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and may not be up to date. The concepts of “professional culture” or “organizational culture” do not apply. In contrast, the power of traditional social culture is very strong. Human behaviour, essentially fatalistic and conservative, is governed by deeply rooted beliefs and prejudices. Cultural characteristics reflect difficult living conditions, poverty and poor education. Passivity, resignation, lack of personal drive, fear of change and uncritical respect for traditional authorities may prevail.

In consulting, knowledge of these factors is essential, but it is not all that is needed. Consultants need to possess cultural and social work skills rather than knowledge of refined management techniques. They need to be patient, to be able to live and operate in imperfect and uncertain situations, to know how to improvise using limited and simple local resources, and to apply a great deal of imagination in proposing solutions that are not to be found in any management handbook. Personal commitment to and empathy with the underprivileged are qualities without which it is hard to succeed.

Consulting to “high-tech” companies

“High-tech” companies in fields such as information technology, the Internet, e-business, telecommunications, microelectronics and biotechnology are at the opposite end of the wide spectrum of environments where consultants

Box 5.5 Characteristics of “high-tech” company cultures

There is a broad spectrum of companies in high-technology sectors. Some cultural patterns tend to predominate in these companies:

●predominance of professional culture over company culture;

●authority vested in innovators and leading researchers;

●little respect for formal authority, hierarchy and seniority;

●tendency to ignore chains of command and break down organizational barriers;

●easy and frequent horizontal communication and knowledge-sharing, easy team-building, spontaneous creation of knowledge-sharing communities;

●hard work and no counting of hours when involved in challenging projects;

●informal interpersonal relations and dress code;

●employees loyal to their profession and to themselves rather than to the organization;

●high mobility of professional employees, more concern for job content than for job security;

●more concern for technical innovation and excellence than for costs and budgets;

●high remuneration regarded as standard.

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intervene. Their demand for consulting services is high and they represent a challenging consulting market, not only in Silicon Valley, their cradle, but in many other regions and countries. They exhibit many common cultural characteristics which are derived from the role of knowledge and knowledge workers and the pace of change in these companies, from the professional cultures of their founders and managers, and from the core employee groups who create value. Professional cultures tend to influence strongly whole organizational cultures (see box 5.5). To be accepted and listened to in these companies, consultants have to understand their value systems and find a common language with management and staff.

1G. Hofstede: “Culture and organizations”, in International Studies of Management and

Organization, No. 4, 1981. See also idem: Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind

(Maidenhead, Berkshire, McGraw-Hill, 1991). The word “culture”, in English and some other languages, is also used when referring to the arts, literature, and so on; obviously, this is not the meaning intended here.

2See, e.g., T. E. Deal and A. A. Kennedy: Corporate cultures: The rites and rituals of corporate life (Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley, 1982); E.H. Schein: Organizational culture and leadership (San Francisco, CA, Jossey-Bass, 2nd ed., 1992); F. Trompenaars and C. Hampden-Turner: Riding the waves of culture: Understanding cultural diversity in business (London, Nicholas Brealy, 2nd ed., 1997), and G. Hofstede, op. cit.

3G. Hofstede: “Business cultures” in Courier (Paris, UNESCO), Vol. 47, No. 4, 1994, pp. 12–16.

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PROFESSIONALISM AND ETHICS	6
IN CONSULTING

The growth of management consulting has provided ample evidence that at one time almost anyone could call himself or herself a consultant and set up in practice. In its early years and even now, the business attracted the good, the bad and the indifferent. The word “business” is used deliberately: “professions” seldom start as such. Professional awareness and behaviour come when the early juggling with a little knowledge gives way to skilled application of a generally accepted body of knowledge according to accepted standards of integrity. The professions of medicine, the law and the applied sciences all followed this path, and management consulting is proceeding in the same direction.

6.1Is management consulting a profession?

The criteria normally used to define a profession can be summarized under five headings.

Knowledge and skills

There is a defined body of knowledge proper to the profession, which can be acquired through a system of professional education and training. The necessary level of professional expertise is reached only after a certain number of years of practical experience in addition to completed higher education, preferably under the coaching of senior members of the profession. Furthermore, the practising professional has to keep continuously abreast of developments in theory and practice. The professions tend to have their own criteria and systems for verifying and assessing required knowledge and experience, including examinations on entry, assessment by professional bodies, testing the results of further training, and similar.

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The concept of service and social interest

Professionals put their knowledge and experience at the disposal of clients as a service against appropriate remuneration. The real professionals are characterized by the “service ethos”: they serve clients’ needs and interests, to which they subordinate their own self-interest. Furthermore, they view individual client interests from a wider social perspective, and keep broader social needs and implications in mind when serving individual clients.

Ethical norms

There is a set of recognized ethical norms, shared and applied by the members of the profession. These norms define what is proper and what is improper behaviour in providing a professional service. They demand more than respecting the law: a behaviour that is perfectly legal may not always be ethical judged by the profession’s norms.

Community sanction and enforcement

The community in which the profession operates and the clientele recognize the social role, the status, and the ethical and behavioural norms of the profession. There may be explicit recognition (e.g. by means of a legal text governing and protecting professional practice). This may include definitions of educational or other standards required and special examinations to be passed, as well as of behaviours considered as unprofessional and illegal, and of corresponding sanctions.

Self-discipline and self-regulation

While serving clients, members of the profession apply self-discipline in observing the profession’s behavioural norms. The profession organizes itself in one or more voluntary membership institutions (associations, institutes, chambers, etc.), thus exercising collective self-regulation over the application of an accepted code of professional conduct and over the development of the profession. An equally important purpose of membership institutions is to defend the collective interests of the profession in dealing with representatives of the clients and the community.

Does consulting meet these criteria?

There has been a long but inconclusive debate on whether management consulting meets the criteria discussed above and deserves to be called a profession. Both scholars and leading consulting practitioners have expressed and emphatically defended diametrically different opinions, which illustrate the current state of management consulting. While consulting exhibits some of the criteria applied to professions, it does not meet others. For example, the scope of consulting has never been clearly defined and the proposed definitions have never gained general

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