Papers by Christopher McKenna
In 1993, AT&T spent more on management consulting services than on corporate research and develop... more In 1993, AT&T spent more on management consulting services than on corporate research and development, and AT&T is not alone [8, p. 60]. Wall Street analysts expect billings for consulting services to advance at twice the rate of corporate revenues over the next decade. Yet, despite the size, growth, and influence of consulting firms, business historians have remained uncharacteristically silent about the origins, development, and impact of management consulting, or "management engineering" as it was known before the Second World War. 2 In this paper, I will describe the professional origins of management consulting firms at the turn of the century and discuss why, after slow, gradual growth through the 1920s, these firms took off during the 1930s. I argue (1) that historians have wrongly assumed that management consulting arose directly out of Taylorism, (2) that engineers, accountants, and lawyers, often supervised by merchant bankers, provided counsel that later became the primary repertoire of management consultants, and (3) that the legal separation of investment and commercial banking in 1933 drove the rapid professionalization and growth of management consulting during the Great Depression. Recent historians of scientific management, including Daniel Nelson, Stephen Waring, and Judith Merkle, have traced the impact of Taylorism on contemporary institutions as diverse as business education, public administration, and British industry long after the Progressive-era craze for "efficiency" ended [29, 36, 26]. The proponents of scientific management, Frederick Taylor, Henry Gantt, Morris Cooke, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and Harrington Emerson, consulted with nearly 200 businesses on ways to systematize the activities of their workers through the application of wage incentives, time-motion studies, and industrial psychology [29, p. 11]. Naturally then, historians of Taylorism have assumed that they could describe contemporary practitioners of "industrial engineering," "production This article is drawn from my dissertation, "The History of Management Consulting, 1880-980." 2 The Association of Management Consultants (ACME) defines management consulting as a service provided for a fee by objective outsiders who help executives improve the management, operations, and economic performance of institutions. Since the institutionalization and professionalization of management consulting occurred within firms, not among solo practitioners, this paper focuses on management consulting firms.
Administrative Science Quarterly, 1990
Excerpt] In The System of Professions, Abbott directly confronts these important and long-neglect... more Excerpt] In The System of Professions, Abbott directly confronts these important and long-neglected issues in an original and highly thought-provoking approach to the analysis of professions. Focusing on the dynamics through which occupations define their jurisdiction, or the right to control the provision of particular services and activities, this approach draws attention to one of the most critical determinants of jurisdiction, interprofessional competition. Based on an astoundingly wide, cross-cultural knowledge of the histories of a variety of occupations, Abbott provides a rich and complex analysis of the nature of relationships among professional occupations and the forces that shape these relationships over time.
Enterprise and Society, 2008
I never really knew Al Chandler. While my teachers, Lou Galambos, David Hounshell, and Hugh Aitke... more I never really knew Al Chandler. While my teachers, Lou Galambos, David Hounshell, and Hugh Aitken, were to varying degrees close friends with Chandler, I spoke at length with him only twice. I met Chandler for the first time in 1990 when I was trying to decide where to do my doctorate and I met with him a second time when I held the Chandler Travel Fellowship at the Harvard Business School in 1995 as I was writing my doctoral dissertation. Chandler's scholarship consistently shaped my approach to the study of business history, yet my relationship was always to Chandler's academic research rather than to him as a mentor or as a colleague. Although I never knew Chandler in a personal sense, I also never knew business history without his overwhelming intellectual presence. Since 1984, when I first studied economic history under Hugh Aitken as an undergraduate at Amherst College, Chandler's work served as the alpha and the omega for my own research and teach-
Writing the ghost-writer back in: Alfred Sloan, Alfred Chandler, John McDonald and the intellectual origins of corporate strategy
Management & Organizational History, May 1, 2006
Choice Reviews Online, Feb 1, 2007
Redirections in the Study of Expert Labour, 2008
In 1906, a little more than a century ago, the American Academy of Political and Social Science p... more In 1906, a little more than a century ago, the American Academy of Political and Social Science published a special issue of their journal, The Annals, on the topic of the 'Business Professions'. Leading academics and practitioners contributed nearly a dozen articles chronicling the rise of the new business professions, including accounting, actuarial science, public relations, and scientific research. Although management consulting (or 'management engineering' as it was known then) did not appear among the emerging specializations that they profiled, another contender for professionalization, journalism, was prominently featured. George Washington Ochs, the former Mayor of Chattanooga whose brother owned The New York Times, wrote about the ongoing attempt to professionalize journalism from his vantage point as publisher of the Philadelphia Public Ledger (Diamond, 1993). That said, Ochs was far from convinced that specialized training or formal qualifications were a prerequisite to the training of the best young writers, arguing that often 'specialization is a drawback' in the education of journalists (Ochs, 1906: 52). Or as a contemporary sociologist summarized the perspective of the many skeptics who doubted that journalism was a natural candidate for professional status, 'journalism has no clearly defined, conventional technique analogous to that of law or medicine' (Vincent, 1905: 298). Journalism is one of a number of business occupations that failed to professionalize during the twentieth century in the Anglo-American world despite widespread predictions among contemporaries that professional status would surely follow its steady growth in status and numbers. Into the 1960s, faculty members in American journalism schools continued to predict that in 'another decade a college degree in journalism may become a requirement for journalists, just as medical 204 D. Muzio et al. (eds.), Redirections in the Study of Expert Labour
Strategy Followed Structure: Management Consulting and the Creation of a Market for “Strategy,” 1950–2000
Advances in Strategic Management, 2012
ABSTRACT Purpose – This chapter traces the creation of a market for strategy by management consul... more ABSTRACT Purpose – This chapter traces the creation of a market for strategy by management consulting firms during the second half of the twentieth century in order to demonstrate their impact in shaping debates in the subject and demand for their services by corporate executives.Design/methodology/approach – Using historical analysis, the chapter draws on institutional theory, including institutional isomorphism. It uses both primary and secondary data from the leading consulting firms to describe how consultants shifted from offering advice on organizational structure to corporate strategy and eventually to corporate legitimacy as a result of the changing economic and regulatory environment of the time.Findings/originality/value – This study provides a historical context for the emergence of corporate and competitive strategy as an institutional practice in both the United States and around the world, and provides insights into how important this history can be in understanding the debates among consultants and academics during strategy's emergence as an academic subject and practical application.
