identified. Whilst the study does provide requested empirical data and may facilitate improved comprehension of means to counteract intangibility to benefit clients and consultants - and hopefully increase public interest for these issues - further research is needed to nuance the findings, especially through capturing clients’ perspectives.

In this comparative case study between Handelsbanken and Nordea, the homogeneous industry of banking is investigated together with the phenomena of management consulting. The two banks are scrutinized under the same laws and regulations, offering the same products and services and tend to recruit similar people. Hence, they are under the same isomorphic pressures. At the same time, it has been acknowledged in the media that the two big banks clearly have different opinions towards management consulting, which additionally is a business area that has increased dramatically over the past years. With this in mind it is interesting to examine why the two actors take such different stands towards the usage of management consultants? In order to answer the research question, theories within management consulting, isomorphism, organizational identity and culture are presented. Semi-structured interviews are used as a primary method and the result of our study is twofold. First, the banks have different ideas about what a management consultant contributes with. Second, the result emphasizes the importance of organizational culture to a greater extent than expected. Hence the cultural palette and the existing understanding of management consulting in these two banks are crucial in order to understand the differences within a homogeneous industry.

Thesis (MBA (Business Management))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:51:33Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DissFZS.pdf: 999153 bytes, checksum: 4b0cf7d365bc8f476149f3d429cc0e2d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-05-31 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / In the whole world, the economical changes, incremented by the information tecnology´s advance and by the pouplarization of basic manegement methods, associeted to the desindustrialization process and to the expansion of the service field, made that the small firms have become the highlights in the economy of several countries, being responsable for a large part of the employment and profits. In that context, this study intend to contribute with the understanding of the growing process of the brazilian consultant field, its acting forms and its relationship with the other organizations. Particularly, analysing the SEBRAE-SP´s acting form, with a parallel between its goals and its posicional manners in the face of other organizations. That is why, it is necessary to comprehend how much that ocurried changes in the acting forms of the institution in the past few decads, are a reflexion of a new form of interaction with the management consultant field. / Em todo o mundo, as mudanças econômicas, incrementadas pelo avanço da tecnologia de informação e pela popularização de métodos gerenciais básicos, associada ao processo de desindustrialização e à expansão do setor de serviços, fizeram com que as micro empresas e as empresas de pequeno porte assumissem um papel de destaque nas economias de diversos países, sendo responsáveis por grande parte da geração de emprego e renda. Dentro desse contexto, o presente estudo pretende contribuir com o entendimento do processo de crescimento do mercado de consultoria brasileiro, suas formas de atuação e o relacionamento com as demais organizações, particularmente analisando a atuação da instituição do SEBRAE-SP, traçando um paralelo entre seus objetivos e sua maneira de se posicionar perante as outras organizações. Para isso, faz-se necessário compreender em que medida as mudanças ocorridas nas formas de atuação da instituição nas últimas décadas são um reflexo de uma nova interação com o espaço de consultoria.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:51:33Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DissVRZR.pdf: 1149066 bytes, checksum: 789b9184c1dcd26237a8c8237a9f998f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-07-26 / Materials in general as well as specialized articles with a lot of semiofficial estimation have indicated high increase in the use of management consultancy particularly during the post-war period of the sixties decade. Numerous authors have linked this increase to the growth in markets and technology complexities. However, in addition to consultancy firms, it has also appeared in the economic arena, consultants cooperatives of business enterprises as a new working arrangement occupying nearly the same space available in large and medium-sized firms. As a result, an interest in developing this study has surged as basis for bibliographical research based upon documentation as well as interviews with some members of such cooperatives aiming at analyzing a better understanding of what has motivated the appearance and development of such consultants cooperatives as well as the understanding of such cooperatives importance on the present economic arena. A certain cooperative located in the city of Belo Horizonte at Minas Gerais was the subject of such study. This cooperative set up its activities in 1994 and, today, comprises more than 1200 members. Its foundation, present situation as well as its internal relationship, claim of contacts, and increase are some of the factors looked into this study. / Matérias em geral e artigos especializados como muitas estimativas semi-oficiais apontam um crescimento alto no uso de consultoria de administração durante o período pós-guerra e especialmente a partir da década de 60. Inúmeros autores associam este crescimento ao aumento da complexidade dos mercados e tecnologia. Mas além das empresas de consultoria, aparecem também no cenário econômico empresarial a cooperativa de consultores, como um novo arranjo de trabalho, ocupando talvez espaço de consultores de grandes e médias empresas do setor. Diante deste cenário, surgiu o interesse em desenvolver esta pesquisa, com base em levantamento bibliográfico, documental e entrevistas com alguns cooperados, a fim de analisar e entender melhor o que tem motivado o aparecimento e crescimento de Cooperativas de Consultores, e qual a sua importância no cenário econômico atual. Toma-se como objeto de pesquisa uma Cooperativa sediada na cidade de Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, que iniciou suas atividades em 1994 e hoje conta com mais de 1200 cooperados. Sua fundação, atuação, interação, rede interna de relações e seu crescimento são alguns dos fatores que abrangem esta pesquisa.

