The Equilibrists. An Ethnography of Management Consulting

Conquering technicians? Quacks of the modern world? Management consultants are often ridiculed by critics but they are little studied for what they do. Consulting can neither be reduced to the mechanical application of knowledge nor to a game of dupes. Immersed for several years in an international consulting firm, Alaric Bourgoin has conducted an ethnographical investigation on this controversial practice: he discovers an activity entirely dedicated towards the production of its own value. Made of fragile performances, this value is never guaranteed. The consultants must therefore make it exist, by relying on multiple devices, and to make it recognized, by incessantly highlighting their contribution. As Michel Callon wrote in the foreword, what stands out from this investigation “is the existential anguish that seizes the consultants that accompanies them throughout their mission. Every morning and end of each day, the question they asks themselves is terrible: what is the value of my contribution?”

The answer to this question does not only concern the practitioners and those who pay for their services; it is at the heart of the current questioning of sociology and economics on how to assess the value of things, and how to understand the uncertain processes giving life to value. This pragmatic study shows the production of value as the testing of attachments that constantly need to be discovered, tamed, tried, strengthened, valued. Through the extreme case of the management consultants, the study highlights in an original way contemporary capitalism, which appears less as a system than as a continuous and multifaceted incentive to produce its own value.

2015 – Presses des Mines

Language: French