Journal of the British Academy, 2018
This article charts the historical role of the corporation in society from antiquity to the prese... more This article charts the historical role of the corporation in society from antiquity to the present day. Using a broad temporal and transnational approach, it argues that social purpose has been a defining trait of the corporation since the concept of legal personhood first appeared in antiquity. The direct connection between incorporation and social purpose formally broke in the 19th century, when countries like the United Kingdom and United States introduced general incorporation laws. Yet many corporations continued to act positively on behalf of society on a voluntary basis, but even as they acted against the interests of workers, consumers, and the environment. This article demonstrates that concerns about corporate power have a long history, and that societies over time have designed a variety of legal systems and forms of corporate governance to address these concerns.
Business History Review, 2016
Globalization and Institutions
Corporate Reputation and Regulation in Historical Perspective
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012
ALT-J, 2004
There has been a wealth of investigation into the use of online multiple-choice questions as a me... more There has been a wealth of investigation into the use of online multiple-choice questions as a means of summative assessment, however the research into the use of formative MCQs by the same mode of delivery still remains patchy. Similarly, research and implementation has been largely concentrated within the Sciences and Medicine rather than the more discursive subjects within the Humanities and Social Sciences. The INQUIRE (Interactive Questions Reinforcing Education) Evaluation Project was jointly conducted by two groups at the University of Oxford-the Saïd Business School and the Academic Computing Development Team to evaluate the use of online MCQs as a mechanism to reinforce and extend student learning. This initial study used a small set of highly focused MCQ tests that were designed to complement an introductory series of first-year undergraduate management lectures. MCQ is a simple and well-established technology, and hence the emphasis was very much on situating the tests within the student experience. The paper will cover how the online MCQs are intended to fit into the Oxford Undergraduate study agenda, and how a simple evaluation was executed and planned to investigate their usage and impact. The chosen method of evaluation was to combine focus groups with automated online methods of tracking, and the paper discusses the findings of both of these.
Writing the ghost-writer back in: Alfred Sloan, Alfred Chandler, John McDonald and the intellectual origins of corporate strategy
Management & Organizational History, 2006
Business History Review, 2006
The Gilded Age of Consulting: A Snapshot of Consultants Circa 1960
The World's Newest Profession
By 1960, the three leading management consulting firms in the United States – Booz Allen & Ha... more By 1960, the three leading management consulting firms in the United States – Booz Allen & Hamilton, Cresap, McCormick and Paget, and McKinsey & Company – had reached the height of their power. Not necessarily the largest consultancies, these three firms oversaw the most prestigious assignments and referred to themselves, like the American automobile oligopoly, as the “big three” of management consulting firms. As the journalists at Forbes magazine explained in a feature article on Booz Allen & Hamilton: The firms that Booz Allen likes to compete with are the other members of the club that includes McKinsey; Cresap, McCormick and a few others. All of these are sufficiently comfortable with one another's approach, work and pricing that they will often recommend that a prospective client also price a job with the others. Like the “big three” automotive manufacturers, this elite “club” of consulting firms exercised significant economic influence and power. As management consulting firms, like the large law, accounting, and engineering firms, became a crucial element of the institutional infrastructure that undergirded the American economy, the leading management consulting firms commanded greater respect and authority. Thus, when these leading firms expanded overseas in the early 1960s, consultants not only transferred American managerial models but also the American institutional system that had routinized the use of management consultants within large organizations. In retrospect, the big three consulting firms reached the height of their influence in the United States during the early 1960s.
The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century. By Christopher D. McKenna. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xxi + 370 pp. Illustrations, figures, tables, notes, index. Cloth, $30.00. ISBN: 0-521-81039-6
Business History Review, 2007
In The World's Newest Profession, Christopher McKenna offers a history of management consulti... more In The World's Newest Profession, Christopher McKenna offers a history of management consulting in the twentieth century. Although management consulting may not yet be a recognized profession, the leading consulting firms have been advising and reshaping the largest organizations in the world since the 1920s. This groundbreaking study details how the elite consulting firms, including McKinsey & Company and Booz Allen & Hamilton, expanded after US regulatory changes during the 1930s, how they changed giant corporations, nonprofits, and the state during the 1950s, and why consultants became so influential in the global economy after 1960. As they grew in number, consultants would introduce organizations to 'corporate culture' and 'decentralization' but they faced vilification for their role in the Enron crisis and for legitimating corporate blunders. Through detailed case studies based on unprecedented access to internal files and personal interviews, The World's Newest Profession explores how management consultants came to be so influential within our culture and explains exactly what consultants really do in the global economy...
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Papers by Christopher McKenna