Managing Expectations. Consultancy and Corporate Decision-Making in Germany after 1965

本项目考察了1965年后咨询公司的兴起及其对德国企业决策的影响。我们认为，咨询业的增长是由于顾问和客户公司之间的经验动态转移。这导致对商业预期和公司决策的影响越来越大。我们认为这是一个多层次的过程：通过推广最佳实践管理工具，顾问重新调整了公司内部“内部”和“外部”经验之间的关系。通过他们的报告、文章和书籍，顾问们充当了对企业和管理未来变化的预期的提供者。他们明确地把组织问题和战略问题联系起来。新的管理工具改变了公司的决策，例如通过组织结构调整或实施期望形成的科学工具。历史研究得出了模棱两可的结果，将顾问描绘成管理委员会额外合法性的提供者或公司变革的先驱。为了从经验上确定咨询顾问的作用，我们采用了三步研究方法：首先，我们将勾勒出咨询行业的演变，并从专业化的范围和水平方面考察其增长。其次，我们分析了顾问对未来的叙述，并调查了“管理时尚”在商业期刊中的传播。为此，我们将建立一个广泛的文本数据库，并采用文本挖掘方法进行分析。第三，也是最重要的，我们将从商业历史的角度探讨1965年以后顾问在德国公司中的作用。这是第一次，我们可以系统地研究管理工具在公司层面的实施及其对公司决策的影响。我们将在汽车、化工和电子三个不同领域的大量未开发的商业记录上建立我们的实证分析。

This project examines the rise of consultancies and their impact on corporate decision-making in Germany after 1965. We argue that the growth of the consulting industry was due to a dynamic transfer of experiences between consultants and the client companies. This led to a growing influence on business expectations and corporate decision-making. We consider this to be a multilevel process: By promoting best practice management tools, consultants re-adjusted the relationship between “internal” and “external” experience within companies. Through their reports, articles, and books, consultants acted as providers of expectations about future changes in business and management. They explicitly linked problems of organization and strategy. The new management tools changed corporate decision-making, for instance by organizational re-structuring or the implementation of scientific instruments of expectation formation. Historical research has come to ambiguous results, portraying consultants either as providers of additional legitimacy to management boards or as pioneers of corporate change. To determine the role of consultants empirically, we adopt a three-step research approach: First, we will sketch the evolution of the consulting industry and examine its growth in terms of scope and level of professionalization. Second, we analyze consultants´ narratives of the future and investigate the dissemination of “management fashions” in business journals. For this purpose, we will build an extensive text database and adopt a text mining approach for our analysis. Third and foremost, we will explore the role of consultants in German companies after 1965 from a business history perspective. For the first time, this allows us to systematically study the implementation of management tools on the company level and their impact on corporate decision-making. We will build our empirical analysis on a large set of untapped business records from three different branches: automobile, chemical, and electronics.