Conducting management consulting project for Transparency International Czech Republic, the leading non-profit non-governmental organization active in anti-corruption practices, by applying selected project management and problem solving methods, the objective of the thesis is to support the assumption that proper selection and application of suitable methods to problem identification, definition and decomposition enables to come up with the solution of the problem by analyzing it with no need for further solution development.

As the risk society has evolved, crisis management has become significant in order to survive a crisis. Crisis consultants have an important role in the risk society and organizations expects a whole lot from the profession. There is a gap in the research about the perceptions of crisis consultant’s role and expectancies in the risk society. Additionally, there is no research connected to the impact of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic on the profession of crisis consulting. The study aims to explore the crisis consultants view of and their role in the risk society. It also seeks to investigate how the crisis consultants have adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic. The study has been conducted through a qualitative case study consisting of various crisis consultants from diverse consultancies. The primary data consisted of eight semi-structured in- depth interviews. Crises in the risk society has become more complex due to the developing technology which has had an effect on the dispersion of information and personal exposures. Crisis consultants are expected to act as change agents who provides an outside perspective and pushes the client forward during crises. The Covid-19 pandemic has had no effect on the types of crisis and neither on the processes used by the crisis consultants. The shift lies within tools and certain procedures where social distancing and digitalization has become the new standard. Although the alterations have been challenging in some situations, the crisis consultants have still managed to fulfill their tasks and increase their workload.

A Study On Taiwan’s Management Consulting Industry ~ An Application Of The Structure-Conduct-Performance Analysis Student: Hui-Wen Chang Advisor: Dr. Yung-Chien Lou ABSTRACT Among the service industries, management consultancy is the most prominent due to its importance for the prosperity and competitiveness of enterprises. Therefore, the motivation of carrying out this study is to explore ways to facilitate the successful development of management consulting industry and ultimately revive Taiwan’s economy. The focus of this study is concentrated on the characteristics of Taiwan’s management consulting industry by understanding its evolvement path, current condition, composition of five competitive forces, and its organization economic model to discover the industry’s structure, behavior pattern of participants and overall performance. This study also aims at identifying fundamental causes of the industry’s long-lasting problems and factors that hinder the implementation of the most frequently proposed recommendations in the past two decades. Through the application of S-C-P paradigm and the feedback from industry experts, this study concludes that the most frequently raised pressing issues of Taiwan’s management consulting industry are actually symptoms of the industry’s unique structure with 88% of industry participants employed fewer than 10 people (i.e. the cause), which reflects the influence of the industry’s low entry barrier, as well as the nature of management consultation knowledge, mindset of consultants and clients’ behavior. And pertaining to factors hindering the implementations of most frequently proposed recommendations in the past 20 years, this study comes to the conclusion that lacking of legislation, characteristics of management consultation services, mindset of industry participants, and clients’ true needs are major issues adding difficulties to the execution of various recommendations proposed. Last but not least, this study also proposes several criteria to enhance the effectiveness of recommendations proposed by previous studies.