DISCOURSES OF MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS ON INNOVATIONS IN PUBLIC PROFESSIONAL BUREAUCRACIES

Carole Lalonde
Alicia Buyse
University Laval
ABSTRACT
This research study presents a critical interpretation of the “discourses of management
consultants” regarding “managerial innovation” in “public professional bureaucracies” (PPBs).
How consultants discursively construct, characterize, and depict innovation in these organizations
is analyzed and interpreted. Semi-structured interviews with a sample of management consultants
who work mainly with public managers were conducted and analyzed using critical discourse
analysis (CDA) as a generic framework. This study shows that management consultants discursively
construct PPBs as systems that hardly innovate, echoing the societal discourse emphasizing
barriers to innovation and the reference to the private sector as the standard.
A second discourse is the self-proclaimed relevance of consultancy on process innovation;
consultants depict themselves as being knowledgeable to fuel innovation and use a repertoire of
“linguistic devices” such as caring, co-creating, trying/learning, circumventing, provoking or
programming, and all serving as discursive resources to legitimize the relevance as well as the need
of consulting services. This “discursive construction of innovation” in PPBs among management
consultants appears as disembodied from the “mission and fundamental values of public services”
in favor of an administrative rationality. This study contributes to critical studies of management
consulting in public service organizations by offering new insights into consultants’ discourses of
innovation.
Keywords: Critical interpretation, management consultants, managerial innovation, public bureaucracies