Management consultants: A sociology of seduction

This doctoral dissertation analyzes the social processes involved in management consultants' knowledge production. The actor-network theory is found incomplete with respect to the study of knowledge producers with weak institutional support. A four-step model of seduction is proposed to analyze management consultants' knowledge production, as an amendment to Michel Callon's four-step model of translation. Two series of open-ended interviews with management consultants and managers, respectively, are presented and analyzed. In addition, three reports written by management consultants are analyzed using the textual reality construction methodology. This research concludes that seduction is a valid model to understand the informal and non-rational aspects of management consultants' knowledge production. It also suggests that this model could be applied to several other fields of knowledge production.