The first thing to note about this book is that it doesn’t quite do what it says on the tin. This is a partial history of management consulting in the US seen through the development of the half dozen or so major consult-ing firms since the inter-war years. As such it offers neither the inter-national perspective one might have expected (other than a single chapter on the expansion of McKinsey into Europe) nor does it provide the sorts of data charts and tables that one might expect of an economic history.

What I take McKenna as attempting to do is threefold – first to provide some theory and explanation of why management consultancy developed as it did it in the US; second to provide some sense of the impact that consultants had in spreading knowledge, ideas and ways of doing things among private sector firms; and third to describe their role in influencing public and third sector organisations. 

In the first of these he is partially successful. Just as the book isn’t quite as encompassing as the title suggests, so his "general theory of management consulting" isn’t quite that. What he does provide is interesting, though. The fact that management consultants act as knowledge brokers able to learn and spread best practice among firms is unsurprising. The fact that McKenna is able to argue convincingly that, in the US at least, the scale, shape and role of the consulting industry is an unintended but direct consequence of government regulation and judicial activism is less expected. 

In the 1930s it was, McKenna argues, the Glass-Steagall act and SEC disclosure regulations that "forced commercial and investment bankers to abandon internal management consulting activities even as regulators mandated that they commission outside studies". Accountancy firms like Arthur Andersen also had to choose between accountancy and consul-tancy, choosing the former and only re-entering consultancy on the back of developing expertise in Information Technology, IBM having been forbidden from offering IT consulting services. Thus did specialist consultancy companies like McKinseys have the field cleared for them.

Much later, in the 1980s, judicial decisions effectively forced company boards to seek outside advice to insulate themselves from challenges of negligence from shareholders. The demerger of accounting and consul-tancy businesses again followed SEC pressure in the 1990s. And, most ironically, the failure of consultants to protect Enron shareholders was effectively rewarded by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which, whilst forbidding accountancy firms from offering consultancy services to audit clients, increased legal obligations on directors in such a way as to ensure an even greater demand for management consultancy services. This is fascinating stuff.

It is somewhat harder to pin down the central messages of the core chapters which show, through numerous exemplifications, how a small number of US consulting firms worked with private, public and third sector organisations through the middle years of the 20th century. They clearly had an influence on the structure of the public sector and the ‘hollowing out’ of the US state, they helped spread both best practice and management fads or fashions around private sector companies and public enterprises. In the end though the sheer weight of specifics – there are more than 100 pages of footnotes for 250 pages of text – alongside a lack of data and a slight tendency towards lists and clever words (the ‘proministrative state’, the ‘adhocracy’) make this hard going.

The attempt to wrap the story around a question of whether this really is a profession also in the end fails, and feels rather forced. But the author has surely done one of the most important things that he sets out to do which is to bring to the attention of current and future management consultants a knowledge of the development of their profession. This should give them pause for thought in considering the extent to which they were shaped by regulation and the extent to which they can play a role in shaping the institutions of an economy.